Uncapped #11 | Jordan Bramble from Antares

0:00It was really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors between roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built in turn on three cents in the US on the grid. Wow. All right. Really excited to have this conversation with Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares. Jordan, thanks a ton for doing this conversation with me today. Thank you for having me. Yeah. We're going to talk all about nuclear today. Maybe before we get into it, could you give me like a little overview of like the nuclear market, the history in the US, what's happened over previous decades and kind of catch us up to speed on where we are today?

0:34Let's start from the beginning. So the first artificial human -made nuclear reactor ever was the Chicago pile. So 1942, I think it was. They actually built it at the University of Chicago underneath of the football field. So right in the city in the middle of Chicago. And the idea was you stacked something like 45 ,000 graphite blocks in order to moderate neutrons. I want to say it was like 50 tons of natural uranium in order to sustain a critical reaction. And they actually only produced like a half -water of power. But that was the first kind of academic research reactor ever built. And the motivation behind it was really the Manhattan Project was going on.

1:19So we were exploring nuclear vision for the development of weapons. But then later, actually for the production of plutonium, because plutonium production is a byproduct of nuclear vision, uranium vision. So it built a couple of reactors after that. And by 1945, 45, 47, as we're still in the 40s, we had plutonium -producing reactors both Savannah River and at the Handofford site in Washington all to support the weapons program. And then in parallel, a naval officer by the name of Hyman Rickover started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. And I also want to say 1945. So all these things are happening really fast at this point.

1:59He eventually became Admiral Rickover and his father of the nuclear Navy. 1952, we had the first nuclear submarine, so the Nautilus, which was a water -cooled reactor. And then in parallel to that, they built the seawaf, which was a sodium -cooled reactor. That was the first non -weapon application of nuclear with submarines. Certainly the first naval application will actually get into it. The first kind of power producing, civilian power producing reactor was actually a spinoff from a naval reactor core that they didn't end up using. It was the shipping port reactor in Pennsylvania. They built it in like 18 months.

2:35So it's kind of a spinoff from the nuclear Navy programs. It's actually only a 60 megawatt reactor. Not long after that, we got the Yankee Row in Massachusetts, which I want to say is like 100 megawatts, 120 megawatts, something like that. So significantly smaller than what we build today. I imagine at some point talk about small modular reactors. One thing I would highlight is actually the kind of small concept is actually how we originally built reactors when we first started doing it. So the seawaf and the Nautilus both ran for something like five years. The Navy eventually settled on the water -cooled reactor designs.

3:11And part for just pragmatic reasons, they were easier to build. It was easier to conduct maintenance on. You know, also sodium reacts violently with air and water. And submarines go underwater, right? So there's safety considerations as well. But maybe one of the things kind of take aways of all of this is the history of atomic energy actually came out of government led sort of military -focused programs. And that's where the commercial sector kind of originated from. So in parallel to all of this, sort of mid -50s going into the 60s, the Air Force and NASA also had their own nuclear program. So at the Nevada test site, which is where we tested, or historically tested our nuclear weapons, we had the Nerva program, which was nuclear thermal rockets.

3:58So you circulate liquid hydrogen through a nuclear reactor and exhaust it out at the back of a rocket engine. And it's like twice as propellant, efficient as a chemical rocket. So you could get to Mars and half the time. We were actually building this stuff and testing it in the desert in the 50s. I'm going through the 60s. We also had Rover and Pluto, which were nuclear -powered jet engines. The Air Force actually looked at developing a nuclear -powered airplane, which could basically stay in the air indefinitely. Wow. Did that already end up? Ground tested. And we also, there are examples where we flew airplanes with operating nuclear reactors to shield the pilots and just test all of that.

4:47So there's some history there, but I don't think an actual nuclear -powered airplane is ever flown, I'm pretty sure. Going into the early 60s, so we had the SNAP program, which produced a reactor called the SNAP -10A, which in 1965 was actually launched into space and is still up there to this day. So we as Americans publicly only ever launched one space reactor. The Soviets did something like 37, 38, 39, even going all the way into the late 80s, early 90s, where they would put vision reactors in orbit in very low Earth orbit because they have lower drag than solar panels. And they would do, I believe it was radar, either for detecting missiles or tracking ships.

