⚡ “1st Pod in a Nuclear Reactor” — Inside Oklo’s Cancer-Fighting, Waste-Recycling Reactor

0:02Nick and Jack here from the T-Boy Studio. This is our best interview yet, by far. And not just because we're the first podcast to record inside of a nuclear reactor. And we survived to tell the tale. The way this interview came to be is also really interesting. Oh, totally. Because the team at Oklo Nuclear, they're fans of the show. So they flew us down to Texas to visit their record-setting nuclear reactor. And they sponsored this episode to do it. We sat down with their co-founder and CEO in the reactor to explore this wild new technology and covered Oklo just like we would any other company.

0:33We actually had a whole camera crew with us the whole time. It's our most visual episode yet, so you can watch it on YouTube or Apple if you can. But in the meantime, Jack, should we put on our lab coats, turn the key, flip the switch, press the button? Actually, do we both need to turn the key? I think we need two to turn the key, right? I've turned my key. Your turn to yours. Three, two, one, now. Two feet behind us, atoms are getting split. This is the first podcast ever recorded inside a nuclear reactor. And we're going to interview the guy who did it in record time. Because 11 months ago, this was all prairie dust.

1:06But now it's the smallest, tidiest, sexiest nuclear reactor you've ever seen. And it's built by a publicly traded company that you can trade. We'll tell you how Oaklow pulled it off. And now this place doesn't create nuclear waste. It eliminates it. By the end of this episode, nuclear will be officially uncancelled. Yetis, put down the Stanley mugs and pick up the Geiger counters. Because today's guest is bringing back the most canceled technology in America, nuclear power. We're hanging with Jacob DeWitt, the MIT-educated co-founder and CEO of Oklo. And former Florida Gator football player. Walk-on football player.

1:42And right now we are live at Oklo's brand new nuclear reactor in Lockhart, Texas. Oklo is an$8 billion publicly traded stock. That's one lift, but we'd call it the first ever nuclear brand. Not just because the power plants look like luxury ski showers. Architectural Digest? Did Frank Lloyd Wright do the blueprints of this thing? And Nick, Oklo is not just powering the U.S. military. Their profit puppy is artificial intelligence. Because they've got to deal with Zuck, fueling a metadata center with nuclear juice. And a relationship with Sam Altman, an early Oklo investor and former chairman of the board.

2:15But today, Jake's going to reveal why nuclear is having a moment and why his reactors are different and how nuclear is not going to cause a catastrophe but could actually cure cancer. So if we're having a nuclear renaissance, then Jake is Leonardo da Vinci and this facility is his Mona Lisa. So please welcome the Sultan of Splitting Atoms, the chairman of chain reactions, the missionary of fissionary. He didn't choose the nuc life, the nuc life chose him. Our guest today is Jake DeWitt, the co-founder and CEO of Aqualine. And today's interview with Jake, next to his nuclear reactor is the best one yet.

2:50It's a T-boy. They work. There we go! That was pretty legit. That was really good. That was legit. I'll be with you. The door actually said U.S. Department of Energy as we walked in? It did. So it's our nuclear reactor. We actually had to show our passports to get it. Yeah, we did. True story. Did you too? Yes, we did. I did when I had to get facility access. And you own the place. Yeah. It's protocols. So, Jake, you have the hottest meet-cute ever. Literally. Literally radioactive. It's radioactive. Because your co-founder of this nuclear startup is also your wife. You met her at MIT, and then you bonded, like, hydrogen and oxygen.

3:26Yeah, the electrons were firing. But the reason we're here today is because of a tiny pellet the size of a pencil eraser that, when you saw as a kid, basically set the path for the rest of your life. Because that little pellet of fuel energy was equivalent to a ton of coal or 149 gallons of oil. A year's worth of household electricity in a tiny pellet. And it's all thanks to the possibility of nuclear energy. You saw that when you were a kid. You got excited then and it got us excited now. Well, the story of that pellet is the incredible energy density in the nucleus. That's the thing, right? Literally, when you think about splitting an atom, you're getting tens of millions, I mean, millions of times more energy out than when you combust a molecule like a hydrocarbon.

4:11That's insane, right? But that's what people got so excited about when they discovered what was actually going on in the nucleus back in the early days of nuclear physics. So when you can harness that, you completely change how we think about energy. Like the delta in terms of like the energy density on a per reaction basis of tens of millions. It's like, you know, almost 50 million times. It's like the difference between Usain Bolt sprinting and the speed of light. It's an insane paradigm shift. Well, you grew up in New Mexico and happens to be the location, the setting of Christopher Nolan's Robert Oppenheimer movie.

4:43Tell us about your childhood fascination. So I grew up around nuclear because of that, right? Like you grew up in New Mexico, you're around nuclear because of the legacy from the Manhattan Project. It's the lore. And there's a lot of nuclear museums. And so as a kid, I would go to them, especially what was the National Atomic History Museum is now the National Nuclear Science Museum. And fell in love with it. It seemed like science fiction, but it was real life. And when I realized that New Mexico got about one-fourth of its power from the power plant in Arizona, I was like, that's so cool. That means one in every four seconds.

5:16That's not exactly how it works, right? But if you just discretize it, it's like, wow, a quarter of the electricity. So if I had four light bulbs on in my room, one is being driven by a reactor. So I was obsessed with it because it seemed like science fiction but real. So I knew I wanted to work on it from the time I was very little. Really? Yeah. It felt like, okay, really cool, but also felt like it was the future. Probably just because I think as a little boy I was like, I just was like, oh, that's what's next. Like technology is cool. It's what's next. So like actually if you guys remember the game Sim City 2000.

5:43Totally. Yeah. So I used to play that and I got really frustrated because they treated nuclear power poorly. They treated like it was a negative. Oh, in the game, like nuclear was a liability. I remember the nuclear plant was a big one. It was like four by four. In Sim City. Yeah. But it was like brown. It was kind of like dirty. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't great. It was kind of the opposite. It was a negative thing. And so I was like, I don't like... So I used to write them letters being like, you treated inaccurately, blah, blah. Never responded, but... This New Mexico kid writing it again. And, like, I would write even in my, like, English class or my literature class or history classes, any chance there was a reasonable freedom to write something, I would often write about nuclear power in elementary school through high school.

6:22Any poems? I need to go look. Nuclear is a new language for most of us. Yes. But what is a nuclear reactor? Because we are next to this right now. We're sitting and recording this interview live next to one. So what are the key terms that you got to know if you're a Yeti or a Besidee or a listener out there from the nuclear dictionary to impress an atomic scientist on a first date? Okay. So you want to understand what a chain reaction is. Okay. You want to understand what going critical is. All right. So you get fuel with the right concentration of elements in it, put it in the right configuration so that when the atoms split, they release neutrons two or three times.

6:57That just happens. Two or three neutrons on average every time you split an atom. All right. then what you want is those neutrons to go on and split other atoms and propagate, right? So one atom splits, two or three neutrons get out. One of those neutrons goes, causes a fission. And then one of those neutrons from that go on, causes a fission. And if you balance that evenly, so the same number from one cycle to the next to the next, that's called being a critical reactor. If the number is going up, it's supercritical. So it's increasing in power. And if it's going down, it's subcritical. It's just not on.

7:24So that's what a nuclear reactor fundamentally is. And when you're splitting the atom, what you're doing is not just producing neutrons, you're producing a bunch of literally kinetic energy that's in the, that's manifest as heat. Because those atoms, as they split, the resultant, the daughter atoms are going, they have a lot of energy. But they deposit all that. They basically slow down in the lattice, the crystal, like molecular atomic lattice they're in, and just deposit their energy. And that heat is then transformed into steam? Is then turned, yeah. So most reactors, you're going to transfer that heat by some kind of coolant.

7:54And then that coolant goes and does something useful for you. That liquid metal flows out of the reactor, goes and ultimately transfers its heat to basically a boiler and boils steam and that steam spins the turbine. And that turbine eventually creates the electricity energy that powers our humps. Turbine basically spins as the steam expands in it and then rotates a bunch of magnets inside of the magnets in a generator and that's how you get electricity. So if we were going to use the analogy we had from our interview before, this is the pot of boiling pasta water. This is what would be bubbling.

8:22So down on the bottom there, you have fuel. You can kind of get a glimpse. you see on the top, you see those pattern of where those positions are, that plus shape? Mm-hmm. So those are each positions where there's fuel elements. And those fuel elements is an array basically of 17 fuel pins by 17 fuel pins, so square. And those fuel pins are about the size of my pinky, about 12 feet tall. And they're arranged in that pattern. And that's the fuel. And so what it is is zirconium tubes with uranium fuel, uranium dioxide pellets, that stack that length. And then what you could do is you can put materials alongside of that in different positions and absorb the neutrons.

8:59But the three differentiators we really see with Oklo is tiny, sexy, and tidy. Tiny, sexy, and tidy. Because your reactors are relatively small, they're built to look beautiful from the outside, and they produce no nuclear waste. It's like the only nuke facility that we are going to see in Vogue magazine pretty soon, right? And it looks nothing like the nuclear power plants from Homer Simpson. And your fast reactor technology eliminates nuclear waste by recycling old fuel. Yeah, there's the tidy part. So I'm sure you've got a lot to say about all that. How are you taking a 70-year-old, incredibly regulated and complex model and turning it all upside down?

9:38It started that way. So that's the cool thing, right? Like, the very first reactor that made electricity in the United States is very similar to what we're building in Idaho for the power side. It uses liquid metal as the coolant. That's great at making it tiny. Why? Liquid metals are really good at removing heat. Basically, there's a thing called a heat transfer coefficient. And the higher that is, the better you can remove heat from a small volume. Liquid metals are so good at it. We all know this kind of because air is something... Humans are really used to air and water as our heat transfer media.

10:06If you get into air... That sounds really silly, if you get into air. If you're walking around in the air and it's at a certain temperature, and it's kind of warm, but then you go to water, and it's the same temperature, it feels very different. Because of the heat transfer of water, water is way better at removing heat. Well, liquid metals... That's why a hot tub feels so much hotter than... Yeah, a 100 degree hot tub, 102 degree hot tub feels way hotter than 102 degree air. Way better. It's just, right, it's way different. And that's because the heat transfer is so... You're depositing way more energy from the water, or it's removing way more energy from you.

10:36Well, liquid metals are even better than water at transferring heat. What that means is you can make things a bit smaller as a result. On top of that, liquid metal doesn't boil at, like, the low temperatures, relatively speaking, that water does. That means you don't have to pressurize it, which means the componentry is smaller. So all that translates to doing something that aligns itself to be a bit smaller, and it means that when you think about what it looks like to design and build a reactor, you don't have the same physics driving you to a much bigger design. And you can do more with less.

11:06You can be smaller with it. So that's part of the dynamic of why that can be done that way. So I'm hearing a lot of, like, this is better, the way we did it in the first place, but it still is new somehow. Yeah. What happened was we as a society saw the potential in splitting atoms and harnessing the energy from them. But what we saw with these reactors is different types of fuels and coolants enable you to do different things. But what are we as a society and a species? Our industrial base in the 1950s, when we were really going on the first steps of this technological adventure, were rooted in boiling water and managing water because that's how steam power plants work.

11:43We know it super well. We didn't know liquid metals as well. The world's changed a lot because we've advanced this technology and other technologies that helped this so that what happened with some of those first reactors showed, hey, it can work. But they weren't working as well as the potential was because we had to work through things. But this culminated through multiple iterations of this technology sponsored by federal research in the U.S. as well as other countries into really sort of the last generation of these builds. Notably in the U.S., there are two reactors I always like to talk about.

12:11It's called the EBR2 reactor or Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 and then the Fast Flux Test Facility, or FFTF. Both of those reactors were built like in between 60s and 80s. And well, one was built in the 60s, one was built in the 80s. And what was really cool about it is some really neat things came out of that. We learned that they could run really well, that they could do these incredible things on safety. They could do these incredible things operationally in terms of reliability and availability. They could do these great things as well on recycling fuel. And so at the end of the day, it was like, hey, this stuff makes a ton of sense.

12:40What was new about us was realizing that that had been done and modernizing it in a couple different ways. There's one interesting part about this whole history too. Like all this stuff was done, but all of it was archived in paper and it wasn't digitized. So basically we're in the nuclear 2.0 era and we'll get to why there was such a long gap between nuclear 1.0 and 2.0. Now a quick word from our sponsor. Monarch. Yetis, you know my first money lesson? It was where to put our lemonade stand. I was wondering, it was on the Upper East Side. Do we do it on Lexington Avenue or Park Avenue? Wait a second.

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15:17This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. But this facility that we're sitting in, it is a nuclear reactor. It is. It sure is. And one year ago, it was a field of grass and shrubs. Now it's the first ever nuclear reactor built on private land with private resources in just 11 months. How did you pull it off so fast, and did Christopher Nolan write the screenplay for it? Not yet. Sequel. So, I think what we saw was, we originally found this awesome place where we're at in Prototown. When Caroline and I had known this guy, Josh, who started this effort to kind of build a new American city, and back years ago, and he was looking at a place that this is just cool.

16:01We're into that. And then he found this spot specifically with a lot of support from the community to try to be a place where you'd come build hard infrastructure tech, not just hard tech, but also hard tech. Like it's just a place where you can build easier and faster. So we said, hey, let's go build some training facilities here because there's a company at that time. So circa 2024. We're pre-public and it opened a different regulatory lane that existed, but just hadn't been used, direct the government to use it. And that allowed us to say, hey, what if instead of building a training facility, we actually build a reactor here with the goal of turning it on like in less than a year.

16:36Yeah, and to sprinkle on some quick context, one of the big reasons nuclear 1.0 ended, and we'll get to this more in detail in a second, but it's because it took so long to build nuclear power. Yes, red tape on red tape. Something that was supposed to be five years became 20 years. Magenta tape. Do you have any idea how angry the investors are if it's supposed to be five years and it's 20? Yeah, my money can do it. This reactor was built in 11 So this reactor behind us achieved criticality. Yeah, and I do want to... Remember Jake mentioned that in our speed-dating nuclear dictionary earlier? Criticality.

17:10Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is criticality? Because that's the milestone you reached on August 6th. Just a month ago. Criticality is when a reactor really becomes a reactor. It's when it turns on and is self-sustaining. In other words, the neutrons released from fission go on to produce other fission events that produce other neutrons in a self-sustaining way. that's when it's actually on. And so for an electric generating facility, that's when it could stay hot indefinitely. Yeah, and basically until it depletes the fuel. But yeah, so that's when you turn the reactor on. Before that, before you're critical, it's not on yet.

17:42And what was cool and why we were able to do this so fast was probably the partnership here with Prototown and also the team we brought in to help build this with the mindset of design, build, and iterate. Because the permitting process in the past, one of the reasons it took so long to build nuclear was we did a really silly thing in the policy space where we said, okay, you have to do a ton of permitting paperwork and licensing work before you can build anything, which was basically saying you have to do all this nuclear value, like you have to do all this nuclear safety work and hazard analysis and all this other stuff before you can build anything.

18:10I get why you need to do that before you load the actual nuclear material. That makes perfect sense. You should have to do that. But if you're just building a building that has no real hazard, why do you have to do all that work? That loads so much front-end time and investment. Yeah. Could be doing both. Could do it parallel. Total mojo killer. That's what's changed. That's what's recently changed and why we're in a new era and why we could build this in parallel to the permitting. We were ready. The facility was built for a while before we got the go-ahead to load the fuel. That's how it should be.

18:36Yeah, and if it didn't work out or you didn't get the permit, it could have been converted to something else you're saying. Yeah, we could have used it as a test facility. It was worth being risk-on for that. And the other thing was we said, okay, we got to build, learn, and iterate from this. And the other big thing in nuclear that's hard, because it's been so hard to build and we haven't built, the culture in the industry is pervasively stuck in analysis paralysis. It's slow, yeah. And we're breaking out of that. But what does that mean? You're not going to design and build the perfect reactor the first time, which is how nuclear, you know, the industry's kind of taught itself.

19:01Now it's like, no, no, no. You're going to build and turn one on, and that's awesome because you're going to learn from it and make the next one better and the next one better and the next one better. And it's changed the cost paradigm and the time paradigms, which is awesome. Jake sounds like someone who got a lot of reps in, in the weight room. Yeah. Get in the reps in. And the reason for this paradigm shift in regulatory, it's kind of a combination of, first of all, climate change. like we need carbon-free electricity. Second, energy independence. And third, the data center AI build-out. I think so.

19:29There's just all these things that compound themselves that electrification drives people to use more power. On top of that, we have re-industrialization happening in this country. We outsourced so much manufacturing and therefore power demand out of this country for so long and now it's coming back in and we need the baseload, that 24-7 power that nuclear is really good at doing back. And then on top of that, AI. Couple that whole layer with something we want to actually do sustainably so that we can kind of, you know, endure living on this planet. Very, very, very important. Nuclear is the answer for all that.

19:59And something people have been shy in this industry is to call it a silver bullet. I'll stand up and say fast reactors and recycling, like what we're doing are effectively, they're a silver bullet for climate and energy abundance. But this plant generates isotopes, not electricity, the one we're in right now. So the best analogy we could think of to explain what this nuclear reactor six feet behind Jack is doing, or Jack, why don't you bring up the analogy? Yeah, don't fall in. So this proved to yourself that you could do it. You learned how to do it, and you showed the world you could do it. The analogy we thought of was 2008, the Falcon 1 rocket launching into orbit by SpaceX.

20:35By Elon. That wasn't a money-generating product, but they showed that they could send a rocket into space as a private company, and it paved the way for the Falcon 9, which has done so much work sending stuff into orbit. It's a very good analogy, and it's accurate. I think for a couple of reasons too. When I was growing up in this space, because I fell in love with nuclear as a kid, I worked on it like in high school. And I remember all these mentors and folks I worked with, you know, as a young kid growing up, always more or less said, I mean, people literally told me several times, multiple people that building a nuclear reactor is like one of the hardest things you can do on earth.