5:34The Rorset satellites. Going back to what I was saying earlier, we are really the pressurized water reactor designs that ultimately ended up being commercialized or originated out of the naval programs. It's kind of, generally, what we have on the grid today, the white water reactors and the PWRs, was really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors between roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built in turn on three cents in the US on the grid. Well, BWXT, the company that produced, I guess, all the majority of those nuclear reactors for the Navy.

6:14When did that get going? Was that around the same time? So BWXT primarily fabricates the fuel and other components of the reactors. And the reactors themselves have always kind of varied either between Westinghouse and General Electric, that makes those. But I want to say by the 50s or 60s, those vendors were kind of baked in into those programs and they've always sort of split back and forth whose making the reactor company's are obviously much older. Yeah, like 100 years old. Right. General Electric may even be like 120 years old or something like that. Yeah. So we had this period where we're building a ton.

6:52Yep. Since then we've slowed down wildly, obviously. Yep. What was the climate? Like, why in your sort of telling of the history, why did that happen? There's a lot of different reasons that people will cite. And I almost think it's like overdetermined in a way. It was kind of all of these different things happened at the same time. So one, we had a couple of safety incidents and what was, so we didn't have a department of energy. We actually had the Atomic Energy Commission. So what is now the DOE, all they did was nuclear energy. And they were, for most of their existence, actually all of these programs that I cited, they were involved.

7:35So they were both the regulator and the builder at the same time. Eventually, Congress decided that's probably not the best from a safety perspective. And then the AEC became the Department of Energy. And then they created a congressional, an independent agency, the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have regulatory oversight over an nuclear energy development. At the same time that we were getting a new regulator, we were also losing demand for nuclear. So historically, nuclear had kind of been catalyzed by the government, by government funding. And if you go back in time to the 1960s, 1950s, like R &D spend as an overlay of the entire federal budget with something like, you know, it fluctuates between 12 and 15 % or something like that.

8:22Today, it's probably around 3%. And those cuts really came in the early 1970s. And it was, it was, some ways it's like 1971. We went off the gold standard, not long after that, we had the, or really at the same time, we had the Iran energy crisis, the hostage crisis. Interest rates were skyrocketing, you know, service payments on the federal debt went up. And so this was like just budget austerity, right? So like, you know, we sometimes talk about, how did we do all these things in the 50s and 60s? Well, you know, if you adjust what we spent on nuclear from our rockets back then to today's dollars, it would have been like $10 billion in today's dollars.

8:59We're just, we're not doing large government led programs of that scale anymore. In fact, the Naval Nuclear Program, as it exists today, I would almost view as a little bit of a remnant of that era where, you know, it's tens of billions of dollars, you know, earmarked for those programs, they have dedicated nuclear energy labs where we have national lab employees that are solely focused on serving the Navy, Oak Ridge and Idaho National Lab, both both also have a dedicated workforce focused on Naval reactors that come up with the designs in house then they bring in their vendors. And it's like, you know, billions of dollars to make these.

9:33Yeah. It's kind of unlike the broader discourse around defense tech now where, you know, it's more like how do we get venture capital into this so that, so that, you know, private capital sharing some of the cost of tech maturation with the taxpayer. Yeah. You know, that's happening for the first time in nuclear now. Yeah. It's actually, you know, I would be hesitant to say that like, you know, nuclear is going to, you know, start up nuclear is going to look just like SpaceX where you've got these companies building rockets. It's a very different technological development arc, but, you know, sort of the starting point is very similar, right, where we had the Apollo program in space just like we did with the Manhattan project, largely government led, right, lots of taxpayer dollars that go into this.

10:15And then, you know, for various reasons, we just stopped doing it, right? And so we stagnated in our ability to send tundish to orbit, to send people to space. And it took decades for SpaceX to come along and finally recatalyze that, right? Largely funded by private capital. Yeah. I've seen a lot of people have talked about regulation in nuclear, they've talked about, kind of public sentiment, right, like environmentalists killed nuclear. But I've seen very few people really comment on the kind of financial changes that we went through in the 70s. Yeah. And how we went from being something that was government led to not really having a true private sector to kind of carry this, right?