21:10It's one of the hardest things for people to do. And that never made sense to me because the physics, we know, we know how to manage this stuff. Like it was all because we just kept self-imposing both as an industry as well as regulatory stuff and all those things, really hard things. So it was really, really hard. So proving you could do it is unbelievably important because it starts to shatter the paradigm. Okay, but one of the main reasons for all of those red tape and concerns is something that we should also reference, which, you know, Jack and I are former Wall Street guys, so we jumped into your SPAC paperwork from when you guys went public.

21:41We did notice you said the word disaster four times in the paperwork. And being two guys sitting next to your reactor right now, I wish it was zero times. but is this technology safe? Absolutely. Look at objective facts. Nuclear technology is one of, if not the safest form of energy in the most brutal, but distilled metrics for that. I don't love it, but it's clear is it has among the lowest deaths per megawatt hour of all energy sources. Like it's right up there around with solar. It might even be better depending on how you account for some of this stuff. It is incredibly safe. Why? Because we learned that it was dangerous early on.

22:13And we, as an industry and as a society built rules, regulations and operating practices and procedures that manage that. Well, if you cool and control it, it makes the containing part a lot easier. So if you build a reactor that's self-controlling and self-cooling based on physics, not systems, not operator intervention, you change the paradigm of how you think about safety. This is something that human society figured out how to do. And this reactor is an example of it. The reactor in Idaho Falls that we're building that builds off of its predecessor, proved it out. On April 3rd, 1986, this reactor in Idaho called EBR-2 was literally running at full power.

22:49They locked these control rods, that are the things that would go in the reactor and shut it down. They locked them out of the reactor so they could not go in. And then they turned off the pumps. Like a stress test? Huge stress test. An unbelievably challenging stress test. Did people know, was this public? It was like a dangerous stress test. Yeah, they actually knew how well this was gonna work and they had a whole audience for it. It was like a performance. This was unprecedented. And what happened was the reactor had the following things happen. When I say self-controlling, self-cooling, what does that mean?

23:16It means that as it heats up, various phenomena come to play to cause the reactor to shut down, and that means it's not going anymore. But you still have to manage the heat, because in a nuclear reactor, when you turn it off, it's still making heat, because the decay products still are around. So yes, it has incredible safety to the point that it's amazing what the system did, and that was just the morning. Then they shut the reactor, they fully shut it down after it shut itself down naturally and was just fine. went to lunch, came back, turned it on, and did what happened basically at Fukushima, but way worse.

23:44Because at Fukushima, the reactor was shut down. Yeah, in the afternoon. Really stressful already. They just put it through something just as hard. And it was just fine. And it's because it's a quote-unquote fast reactor. Well, you can design a lot of reactors that have these features. It's just really about having a modern reactor that's passively and inherently safe. The analogies you gave at the beginning about the eraser, Yeah. That's with today's reactors that use 5 % of the fuel in a single pass. With recycling, you can use almost... And then they throw it away. Yeah. And with recycling, you can extract all that unused fuel almost.

24:15So you get almost 90, 95 or more percent back. So now instead of that being worth 147 barrels, it's worth thousands. We're all crunching the math and not getting there. I expected the PhD would get there. So Jake, all three of us are standing over a nuclear reactor. Yep, we sure are. Should we be worried for our health? Not at all. Not at all. So first of all, the water is really good at shielding radiation. So there's a radiation really getting up here. You're fine. So yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool actually. They kept telling us that we're safe. I would literally, like I would swim in it, live and sleep in it, do everything else.

24:57Like, damn. I would drink the water. I know it's fine. I know it's safe, I would do it. Like, it's just, you know, there's reasons I guess I can't yet live in a, or above a reactor, but one day. What's the biggest, you know, on that front, like the question Jack's asking, what's like the biggest misconception question you get when you're at dinner with people and you say, hey, I'm Jake, I run an$8 billion nuclear company. I definitely try to be more low-key. No, I just, like, people ask what I do. It's like, oh, I work in nuclear. And then people are always, like, curious about, well, what do you like, like, you know, what about the safety?

25:30What about the waste? Those are usually the things. Um, and you know, oftentimes it's like, well, you're that close to stuff. It's like, I've been really close to a lot of things that are very radioactive, but in managed controlled ways. And I know how to like, I know the physics, I know the science, but also importantly, we know the protocols and mechanisms to make it so that you're not actually at risk. You get more radiation living next to a coal plant than a nuclear plant. Really? Because coal is actually radioactive. It It has all sorts of small amounts of materials that are radioactive, and we just pump that out the stacks and it goes everywhere.

25:57And so people get more radiation that way than they do, and they don't monitor it. Actually, the other analogy I like is what, when it comes to the broader trend, when we like stand back a bit to see where nuclear has gone up and down, Jack thinks fashion, Jack thinks bell-bottoms. Right, Jack? So, bell-bottoms, hot in the 60s. Lame for a long time after that. Hot again, today. So that's nuclear 1.0 versus 2.0. So from 1950 to 1990, that's the nuclear 1.0 era. Yeah, 40 years. We built 100 nuclear reactors, all producing carbon-free electricity. That was the 1970s swinging bell-bottoms era. We had one incident where nobody died.

26:39Right. Now, the 40 years since then, we have built three reactors. Bell-bottoms were out. Up until this year, when there's been a renaissance, nuclear 2.0. So our big question here, you know, nuclear, it's one of the incredible inventions of humankind. Why did it get canceled? Yeah, I think you had a confluence of different factors that happened with it. One, it's hard to overstate this, right? Like, generationally, we have a different mindset about how we think about interacting with information. It sounds really silly. The internet changes everything. People can go online and research things on their own with a lot of information at their disposal.

27:14Think about what we can do. Think what you can do right now. during the 70s and 80s and 90s, that wasn't available. And so what happened was misinformation, disinformation, confusion, fear, and uncertainty drove how people perceive certain things. And when you combine various factors that were sort of in a little bit of an anti-development area, right, going on, confluence, inappropriately so with nuclear weapons, like all this stuff going on, it created this environment where fear and uncertainty, misinformation and disinformation could spread unmitigated. And that caused a lot of people to be afraid.

27:44And it was hard to get information to dispute that. Look at our generation for a couple of reasons that are different. I say our generation, I mean generations today. They're curious by something. They go look it up, right? And they find the facts. And I've seen this so many times anecdotally with people go in and say, hey, nuclear is really cool. Or sorry, they don't know much about it. They hear about it. They're like, this sounds interesting. They go into it and they're like, wow, this is really cool. Wow, this is really safe. Wow, this is great. Why haven't we done this so much before? What happened?

28:10And that is part of what's changed the world because the objective facts are on nuclear side. that's enabled a lot of this change to happen. And it wasn't there for why these elements festered, but also a couple of other factors. And this gets borderline to the conspiratorial side, but the facts are out there. Like, look, there were advocating interests in various other sources of energy that went against nuclear. They paid for anti-nuclear advertisements. Gas, fossil fuels. Right. Yeah. On top of that, you had foreign interests that were not interested in the US having energy superabundance. Right.

28:44They were not able to keep up. So they advocated for things against it. They've sowed doubt and fear and uncertainty and all those things. And again, then you add to that some poor dynamics that the industry didn't necessarily do a great job of getting in front of some of these elements. When you were kind of going through this rise of the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s, where people didn't stand up and tout the benefits strongly. That was a factor. And I feel like when you look at the data, it's a dark analogy, but it's kind of like how people are more concerned about when it comes to the danger concerns.

29:12People are more concerned about a plane crash than a car crash, even though the data clearly shows the car crashes are more dangerous. Which leads to this wild fact that should end any argument about nuclear safety. And Jack Saney is having, he wrote a term paper in business and policy school about nuclear. I didn't know that. Yeah. At the University of Michigan, yeah. Got published. It did? Yeah, it's got like 100 views. Nice. Maybe get a lot more now. It's one of the few things that I have not co-authored with Jack. Yeah. It needs a razzle-dazzle. We'll actually put a link to that paper in the show.

29:42Yes, you should. Yes, you should. More people die every day from fossil fuels than have ever died in the history of nuclear power. It's a great stat. We need to repeat the stat. It's a hero stat. More people died yesterday from natural gas, oil, and coal, mostly through respiratory illness, than in the 70-plus-year history of nuclear energy. More people have died from bell-bottoms. So, personally, I got super into nuclear because I get the abstract fear of a nuclear disaster. That's incredibly scary. But we have a very real thing happening right now called climate change. And in my opinion, nuclear is a must-have to stop the world from warming.

30:26And it's all about timing, too. Like, one of the cool things about Jack and I having the show is that you came of age, this nuclear renaissance moment, when we were launching the podcast 10 years ago. And so we've been able to follow this moment and cover it on the show the last few years. Like, we've covered Oak Low two years ago, last year, when you went public, and, like, now to actually tour the reactor with you. That is very cool. And, yeah, I think the other thing, too, is, like, sometimes people get caught up in the climate discussion. People know air quality. People know pollution and emissions.

30:56Those are real things. Like, and the reality is, like, this is an important thing to mitigate and avoid that. And at the end of the day, it's climbing the energy density curve. Humankind has almost always done that. So it's the natural logical next step. I think that's what he said at his frat sorority social. It's the logical next step. So we're going to get eventually Oak-Low nuclear cores that are self-sustaining. And the nuclear reaction continues. And it goes as long as the fuel lasts, which could be years, right? Yeah. And it's going to be hot for all of those years. And the heat connects to a metal, connects to another metal, warming water ultimately, creating steam.