10:51Yeah, I want to get into the technological arc that we're kind of on, but maybe right before that, now fast forward to today, it does feel like there's now like a much, you know, bigger drive for nuclear. You hear it in the sentiment in the ether a lot, you see it in, have interest operating now. Yep. What's sort of the lay of the land at the moment in terms of like what the appetite is for investment from, you know, the public sector, both in terms of, you know, the demand for it and like the willingness to sort of fund these efforts and things. Yeah, I would say we're seeing maybe three different drivers of this.

11:28One, his kind of a risen more out of the, like, what is going to be our solution to climate change? I think we've, as a society, we've gone far enough down that path that we've realized net zero is probably not possible without significantly more nuclear energy, right? Probably fusion or fusion. Well, fusion is here today, right? But do we need fusion to get there or even fusion has a path to get us to that kind of environmental impact? Oh, we can certainly do it with just fusion, right? I mean, fusion is carbon free power. Can do the benefit of fusion is, we'll set aside whether I agree with it or not, but the claimed benefits of fusion are, you can have a new tronic fusion reactions.

12:11So a lot of the problems that you get from nuclear fusion, like how do you shield against radiation? What do you do with the waste products? You don't have as much of that in fusion, right? Problem with fusion is that it's, perpetually 30 years away and you're working with novel materials in order to withstand the temperatures and those are kind of all unsolved technical problems that exist, right? The kind of answer to climate change is sort of the first part of that. The second one is, you know, just growth, right? So if you look, if you look at like GDP per capita historically, it correlates directly with many kilowatt hours of energy we're able to consume per capita.

12:57And we as Americans today actually consume less energy per capita than our grandparents did. So we've gotten more efficient, but we actually haven't really been able to drive new progress through unlocking new things with energy. And you know, some would say we've picked all of the low hanging fruit, but like I would disagree with that. You know, like Peter Teele has spoken a lot about this. We actually travel slower on airplanes than we did in the 1970s. Like we used to have supersonic travel now we don't, right? So in a nuclear energy in many ways, is another example of that. Like what we're seeing right now is an artificial intelligence.

13:29There's this new demand for infrastructure. We're going to need, you know, this large scale data center built out throughout the US and the fundamental question is how are we going to power it? Are we really going to build out all of this transmission? We're not going to do it with solar and wind because the energy densities just not high enough to support that level of infrastructure. So people are looking at nuclear again, right? And now you're seeing companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, they all have internal programs focused on, you know, how are they going to partner with the advanced nuclear industry and buy and deploy these reactors?

13:59And then the third maybe driver, I would say, is national security. So when the Cold War ended, we also went through this arc of, you know, cutting back federal programs. So when Clinton was president, you know, really cut back a lot of defense spending from where it was historically, and nuclear was actually particularly affected by that. And then we ended up in the war on terror where, you know, in a lot of ways, like energy resilience was just not really a focus, right? We'd like fly diesel around on helicopters and stuff and, you know, just kind of do whatever it would take. But now, you know, we've reshifted our orientation where China is kind of the pacing factor for the war in the future.

14:43And it's forcing us to think a lot about energy resilience here in the homeland. So like the way we would conduct operations or the way we would defend this country, most of the assets for that are here inside of the US. And so, you know, an example I'll give is like our nuclear weapons, right? The ICBM silos were built in the 70s. We didn't have the internet back then. So like planning for a cyber attack on the civilian grid wasn't really a thing that you had to plan for. Now you do, you know, all of our targeting and command and control those run on, you know, compute facilities that also have to be able to operate even if there is no commercial power.

15:18Van and Berg Air Force Base, we host our ground -based interceptors there, just how we would defend against incoming missile attacks. Same thing, right? That's also where national security space launch takes place. We launch things to space there. We need to be able to do that, you know, even in times of whether it's a natural disaster or a cyber attack or something, you know, you need that mission assurance. You know, broadly the DOD has started to think a lot more about energy resilience. You know, one of the things I would highlight about that is it pertains to nuclear is like the DOD is spending dollars on supporting tech maturation in this industry today, right?