31:42And then that steam turns a turbine, which generates electricity. Yeah, pretty much. And that just goes on for years. Yeah, so you load the fuel, turn it on, start making the power. Power flows through the system, ultimately manifests steam, spinning a turbine, making electricity. And you can do that for several years before you then refuel a little bit of it and then run it again. No smoke coming out of smokestacks. No smoke. No CO2 being emitted and creating greenhouse gases. So what's the exhaust? All of the waste. There isn't any. Everything is contained in the fuel. Everything's contained in the fuel.

32:13And how much monitoring does it require? Is it like 24-7 there's always someone having to look at what's happening? In a power plant, you do. Now, funny thing that your team may not have told you, but when we were scouting out and preparing and researching for this interview, we saw some imagery where this was lit up blue. And we said, can we light it up blue? Because that looks really cool. And we were told we can't. Why is that? All right. We actually don't know the answer. The reason is come back. Here's why. So right now, we wanted to get this setup turned on. Yeah. And then we're going to go through the process of going and upgrading to make more power.

32:51Now, when you start making more power, you don't need to light it up blue. It'll light itself up blue. You're kidding. No. So the reason we want to do it is we don't want to send the image like we're producing a bunch of power and making it blue. Because this is going to be on YouTube. Because it will actually go blue on its own. Now it has to run a certain power to do that. Okay. And the reason is this, this is a crazy factoid. Yeah. Even this is like second date night kind of. Yeah. Yeah. This is good. So you asked my favorite term, I said it's really Cherenkov radiation. So this is that. This is the blue light that a reactor will do.

33:21So if you have a zone in a reactor that's producing power, there's a lot of free electrons being produced by beta decay. What that means is you're converting neutrons to protons and doing so you release, you spit out an electron. And that electron is going so fast that it's actually going faster than photons go in water. It's actually going faster than the speed of light in water. No, no. Speed of light in water is less than it is in a vacuum. It's not a universal constant. But it goes faster than the light in water. And the sonic boom equivalent for a particle going faster than light in a medium is blue light called cherenka.

33:54Oh! So come back, see it when it's actually on doing that. But that's why we don't want to do it. It's like it looks cool, but it sends off the signal like, oh, we're doing that. We're not there. We want it to glow blue on its own. That is so wild. Oh, you got it. Oh, we will on different things. So I guess the big surprise I had is that whether it's coal, oil and gas, or nuclear, each one of them just creates steam, which turns a turbine and creates electricity. It's just two of them have really dirty byproducts to get to that steam. Yeah. And nuclear has nothing. It's like half of a coal plant and half of a nuclear plant are actually the same thing.

34:31Yeah. So I think the first two business lines are the silver bullets, the power generation, and the fuel recycling. Right, but there is a supporting role character who we think is kind of a hero here. It's funny that this third leg of the stool is not described by you as a silver bullet, because it could potentially cure cancer. I just haven't gotten there yet. We're talking about isotopes. We would say isotopes are the robin to nuclear energy's Batman. Yeah. We might have to update that because there's three. But this facility is producing isotopes. What the heck is an isotope? What are the isotopes that are going to be popping out of from six feet behind Jack right now?

35:06Who do you plan to sell them to, and how will they be used? This is another part of the business that's radically misunderstood and underappreciated, and also another isotope great date night kind of thingy, right? Okay. Isotopes. Basically, the elements on the periodic table. Let's choose. Hydrogen is a great one. We all know hydrogen. Hydrogen primarily is just one proton, orbited by an electron. But there's a flavor of hydrogen called deuterium, which is chemically the same as hydrogen, but it has a neutron bound to that proton. And that's an isotope of hydrogen. So, and then there's another isotope of hydrogen called tritium, which has two neutrons bound to that proton, one electron, chemically the same as hydrogen, pretty much.

35:41But that neutron, that's now radioactive because it's imbalanced. Some are radioactive, so they decay, and that radiation can be incredibly useful because it allows you to treat medical conditions or image the body differently or diagnose things. Like with cancer? Like with cancer. Okay. So to me, I think of it like this. There's two major things about medical uses of isotopes that are really important. There's diagnostics and imaging. That's critically important for diagnosing a lot of different conditions. And we don't have enough of these isotopes at all. And it's completely transformative.

36:10If you catch some of these things early, they're treatable and it saves lives. Then you have the capability to load these things, almost like targeted cruise missiles to cancer cells, load them onto ligands, some of these isotopes. And these molecular carriers are found to be almost only uptaken or specifically uptaken by cancer cells. So if you load it with a ticking time bomb, which is what a radioisotope is, it gets taken up by the cell and then that radioisotope decays in that cell. It obliterates that cell in nearby cells. It kills the cancer cell. And importantly, unlike chemotherapy, which is killing your whole body, just hopefully slower than the cancer cells, this is really only killing the cancer cells because there's very little incidental radioactive decay in the rest of your body.

36:51It's unbelievable. The targeted therapies are insane what you can do with this. Wow. And we don't have nearly enough of these things, and they're becoming frontline treatments because of how effective they are. So what this reactor behind us is all about is making neutrons that can be absorbed by materials to turn those into these useful isotopes. So these isotopes, they don't exist in nature. They need to be formulated. They need to be synthesized. And to do that, they have to absorb neutrons. And reactors make a bunch of cheap neutrons that you can put these materials into next to the fuel. They'll absorb neutrons, turn into these materials.

37:23You pull them out, you separate them out, and then you can load them into therapeutics. Why hasn't this been done? It is being done. But what we did is we don't do enough of it, right? And so in the U.S., here's a couple of things that happened, right? The U.S. really stepped back in nuclear things. Russia never really did. China's been growing into it. So they produce a bunch. We as a country lapsed in nuclear in a lot of different areas, and we just ceded the ability to do this. So now we can actually bring back supply. But what's interesting is there's two factors here. One, these materials have incredible value now and they're undersupplied.

37:49And there's going to be price and margin cannibalization. But given the audience, I think it's a fun thing to say. If you ever see one of the most valuable materials on the planet, there's some social media posts out there. A good number of those are all isotopes, including some that I think the last I saw, the going market rate would be about$400 trillion a kilogram. Yeah, more than caviar and more than gas. Like stupid numbers, right? You don't make kilograms, but these are the things you can make. Now, the other thing, though, is like, you can also start making materials and isotopes that we don't make at all, that researchers see incredibly promising, but they can't get their hands on.

38:23It could open up entirely new drug discoveries and platforms, and then we're the ones producing. That's a great place to be. So China and Russia are producing these now? Yes, and then there's limited production capacity in the U.S. and in the Western world. But we haven't been growing capacity, really. Like, a little bit here and there. And does Dana-Farber Cancer Institute become the customer? I think a lot of people become partners, customers. They become research partners. They become customers. I mean, right now, if you look at one of the best, I don't know if I say best, one of the highest selling cancer treatments is out of Novartis.

38:54It's called, I think it's called Plavicto. It uses Letitian 177. It's an isotope that is being gobbled up because it's becoming, it's very supply limited in its use. And there's so many others that just aren't even being supplied enough so that they can't make the decisions to treat. Or they can't even do the research to see because they have so much promise, but there aren't, you can't even buy it because it's just not available. Now a quick word from our sponsor.

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41:20We want to talk about your origin story. Why is it called Okla? Yeah. So there's a natural nuclear reactor that occurred in Africa. this country, Gabon, Africa, that we know of geologically. Most likely this occurred many, many places. This is the only one we've discovered a record of. This is insane, but go on. Yeah, that is what, and it's called the Okla region. And that's what we named the reactor off, like off of and after. Because it was paying homage to the fact that like, nuclear is natural, it's been around. And we literally had natural nuclear reactors on the earth. So the history is really fascinating.

41:56A long time ago, uranium, uranium, Do you remember we talked at the beginning, uranium-235 is the naturally best useful fuel directly. It's at a very low enrichment because it decays faster than uranium-238. A long time ago, it had a higher concentration. So it's the natural level of, the natural uranium was just enriched to a higher natural level. It was enough so that in enough concentration in certain rocks and ore, if water flowed in, it would start a nuclear reactor to start and happen, a chain reaction to happen and occur. And what happened at the Oakley reactor, as far as we can tell, is this was the case.

42:30Water would flood in from the ocean because it was near coastal. It would flood it. The reactor would start. It would heat up and it would produce steam and it would basically produce a nuclear powered steam geyser. And then the steam would eject out. The reactor would shut down because the water went away. And then the water would flow back in and it would start up again. So it would run on and off and on and off and on for a long time. I mean, I think people generally speaking think it lasted for hundreds of thousands of years before it finally depleted itself and wouldn't run anymore and or the geology changed.

42:56So yeah, that's the name. That is insane. You know the funny story about how they discovered this? Yeah. Is like the French were buying uranium from the region back when they were building a nuclear really successfully, but they found that it came in somewhat denatured, like it had been in a reactor. And that immediately set off alarm bells like, well, what's coming? Where's this coming from? Some secret project. Yeah. So they were investigated and like, well, it did come from reactors just a long, long, long, long time ago. Yeah. Wild. But the big break is 2013. Yeah, because give or take a decade after you met Tim Tebow.