15:56Which you aren't really seeing yet from some of these other markets. So there's a lot of hype about the data center, nuclear opportunity. I think it's a great opportunity, but they're not really spending real money yet, right? Whereas the DOD is. So yeah, I would say that's, you know, broadly what's driving. And actually I would add a fourth to that, which is, so I mentioned space nuclear earlier and how we did some of it in the 60s. We are seeing a lot of activity in space nuclear power and propulsion again. And in my view, the thing that is driving that is the weaponization of space, right? So we started the space force in 2018.

16:29It's now 2025. You know, we went from like the kind of first iteration of the space force was we're going to send a lot of mass to orbit so that like, you know, if our adversaries take out our critical assets on orbit, we can reconstitute, we've got redundancy, we've got survivability in numbers. And now it's very much moved to like, you can publicly talk about putting weapons systems in space. Funny because when space force was announced, I remember like a lot of people kind of, I feel at least my memory of it as people kind of made fun of it. Now it seems obviously important, not that many years later.

17:03Yeah, you know, all sorts of memes and stuff. Yeah, if you go back to 2018 to 2020, what was one of the best like federal government decisions we made? I think creating the space force was, was probably one of them. If not the best one, space is absolutely going to become a war -fighting domain, right? Like if, if we went to war with another great power, the first thing they would do to us and one of the things we would try to do to them is, you know, we do targeting from space, right? We detect incoming missiles from space, communications, GPS, everything that you rely on to fight a war is in space now, right?

17:38And so you would want to be able to take that out. Doing that by launching missiles from the ground is bad. Creates debris fields, which can disrupt the commercial sector in space. It's also really expensive. You want to be able to drive down the cost of that and do it in maybe a way that has less long -term lasting impacts, right? And so that means increasingly being able to generate those effects from orbit and orbit. You're now seeing general lighting and general salt men stand up publicly and speak at conferences and say, you know, we need offensive capabilities in space. We need space fires, you know, weapons in space.

18:12And they even specifically say non -canetic effects. So things like lasers, powered microwaves, particle beams, just. Just sapping each other in space, basically. And you know, physics will tell us that once we are doing that, the way that you gain a competitive edge is to have more powerful beams, right? And the way you do that is you generate more power. Do they need to be more powerful than the ability? Like once you can fry a satellite, like, why do you need to get more powerful at some point? You can engage over longer distances. Got it, right? How far can these things go in space? Like thousands of miles kind of thing?

18:48Yeah, about a thousand kilometers. So, you know, depending on how much power you're generating and the size of the spacecraft and 10 kilometers up to a thousand kilometers. So, and actually the president signed an executive order on at the time it was called Iron Dome for American Outs, called Golden Dome. So it's sort of this return to space. Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's, it's, it's probably land space, you know, all the love, right? And we should actually get some guidance on what that architecture is going to look like and, you know, kind of the coming months or so. But one of the things that calls out in that executive order is space -based intercept.

19:28And, you know, the history of space -based intercept going back to the 80s was, you would use things like particle beams or lasers in space to shoot down the reentry vehicles from ICBMs, right? So you disable them. You could make nuclear weapons obsolete. A lot of that same technology that was, you know, kind of, it was infeasible in the 80s because we didn't have the launch capability, the, the, you know, directed energy itself was to a mature back then. If you shrink some of that down, you know, by the kind of magnitude by a factor of 10, you know, it could be viable in the near -term as I can ASAP and then in the satellite capability.

20:06Right? So you can talk about these things now. The military is starting to speak publicly about them. It becomes a no -brainer that you would want a nuclear power source to scale this technology up. And actually, again, if you look back at the history of it in the 80s, the vision was always kind of space reactors would be used to power these systems because if you look at a solar -powered system, how does mass scale against kilowatts of power generated? It's like a linear relationship with a solar -powered system. It's sub -linear with nuclear. So, you know, as you get to like around 175 to 100 kilowatts or so, you end up with a spacecraft that's much more mass - and efficient, or much more mass -efficient than doing it with solar.

20:48We just start to get huge solar panels, basically. Yeah. The International Space Station is about 100 kilowatts, and it's like the size of a football field. Wow. Yeah. And we had to construct it on orbit, right? Can you talk a little bit about the technology of, like, small modular reactors? Just like, you know, this is obviously what you're building, but can you give us a little bit of the context on what this size, you know, the size of power delivery is, right? Or if the technology going into them, what needs to happen from here to make this sort of feasible, you know, repeatedly? Yeah. Maybe I'll take it back to the history again.