43:27While you were getting your PhD at MIT, you met Sam Altman. He was about to become the head of Y Combinator. So what's the biggest thing you've learned from Sam Altman, and what's something you totally disagree with him on? Wow. And he is listening and watching, we should point out. Well, they just hit AGI, right? You already know. His clone is watching. Okay, so that's an interesting question. Okay, a lot of things that I learned, a ton. I think one of the, I'm going to kind of cheat and give you two answers. One is never stop swinging for the fences on everything you're doing. Like don't let near-term stuff sacrifice the long-term of what you're going to.

44:15Build through. Build and learn and build and learn, but don't stop. Don't optimize for what the thing in front of you is, but grow through it. In other words, what's Oaklow's vision, right? It's effectively unlocking the full power of the atom with fast reactors and recycling, all the cool things you can do with that and isotopes at full scale. That is a terminal energy solution for the planet. There's enough energy content and known reserves of heavy metals with fast reactors and recycling that we can power the entire planet's energy needs for two plus billion years for basically the durable lifetime of the planet.

44:44Without carbon emissions, we have a terminal energy climate solution. That's what we're trying to build at Oklahoma. So don't lose sight of that for everything here, because guess what? I won't be alive for all of that mission to be realized. Physics is on our side. That's great. I think the other thing was celebrate, that said, celebrate all the wins on the way, because it's such a hard, long journey. So you kind of never reach that full in-state in people's careers, much less the lives. So celebrate the little wins that matter so people know that there's steps up the mountain. Okay, but what do you disagree with Sam Alman?

45:17He was hoping you forgot. That question. No, it's kind of hard. I mean... Well, I think there was one area where, man, I'm not copping out. It's like he taught a lot. There were things we agreed with and disagreed with. I think there's some views that he's had about like... incremental hard tech development versus going all the way to where you want to get to on the first iteration. But I think that was like 2014, that was 2013, 14 era discussions. I almost guarantee you if we had that same conversation today, we'd probably be much more aligned because it sounds so weird to say, but what we've all done.

45:53The other thing is like, I think the other one that I would say we kind of disagreed with was how we lean into telling the story and how elements of it matter. Yeah. And not be too shy about some of the stuff. I think there was an over-optimist, like over-anticipation and overthinking about it's hard to tell the nuclear story. And it's like, just tell the story. Yeah. Like, don't be afraid of it. You got to tell the story. And I felt like there was kind of this, like, you got to, you know, you got to perfectly prepare the field before you can even say anything. It's like, no, it's going to be messy.

46:23You're not going to nail everything right. There's going to be people who hate it. There's going to be people who have different views. There's going to be people who disagree. Just like embrace that. So, Jake, one year after you met Sam, you graduated from MIT. He encouraged you to move out to California, where you applied and were accepted to Y Combinator, the famous incubator program, where they encourage you to swing for the fences. And Sam becomes an investor, eventually chairman of the board. But this was all eight years before OpenAI launched ChatGPT. And now everyone's talking about how do you fuel AI?

46:56With nuclear. Was Sam telling you in 2014 that clean next generation nuclear reactors would power future AI? He wasn't saying that explicitly, but what he was saying very clearly was that he thinks the world is going to need unbelievably more amounts of energy. And for a lot of reasons. And that's why nuclear is such an important stable solution for it. 2015, the AI story really starts to land. And that's when it became pretty clear that, like, okay. That's when Sam and Elon and others launch OpenAI. Yeah. So now you're getting to sell shovels to the AI gold rush, right? I mean, the AI development must be a tremendous godsend for your business.

47:46Oh, it's unbelievable. Like, I mean, it's accelerated all of our wildest dreams by 20 years or more because meta Google Amazon opening I anthropic SpaceX trillion-dollar companies and they all Desperately need electricity existentially need like are you even like you know 10 years ago You would've been cold calling them and now what is it like are they just sending people to you? I remember having conversations about data centers in Like 2013 14 15 and people were like, oh nuclear is too big for a lot of data center The world's changed right everything's changed obviously Well, we've seen this in the stock price.

48:20You guys go public, 2024. Sam Altman resigns as chairman of the board a year later because OpenAI wants to use Oklahoma nuclear facilities. And needs to avoid that conflict of interest. Exactly. The stock fell 54 % on the first day of trading. Brutal. But... Then the surge? A massive surge. In fact, today, Oklahoma stock is five times higher than the day one closing price. And that's all without having really any revenue right now, even still today. I mean, it's kind of like the Jerry Maguire, show me the money. Yeah, let's talk the financials. Yeah, yeah. Your latest earnings show$1.2 million in revenue with an$80 million quarterly loss.

48:59So you're basically a pre-revenue company still, and yet the company is worth$8 billion. So when will Oklo start making money, and why should someone invest now? Yeah, well, I mean, look, we're reporting revenues, which is cool. Like, we're making some money, but this is like the piecemeal up to everything we're doing. Where those revenues come from are companies we acquired to help us accelerate building power plants and building reactors for isotopes and other support infrastructure we need for fuel and fabrication work and recycling work. We expect that isotope revenue generation hits kind of in the early part of next year, maybe hits a little sooner depending on how some of the stuff plays out.

49:33And then on top of that, like power generation, we expect to start selling in 2028. We do have prepayments from customers, right? But it's really when you start putting power out. And so, and we have a great position, right? In terms of being able to like, so the question was like, being well capitalized and can we build? And now we've proven, yeah, we can build, we're going to keep getting better at it, too. So like, at the end of the day, I think that's how we see this lining up. And that's where I think the market sees this and says, okay, if you back up what the size of some of these orders are, I mean, I think publicly, it's like, we have like an 18 gigawatt order book.

50:05Yeah, like, and that's, you know, All of those hyperscalers I mentioned, are they all in the book? Yeah, I mean, it's their NeoCloud. Well, now that you're a public company CEO, do you like the idea of potentially being a meme stock? I mean, look, to be honest, like, the stock's very cool because it's great to have people who are partners with us. Like, we're huge believers in ownership. Like, every person who's an employee at Oklo, we focus on equity from the day we started to, you know, go. It's just like, you're a full-time employee. This is part of the story. We want people to have upside on this.

50:34a story that we like so that's like really important for us so it's great that then there's more investors that can get in on this right that's awesome being a meme stock I don't I care about what we're building for which is a very long run so like volatility is like okay there it is my view is look at what this is turning into look what we're building for and look at the scale if we execute there's a clear trajectory to become one of the biggest companies in the world so 8 billion dollars looks like a small number relatively speaking, to what those numbers would be. So the question then, the key is, like, play the long game and execute over scale, right?

51:06And that's kind of how I think about it. But there's a lot of competition in the next-gen nuclear space. Sounds like Bill Gates, the Russian government, probably Elon Musk pretty soon. Yeah. New scale, X Energy, whole tech just filed to IPO the day we're doing this recording. Tell us how your other differentiator, not just fast reactors and fuel recycling, but you're the only one selling power as the product. Yeah, like licensing. Yeah, this goes to the origination of Oaklow. Like when Carolyn and I were talking about this, it was like, hey, this just seems like there's so much potential in doing this better, differently, and new.

51:38How do we do this? What's the best approach? And what came clear to us in time we spent, including time like when we worked together in this thing called the MIT Reactor Technology Course, which is this really cool thing where they have utility executives come in and have a crash course in nuclear technology given by MIT and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators. And what I saw was like, why aren't people doing this? Why is the industry, why are utility executives not wanting to invest in this technology? Why aren't they buying it? Why aren't they building it? So I, coming from an engineering brain, was just pitching the product on the pure technicals.

52:07And it never moved the needle with CFOs of utilities, who then became CEOs of utilities. But what it did was changing the risk profile and the product offering. It wasn't asking them to take on... Because here's what the industry was doing. Here's what the bulk of the industry does. They design a reactor to something like 80 % completion. They take the design paperwork. They give it to a customer. Well, don't give it. They charge a nine-figure fee if they can get it, which most can't, fee to the customer to then say, okay, here, take the blueprints, complete the design, permit it, site it, procure it, build it yourself, and operate it yourself.

52:39And we'll just keep charging you for ongoing services. And in some ways, that sounds good economically, but people don't want that very much. And so what we saw was, okay, especially for new technologies that have all this potential but need to be reduced more to practice, the risk needs to be taken off the table. Well, we should get the reward of that too. So our view is make it easy to sell reactors, which is not selling reactors. It's selling power because that's what people wanted So when we said that pitch was like, well, what if we just built and sold you the power? They're like, yeah, that would solve a lot of things.

53:05We'd want to do that There it is. So then it's like, okay now we design and operate now it scales in really important ways Now we can do the other model if people really want it. We can do build transfer. Those are all options But to get customers excited You got to make the power first and this allows us to move at our speed and not the speed of really slow customers who need to be the ones to build your plant or your product. But then also we get to internalize all the learnings. So that's the other differentiator. And that's why we're taking this approach. And then it gives us like fleet-wide learnings at scale.