21:21So, one thing I mentioned in the beginning is, so you'll hear different definitions from different people on what is a small modular reactor. Yeah, maybe we'll just kind of say, sub 100, 100 megawatts in below is an SMR. 100 megawatts in below. Yeah. And, you know, what we're doing, we like to refer to it as a microreactor, which, again, there's different definitions from different people. Some people will say, like, below 20 megawatts is a microreactor. Some people will say below 10 megawatts is a microreactor. You know, you're seeing people develop it, you know, single -digit megawatts now. We're actually a kilowatt scale system, so targeting between 200 and 300 kilowatts, which is the equivalent of that, you know, 100, the football field of solar panels got you 100 kilowatts.

22:01Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nuclear energy is one of the most power dense forms of energy that, you know, known to man, right, that we have available to us. And this thing's how big, just to put it in contrast to the football field. You could fit it on a truck bed, truck at 18 -wheeler truck bed. So about the size of a sedan. So it's a truck bed versus two to three football fields of solar. Yeah. For space, we would actually be developing something even smaller than that. Solar is something like 60 acres of land per megawatt of fiber cocker, actually. So microreactor, you could do something similar in like an acre to a half an acre.

22:35You know, going back to the original question on like SMRs. So, you know, the basic idea is, in order to drive down the cost of electricity and make it competitive, you know, what we did in sort of the first arc of like grid scale deployment of nuclear was we just made these plants bigger and bigger. Right. So the AP 1000 is a gigawatts scale plant. What's kind of plagued the industry? And so this sort of goes back to like what killed nuclear originally, I would argue that, you know, we had like a multi -decade loss of demand, which really killed a lot of the workforce. And, you know, we lost the ability to do these things.

23:12And we've never had enough demand sense to do things in quick enough succession that like you can cultivate the workforce needed to do them efficiently. So you get cost overruns, construction, you know, takes two to three times as long as, you know, it's originally planned to be. If you look at grid scale nuclear, like financing costs and the construction costs end up being like the vast majority of the total plant costs, right. So as you're selling electricity, like really what you're doing is paying up, paying down that upfront capex. So how do you solve this problem? One idea is you make these systems much smaller such that they can just be fabricated in a factory and then sent out to the site with minimal site prep and construction, right.

23:52So that's generally the idea around SMRs, I would say, with the larger SMRs, it turns out that they're generally not all that different than like you're still in up doing a construction project. And so microreactors are sort of a recognition, but no, let's make them even smaller, such that they can be truly factory -manufacturable like the way we make cars, right. There are some people that, you know, would maybe make the claim that making reactors in that way is actually going to make them cost competitive against grid scale nuclear. It's really heavily dependent on the fuel cycle because in a grid scale reactor, the fuel cost is like a single digit percentage of the total plant cost.

24:28In a microreactor, it's probably more like 40 to 50 % of the total cost. So, you know, we're not really sold. Us at Antares, we're not really sold on, you know, you can do microreactors at like 10 cents a kilowatt hour anytime soon. But what we're convicted about is like, there's actually a very, very large market for expensive power to do things that, you know, you can only do with nuclear, right. And then there's all these factors where it's valuable that are not just about being cheap. Yeah, resilience. Exactly. And that's really what we've chosen to focus on as a business. Like nuclear really struggles to compete in commodity markets, right.

25:04And also, you know, I tend to think this is just, you know, my philosophy, but like spending a lot of capital to develop a product then to turn around and as a commodity is just not really an exciting business anyways, right. So what we've done is we've really tried to say, you know, what are the use cases? What are the opportunities where there's some mission effect, some outcome that's really valuable, you know, to the end pair, and you can only do it with nuclear, right. And you will pay premium to have that. And that's really been our focus and, you know, commercial applications, you know, we're a do use company, there's commercial applications, but in the near term, we're really excited about military and DOD nuclear, both Earth and space, you know, what we found by and large when we were getting started is a lot of the mission critical facilities or critical assets on our military installations are actually kilowatt scale.