53:31And that's super important. So the other next-gen nuclear companies, they're basically handing a PDF to the customer and saying, here, build a nuclear power plant. We designed it for you. Yeah. Like imagine if you went and bought a car. Yeah. You didn't buy a car. You bought blueprints for a car that weren't even fully done. A kit? Yeah, it's like a Sears home kit. I can't even drive sticks. A kit without all of the parts done yet. So you have to then complete it and do it yourself. That sounds potentially really profitable. Because a PDF is not as expensive. But not if people buy it. It's really profitable on paper, in theory.

54:05Yeah. But Meta doesn't want to build a power plant. No. Neither does PG &E. At some point. But they want you to do it first. So then if you do it first, then guess what? Then we have a different offering. Because we can move faster. Because we can build ourselves and sell the power to those who want the power. Who want to move fastest. People need power. So the product you're selling is a 20-year contract to buy all the electricity of our reactor. Yep. We always talk about hero stats on the show. Are there any other wild hero stats in terms of how much went into this facility that really... I remember when we were walking and you were saying, oh yeah, these walls, they're 14 inches thick.

54:42Can you sprinkle on some more context about the magnitude of the place where we are? Yeah, I mean, look, this is like we excavated pilings like 60 feet deep. Not excavated, we piled them down. The concrete surrounding this vessel is well over a foot thick, reinforced. It's incredibly robust, strong structure. The vessel and the support structure is, let's just say, very, very, very strong. It was pretty cool, right? And like part of this was over-design it to build it with some speed, and that way you consider you have your margins in there. And that's something I think people sometimes think about is like, well, if you go fast, you're cutting corners.

55:17No, if you do it right, you're just over designing and over engineering and over building. But you're making the decision quicker with a conservative bounding assumption. Now you end up paying a little bit more for it, but you get it back through the getting it done and learning through the process faster. And that's the part of the philosophical kind of approach we took to learn from this, which was really important. And we learned a ton accordingly on that front. I think one of the coolest hero stats to me about this is, as far as we can tell, the reactor that we're standing next to is the fastest privately-cited and privately-built reactor in the history of the world.

55:51Wow. That's a hell of a hero stat to me, right? That was our first one, too. And in an industry that the story is too long, too expensive, over budget, over cost, everything, to have a different element to that as your first one is really important for us as an organization to build off of and learn from. One thing I'll just get on if you want, like this part of like power, that's the layer everyone focuses on. But the underlying layer that enables that is fuel. And the recycling part is changing the world and how we think about this because of the energy content available in this material and then therefore the benefits on the cost of fuel and therefore the cost on power.

56:23This is the tidy side of your business. And this is the part that is radically underappreciated, I would argue, by most people. Why? Because we don't really do it in this country. We're going to change that. Technically, we are recycling as a country, like we're making a little bit of fuel recycled as we speak, from in Idaho. It's actually going to go in our first reactor up there. But when you think about what recycling opens up the door for, you get the potential for massive revenue offtake, massive revenues from offtake for the fuel you make. Part of it. Great. Because you're getting cheaper fuel.

56:51Yeah. And you're making fuel abundantly available. We have a fuel shortage in this country for nuclear. Like in the world as a whole, like is this ramp rate of build expects to go? The fuel supply chain is going to lag to keep up. Recycling helps contribute to that. So there's that benefit. We can fuel our reactors or some others, which is huge. But also, out of recycling, when you think about what happens in a nuclear reactor, those neutrons are causing all these things to happen because they're getting absorbed by atoms, they're splitting them, they're changing atoms. It's literally alchemy.

57:16So you're going from uranium to all sorts of different materials. It's like the whole periodic table in various concentrations is in the fuel, the used fuel. So when you recycle it, these facilities all of a sudden become able to be some of the largest critical mineral and resource mines on the planet. That's huge. That's insane. And the feedstock is either cheap or free or subsidized, or we're paid to take it. So this is a huge outcome that changes the entire paradigm. The recycling unit economics can, when you start layering these things, look really, really like, whoa, this is wild, right? Let me make sure I get this straight.

57:50What we consider nuclear waste a big problem of the nuclear industry. Like, what do you do with nuclear waste? You bury it in the ground? Do you put it in Yucca Mountain? you consider that nuclear fuel to power these operators? Yeah. That's what's crazy. So it's like the landfill that's a stain on the countryside is a gas station. And the gold mine. It's both, because you literally make a bunch of gold. I'm not kidding you. You make a lot of gold out of this stuff, not to mention like ruthenium and palladium and platinum. There's a bunch of these critical minerals that come out and fuel for energy.

58:22And the fact that you can recycle wasted nuclear fuel and use it for your nuclear reactor, That's one of the two silver bullets you talk about. It's a huge one. And here's why this is so important for scale. When I look at the world right now, we have an undersupply of all the things needed to make fuel. That's uranium, that's mining, that's conversion, that's enrichment, that's fabrication. We're working to solve all of those on the front end, but recycling helps as well because it alleviates the needs here. The other thing is, like, uranium in today's reactors, when you pull it out of the ground, you have to enrich it.

58:58And when you enrich it, you're discarding a lot of the uranium you pulled out of the ground. And that uranium isn't used for much of anything in power. Some of it's used for industrial purposes, but it's really just sitting there. It's a byproduct. So that means that when you go back to the mine, the amount of energy extracted is less of the available energy in that material you pull out of the ground. In today's reactors, it's less than 1%. With a fast reactor, it's way over 90%. So that's a 90x improvement in utilization. Think about what that does to your margins. Oh yeah, it's a profit puppy.

59:23So most traditional nuclear reactors, have to go and mine uranium from planet Earth. They need fresh uranium. Fresh uranium. Pay people to mine it. Enrich it, which costs a lot more money. Then they use it, and then they store it in a mountain and tell humans to stay away for a million years. Yeah. Whereas you, instead of paying for your fuel through the mining and the enriching, some companies will pay you to take it? So it's a negative price? I mean, even the government technically has a burden to get rid of this by the nuclear waste policy act. So they're getting it to you. Yeah, so there's a different revenue stream here potentially as an offtake.

1:00:00This is wild. Yeah, just to take it. And then, so it's a recycling fee you get, right? And then you pull out the fuel, which you can use, sell it to yourself, make energy from it, or sell it to others. They can make energy from it. And then sell other various isotopes and other materials that come off of this. And that's what you think is the biggest thing Wall Street's underappreciating about your business. The fact that you can recycle fuel. Yes. And what it does to diversify revenues and give you this incredible position in the fuel markets. but also very importantly to help nuclear meet its opportunity because we need more fuel recycling is a way to unlock that as You told us fast reactors have been around since the 60s They eliminate the nuclear waste problem, which is wild and have big safety benefits because they self Contain themselves.

1:00:39Okay, so it sounds too good to be true our question. Why didn't that become the standard the fast reactor? I think the reality is during that first build-out nuclear 1.0 when it was really going It just wasn't mature enough. It wasn't ready the early ones we built weren't performing as well There were things we were learning about it. There were things we needed to discover about how to best manage this from the coolant, the chemistry, the materials, the operability, the design, the implications on all of that. Until this new wave started, it kind of roots in the late 2000s, early 2010s, when us and a few others said, hey, this is actually really where the future of the atom is going to go.

1:01:09Let's lean into it. And the thing that compounded and I think stunted some of that effort too was the fact, like we said, it sounds cheesy, but it's real. This was not easy information to get access to. partly because it wasn't digitized. It was in the libraries. Yeah, you had to go read it. And then, like, limited distribution on copies. And some of it was restricted information. So, like, getting it was just... But once you poured into it, or you'd hear lecturers come from the labs who worked on this, you're like, you asked the same question. Why are we not doing this? But then when I spent time in the industry, you start to realize those are the factors.

1:01:41So then it was like you needed capital that was more risk-on. You needed companies that would say, let's try to do things a bit differently in terms of the supply chain, like, what you design and build yourself, what you partner with others to get early repetitions before you do in-house, how you permit it, how you design it to those things, to capitalize on this technology. Because the thing that had also happened was industry was trying to make it look like what it wasn't, which was a large light-water reactor. And if you try to treat it like that, it's sort of this square peg around hole thing.

1:02:07It just doesn't work as well versus saying, let's design to what its organic potential is. Gotcha. So that's one differentiator, the fact that you're doing fast reactors. And by the way, fast reactors are the only thing that can fully recycle like that. It's because of the physics of fast neutrons. That's the unlock. So it's interesting to watch the range of cities and states announce their carbon neutral targets, like Virginia, California, carbon neutral by 2050, New York, Louisville, 2050, 2040. So we were like wondering about this long term vision. We put ourselves 20, 30 years in the future.

1:02:35Is there going to be a mini Oklo next to Madison Square Garden to help New York City get to carbon neutral in midtown Manhattan? I think, OK, honestly, I think there's a very real real world at some point that that is is viable. And New York's actually a very fascinating place for that because you have central heat. So like you can also use the heat for district heating. Because a byproduct of your reactors is heat. Yeah. Right. You already see those steam things in the middle of the streets. Yeah. But there's a long path to that. So in the near term, you're more likely to be offsite. You're going to be in areas downstream, down the grid where it makes sense to build more, where real estate's a little cheaper, where you're not in the middle of Manhattan.

1:03:11Do this, do this more. And then maybe that's possible. Yes, technically completely viable. Upstate New York to help the state of New York hit carbon neutral. Yeah. Yeah. Or probably more realistically, other states that are, I'll just be candid, I'd love to see New York. They're doing a lot. They've got to do a little more because there's other states that are moving a little faster. So it'll start there. But then, yeah, maybe it's in upstate New York. Maybe it's in, it's, you know, it could be in a number of places that serve that market. But like, I think at the end of the day, it's going to start more in those centralized areas.

1:03:37So what we're seeing at Oklo was more likely to be these campuses where you have large power coming out that have good interconnect, good grid infrastructure, and then that power goes out to the ears that need it. But I do think there's a world where it starts to move into closer to proximity. Or things move closer to it, which is the other factor. Early, early days of Oklo, like one of our very earliest, like, you know, potential, I think, customer meetings. Yeah. It was like 2013. Someone was like asking some questions like you could put this in New York. I was like, technically, it's possible, but from regulatory permitting, there's some things that need to change.

1:04:08There's a lot of stuff. Let's just be realistic. It's not going to happen for a while. And they were like, well, because I was like, yeah, you could put it in the basement. And they were like, no, you put it at the top as ballast for the skyscraper. Oh, yeah, because they need a ballast. Because they need the ballast at the top. And I was like, a penthouse reactor. I was like, that's pretty sick. Empire State Nuke. Yeah, I was always laughing. I was like, think how cool the events could be up there. Sorry, this is really silly, but like one thing that Carolyn and I used to laugh at on Saturday Night Live was, you know, the like Stefan about the clubs.

1:04:38It was like, imagine the skyscraper penthouse reactor club that's on the ground, but not in there. Really silly. Well, perfect timing. Because when Jack and I were preparing for this interview, what we realized, this was like our big breakthrough. Oklo is the Lululemon of nuclear. What we mean is you're trying to be a lifestyle brand. Yeah. And lifestyle is not our word choice. That's yours. Right. You've talked about nuclear lifestyle innovation campuses. Or Licks, I think they're called. They're not called Licks. We don't say Licks. In Licks. In Licks. Just get to In Licks. In Licks. So they're kind of like nuclear company towns.

1:05:12Yeah. Can you explain what a nuclear lifestyle innovation campus is, and how they might be coming to Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Louisiana? And do they have an Equinox gym? Like, visually tell us this. Take us into this world, this Lululemon branded nuclear world. I mean, this is swinging for defenses. Okay, I'm going to be semantic. I like the rebrand. Technically, they call them nuclear life cycle innovation campuses, but I like the nuclear lifestyle innovation campus because that's what it turns into. So nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability. Asset. And why would a state take one-fifth of our country's nuclear waste?

1:05:44So think about it like this. If you told a state, so in the waste today in the United States, there's almost, well, it's about 100 ,000 metric tons, a little less, I think. that technically would fit in something the size of a super walmart like a super walmart not in you know vermont or california like a super walmart here um but so that's pretty small that's from the whole history of nuclear power generation in the u.s but there's enough energy content in that material to power the entire country's energy needs for over 150 years because that's crazy it's only five percent it's only five percent waste really it's like 95 fuel another way to talk about that waste all of that it's more than four saudi arabia's worth of oil yeah that's the context.

1:06:26So each state, and they're actually going to pick three, and this is going to grow. So that means each state's getting more than one Saudi Arabia worth of oil. Think about the wealth of that. So it's like a modern millennial company town built on nuclear with fancy architecture that like, so you'll have a very fancy equinox. You'll have an amazing job. So these nuclear towns would do fabrication, enrichment, recycling. They'd build reactors, they'd build power generators, They would build recycling centers, and they would have a Saudi Arabia's worth of energy supply in their state. And yoga classes.

1:07:00And every year it's refueled with a Norway worth. A Norway's worth of fuel. Yeah, every year. That's just the bonus top up. Think about that. So if we can embrace... It's insane. If we can embrace nuclear waste as an asset to be recycled, not a liability to bury in a mountain, then we have four Saudi Arabia's worth of energy. And when you add all it up, That's why we describe this as Oklo having a lifestyle brand. So what happens at the end? When conventional nuclear power plants hit their 40th birthday, they either get extended another 20 years, or, like the plant I grew up eight miles from, they get decommissioned, and it becomes a nuclear haunted house.

1:07:36How long do nuclear fast reactors at Oklo last, and what happens at the end? Yeah, I mean, most of these designs are going to be designed to last for, you know, 60-plus years. and so you're going to run for the lifetime and then you can renew them for a while like there's only a few parts of the plant that are really life limiting right and most of the time that's going to be your foundational concrete your vessel so by the time you reach that lifetime some of that's unknown still because some of these things are going to run for maybe 60 80 100 120 140 it could be a long time um you're going to end up yeah you'll basically tear it down decommission it and my my imagination is that in most of those sites you're just going to you know You're going to be built.

1:08:16You have these, and you'll build the next ones. You'll tear these down at some point and build back over. Right next one. I mean, that's probably how it's going to go at those timescales. But, you know, that's variable. But you're going to get these things are going to last for a long time and have a long life ahead of them after their initial licensing period. And to pause the pod for a sec, for one final entry into our nuclear date night dictionary, Half-Life. Can you sprinkle on the definition for us, please? Yeah, Half-Life is a great one. It's the time it takes for half of a material that's decaying to decay away.

1:08:45so if if the half-life of something is one day it means after one day it there's only half of it remaining okay and then after the another day only half of that remaining which means there's a quarter from the original quantity gotcha which means by the time you've gone through 10 days there's basically almost nothing so 10 half-lives basically is almost zero it's not exactly it's almost zero okay so it's a good rule of thumb to think about how long does it take for this to fully go away it's a decent rule of thumb okay i thought he was going to say asymptote it is an Asymptotic decay. That's for later in the dictionary.

1:09:16All right, so we've only talked about one of the revenue streams of Oak Cloud. The selling of 20-year power agreements through the fast reactors. But Sesame Street would love the second part. Yeah. The recycling. The recycling. Fast reactors, the advanced kind that you're building, unlocking fuel recycling. Again, almost sounds too good to be true. It's like a restaurant that uses food waste instead of fresh food, but still creates Michelin-quality meals. So can you sprinkle on some context into how you actually recycle nuclear waste. How is that physically possible? How do you do it? So that's a cool thing.

1:09:49Nuclear waste, basically 90%, 95 % fuel. That hasn't been used. So how do you recycle it? So you take it out, and then you take it to a facility, and you chop it up. And then when you chop it up, you dump the fuel into effectively a recycling unit, electrorefiners we call it, where then it's dissolved into a bath of liquid salts. And then there's a series, an array of anodes and cathodes. right? So it goes to like, you know, battery chemistry type thing. But instead of pulling electricity out, when you put electricity in, it separates these elements that are in the fuel out by their electrochemical behavior.

1:10:24But we did read that there was a catch in our research. We'd known about this actually for recycling nuclear waste for decades. The risk of proliferation. Yep. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Can you explain what that risk is? Yeah, we'll throw proliferation into our date night dictionary too. Yeah, this is an interesting one too in DC circles. What do I mean by that? So one of the things that we have to manage, obviously, is the appropriate, safe, civil use of nuclear materials. Right. Civil, so it doesn't become weaponized. So if you concentrate it in the right forms and fashions, you can make it into weapon-usable material.

1:10:57This is a national security concern. If it gets in the hands of the wrong people. This is why we had to show our US passports seriously when we came into this facility. That's more of just security management, because nothing in here is like that. I mean, It's more just security and protocols and access. OK. But that is a thing you need to manage and mitigate, too. And there's a lot of ways you can solve for that. But one of the key things is if you're not actually producing directly usable, weaponizable material, it changes that paradigm. It goes back to our conversation similarly. It's not the same, but similar to safety.

1:11:28If you design something that is basically inherently safe or passively safe, in this case for nonproliferation or proliferation considerations, something that cannot be directly weaponizable without much further processing and refinement, you kind of have these inherent safeguards. You have these inherent anti-proliferative features to it. And that's an important thing that modern recycling can enable you to do. And why that matters is that approach I just described to you, you never separate out pure plutonium. And that's one of the key things you want to focus on. And neither do you ever have highly enriched pure, separated highly enriched uranium in the system.

1:12:01Those are the two things you have to manage from proliferation consideration. Some Some people will point out and say, well, if you go Google electro refining and plutonium, people do sometimes talk about using electro refining to purify plutonium in the weapons program. Well, that's because they're taking pure plutonium. When plutonium is there, it decays a little bit and some of the buildup of amyricium occurs and so they can use electro refining to pull the amyricium out to refresh the plutonium. That's very different because you're starting with pretty much pure plutonium and just purifying it.

1:12:26That's different than when you're starting with a whole bunch of stuff and you're never producing pure plutonium. And they're different processes. They have some similarities. But that means that this inherently has very strong inherent non-proliferation features. So the outputs of this are really nasty material that's thermally hot and radioactively hot. Not useful in a weapon at all directly. You would have to go through a bunch of other steps to go make it a weapon. Is there a fuel recycler who could be lazy or cut corners and leave enriched plutonium? No, because you never produce it in this system.

1:12:56In this technique, you never ever have it, really. Like all you have is it's mixed up with these other materials that can't make it work very well. Like you just can't do it with that. So we interviewed Jim Cramer last year. Yeah. And he invented this term called total opportunity value. It supposes what if everything goes right for this company? Yeah. But Nick and I are also, you know, former finance guys and we had compliance series 24 certifications. So we look at both sides, the opportunities and the risks. So we're gonna present to you what the lovers would say about Oklo for the perfect scenario, and what the haters would say about Oklo.

1:13:31So the lovers are gonna say, hey, in ten years, Oklo will be owning and operating a huge fleet of reactors that help reduce the world's carbon footprint, you're running the fuel recycling facilities to manage nuclear waste, and you're producing cancer-treating isotopes. Every data center will be built beside an Oklo reactor. Every island currently burning diesel will switch to an Oklo reactor. Every community trying to save the planet will retire their dirtiest power sources and buy a six-pack of Oklas instead You're gonna solve climate change and nuclear waste cure cancer Okay, here's what the haters would say about Okla They would focus on the risks if AI slows down for any reason Resistance data centers and AI bubble pop that would hurt demand for your reactors Regulatory nuclear is the most regulated industry in the world It's possible you never get approval for the powerhouses you're working on political but politics could turn against nuclear someday.

1:14:24Or you could just fail to execute the roadmap. Not to mention competition. You're not the only pure-play publicly traded nuclear company anymore. How do you stack up against new scale, X-energy, conventional nuclear in plain English? Why should investors be more optimistic than pessimistic? More bullish than bearish on Okla? The things you said. Power, great. Fuel, a fundamental enabling stack. To use the Jensen analogy on layers of the cake, right? Right. Like, fuel is the bottom layer of the cake. And we're the main company playing in this fuel recycling game that ties in with reactors and with isotopes.

1:14:58So great place to be for that. Almost every really cool thing we've ever done in space has been powered by isotopes. We don't have enough of them. We've had to downrate missions to do really cool things because we don't have enough of these things. So the great thing of why, you make these almost always-on batteries that last for decades, thermal batteries that make heat and power, and that's how you can ensure we can really be durable in space. So there's a huge diverse set of, and same things apply for defense, right? So there's huge opportunities across those market spaces. And we're uniquely playing in the three of them like this.

1:15:27That gives us a huge amount of flexibility. So even if there's some squishiness or somewhere squeezes or there's uncertainty that pushes it, there's still a huge amount of upside on those things. I hate to say these things like this because it sounds draconianly simplistic, but treating medical issues, treating cancer, improving medical diagnosis, those things are only going to become in more demand. Those are not going away because of fundamental demographics. On top of that, like, AI is not the only energy driver. It's the flagship driver right now, but there's a lot driving for why we need more energy.

1:15:56And biggest reason why is because people are tired of paying more for their electricity. So they want things that drive prices down, which new generation helps stabilize and ultimately do. So like those things are truly on the side of how we're going to be successful here. There's going to be several nuclear winners, if not many. This is also why we invest in other nuclear companies, partnerships, help them. Maybe we make money from it, maybe not. but we're uniquely positioned, I think, to be able to bolt on to any nuclear deal, basically, in the Western world in some form. Whether it be we're providing recycling services to take waste whack, we're providing fuel, we're providing the power from our reactors.

1:16:28Like, there's a way for us to do this and play across the whole ecosystem. So in a way, we're uniquely positioned as a cross-play on everything. It's not, this is a bit of a stretch. I'm not trying to, it's not quite the exact same, but one thing I've thought a little bit about this is, one of the underlying capabilities around AI is built on some of these chip layers. like that's a similar like energy obviously but the next layer up is chips like that's a play where we're similar to we have a capability to bolt on a number of different platforms but we're not just making you know gpu chips we're making the equivalent of recycling services like ram and right you know all this stuff like i you know that's that starts to get a silly analogy but i think there's some there's a there's a way to think about it like that and it's very underappreciated on the no we love the cake analogy you could make a case that you guys are working on three monopolies.

1:17:13Kind of like how SpaceX has a couple monopolies right now. Space-based internet, rocket launching, those are like two monopolies they basically control. Fast nuclear reactors, fuel recycling. Kind of two monopolies if you get there in the next few years. Plus, isotopes, not a monopoly. China and Russia are doing it. And we're doing it here as well. But it's not exported. But damn! Would I love to round up and say there's three monopolies you guys are working on. We always love healthy competition. We should whip up some final rapid fire questions for our buddy Jake. All right. What's the best barbecue in Texas?

1:17:47Oh, you can't ask me that. Lockhart. It's the most controversial thing we've asked. I'll say this. The easy answer is anything in Lockhart, Texas. Like literally, like I highly recommend anything here. You cannot go wrong with the barbecue here, but go to Lockhart. Diplomatic answer. Best business leader. Who you got?

1:18:08Man, that is a good question. I cheat with multiple answers. I really admire the things, the easy answers to look at with what I see going on between, I mean, between what Elon does, what, in being visionary, what Jensen's played the long game through and opened up these apertures and how he thinks so optimistically. I love that so much because that's how we think too. And then, like, I mean, I always love Sam's audaciousness to dream endlessly. So, like, yeah. Cool combo. What's the best thing to do in New Mexico? Not the National Museum of Atomic Science. You gotta eat red and green chili. On everything.

1:18:50Literally, you can find it in and on everything. So find it on everything. Including the weirdest things you could possibly imagine. Best book you've read? Oh, gosh. I'm a sucker for The Lord of the Rings. I'm also a sucker for Jurassic Park. And I have... I have to say, and it wasn't just because of the movie, but Project Hail Mary, I absolutely loved. What's the best scientific word you like to flex? Scientific word? Well, it's all the nuclear date night ones. Yeah, we got it. Best joke you've ever heard about nuclear. We get them all the time. It's like one of those things where it's just like, oh, you work in nuclear, do you glow green?

1:19:27Why aren't you glowing? Do your kids have three eyes? And the best ones are the ways you say it. It's like, you don't see I glow green? Like, what's wrong with your eyesight? Or like, oh yeah, the kid's got, not three, he's got four eyes. That's good. Really good vision. All right, Jake, we ask every interview guest on The Best One Yet This. If you were a stock, what would be your three or four-letter ticker symbol? You personally, Jake DeWitt. I was a stock? Yeah. Oh, JDDW. That's just like a thing I've used as I and Jacob. It's like my middle initial. It's just like an easy thing to do. I know that sounds so simple.

1:20:02That one or do it, D-O-I-T. Nice. D-O-I-T, that's probably what it would be. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was why, like, in high school, because, like, my name's DeWitt, like, she was like, oh, just DeWitt. Oh, my God, you go twice. Oh, just DeWitt. Legend. This is sick. And I was like, man, if I ever, like, yeah, it'd be, like, such a great endorsement if I was ever gonna do that. Just DeWitt. But the key thing to me that I go back to is when I grew up in the space, when I was a kid, and I had different internships and around different people, when I was in the early days of starting Okolo, and I, so many people would tell us, well, you know, building a nuclear reactor is, like, the hardest thing you can do.

1:20:36Like, you're brave, why would you try it? It's like the hardest thing. There's a lot better ways to make money, all this other stuff. And I was like, I don't believe that it is the hardest thing to do. I think there's enough reasons we can do it differently and better to not make it the hardest thing in humankind to do. And the key then was like, if that's where your starting point is, this is the hardest thing to do. And then the very first time you do it, you set a world record, like that's awesome. And that proves that we've done some things pretty well, but there's obviously a lot of room for us to get better and scale from.

1:21:02And finally, Jake, what's the takeaway on OHLO and nuclear? That the long-term solution for how we think about energy, abundance, availability, affordability, sustainability, being clean, like basically the terminal energy state with the physics that we know today in the universe as humankind, it is fast reactors and recycling. So it's the silver bullet for those things that then enable the silver bullet for treatment of significant medical issues, including cancers, including support for better diagnostics and imaging, supported by radioisotopes. Nuclear technology is the path to really human thriving, and we're in the very early chapters of it, and Oklo's excited to be playing on pretty much all fronts there.

1:21:45Jake, Nick and I admire innovation. We appreciate the risk you're taking here, and we're grateful that you and Oklo team are doing what you're doing. And like T-Boy, we love that you're doing something brighter, smarter, and it's entertaining. You made it fun. And it was fun. Yeah. He made it really fun. I think this stuff is the cool stuff. And congratulations on the upcoming baby. Yes, thank you. In like six weeks, by the time this publishes, you're going to be a double dad. You're going to be close. Congratulations, man. Thank you. That was epic. Very exciting. And congratulations to Caroline, too.

1:22:14It's incredible what you two created together. Yeah, thank you so much. And I don't think we'll have a three-eyed baby on this one either. We're good.

1:22:29and interviews. And comment what company we should deep dive on next. Funnest place in finance.

1:22:59Jake DeWitte: time troubleshooting and more time focusing on what actually matters. Powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get today at business.att.com.