The Reactor Renaissance, with Jordan Bramble (CEO of Antares)

0:00To achieve criticality, essentially one year's time, by July 4th, 2026. We were the first on June 4th, so 30 days ahead of the deadline. But when the executive orders first came out, people kind of scoffed at it. They said that it couldn't be done. Advanced nuclear and nuclear generally stagnated in the U.S. in the 1970s. And in the Clinton administration, we actually decommissioned many nuclear facilities, wound down a lot of the workforce. We've atrophied. It's been exceptionally hard even to get to criticality, right, for decades. So a commercially viable power conversion system is in many ways more complicated than the reactor itself.

0:32This is an incredibly hard task, an insanely impactful achievement that deserves celebration in the Oval Office, especially given how long it's been since we've done it. We still have plenty of hard work ahead of us, too. When you're 80 and you're sitting with your grandkids telling them the story of Antares, what are you going to be most proud of?

0:55Jordan? Great to be here. Pleasure to be here with you. So you were in the Oval Office just a few days ago with President Trump. That's right. And a few of your colleagues in the nuclear startup scene. Tell me about that. Like what happened? Why were you guys there? And what was the significance of that day? So the event was really held to commemorate sort of the culmination of the DOE's reactor pilot program. So there were four companies, us included, that turned on reactors by July 4th, America's 250th birthday. And the impetus of this program that the Department of Energy held was in response to an executive order signed by the president in May of last year.

1:40And so it called for at least three reactors to achieve criticality, which was essentially one year's time. right on by by July 4th, 2026. It was, you know, I think it's there were four companies, right, not just three. I think it's viewed as a major win for the country for this administration. Because when the executive orders first came out, this was actually one of the things people most latched on to. And I think in many ways, we're the most skeptical or most negative about people kind of stopped at it. They said that it couldn't be done. You know, we were the first on June 4th, So 30 days ahead of the deadline.

2:18But, you know, you kind of had a cadence of other companies that followed after that. And that kind of shows that it's not a fluke, right? We can do these things in this country. So, you know, there's really an opportunity to commemorate that. And, you know, if I think back when the program first came out, I always sort of viewed the culmination of this as we would be in the Oval Office. And I joked about it a few times. And I think the DOE was very into this idea, especially it's a huge win for them, right? I mean, they've put a lot of their staffing and resourcing and prioritization into this, and they did it.

2:48So, you know, it's really an opportunity to celebrate. It's like when you win the Super Bowl, you know, you go to the White House and meet the president. Yeah, or you win the NBA championships. Exactly. Go Knicks. So I do have to ask, like, just take a step back. Criticality, what does that mean? Yeah. So the moment of criticality is the reactor is achieved a self-sustaining fission reaction, meaning the number of neutrons being generated by fission events is equal to the neutrons leaving the reactor, right? So you have a stable neutron population. And the ability to do that in a nuclear reactor is dependent on your control scheme, right?

3:28And our control system was developed entirely in-house. and this is really the first opportunity to test it in a nuclear setting. So it's almost like, maybe to describe it in a non-technical way, it's like the birth of the reactor, right? And from there, you scale power up. That produces heat or a rising neutron population results in heat inside of the core. You transport that heat out of the core and then turn it into electricity, right? And so that's really what comes next for us post-criticality is we'll be producing electricity, full-scale commercial product at Idaho National Lab, same facility with the same lot of fuel.

4:09We'll be doing that in 2027. And what that means for our customers, right? Our customers will receive their first units in 2028. Those will be on military installations. There's going to be operational heritage behind this technology, right? They're not receiving first-of-a-kind or developmental systems because we're using the venture capital that we raised to go test that hardware. Right. So criticality does not mean that you're producing electricity. Not at this time. The reactor has turned on. Yep. How challenging is that point? Because if my facts are right, you were the first reactor of your kind to go critical in like the last 40 years, something like that?

4:49I've heard people say somewhere between 40 and 50 years. I've heard both. The press really said 40 years. Right. We wanted to be a conservative on it. It might really be 50 years. Okay. Okay. But yeah, I mean, that's a pretty stark number. Like, what does that mean? How hard is this? You know, I think in many ways, so, you know, advanced nuclear and nuclear generally stagnated in the US in the 1970s. And in the 90s, at the end of the Cold War, in the Clinton administration, we actually decommissioned many nuclear facilities, wound down a lot of the workforce. And so we've atrophied, right? And it's been exceptionally hard even to get to criticality, right, for decades with new reactor designs.

5:33And, you know, that was the thing, I think, above all else that we've just proven out that you can go through a regulatory process, you can qualify hardware under a quality program, you can prove both through test qualification, but also through analysis that there's a fundamental safety basis that ensures safety of these systems. We were able to fabricate our fuel in less than a year, right, with a new supply chain to do that, right? This Triso fuel spec that we've used was really something that was just stood up the same time we were starting in Terries. Right. And this was the first fuel that that fuel line's produced that's actually been visioned.

6:11So, you know, all of those things are hard. I mean, excruciatingly hard, right? Especially to do it on this timeline. I think we tripled in headcount as a company in this time period. We, I mean, we have learned so much and grown so much as an organization, right? Like a DOE operational readiness review. We did that for the first time. And I think there's something really powerful and important about doing this in an incremental and iterative way. where you start with a low-power system like this, take all the learning from that, and then go use that to move even faster on the next iteration and then move even faster to customer deployments.

6:53That's, I think, what's really benefited us. It's an opportunity to really exercise and debug our entire supply chain. So for our suppliers, we know what their lead times really are versus the lead times that we were quoted. We know what they're doing to improve those. these are all things that you know in other industries I think in many ways we take for granted but you know before now we really never had the opportunity to go do this in the advanced nuclear sector so it gives us immense confidence in what we're going to do for the next iteration after this at the same time what I would say is

7:32you know a commercially viable power conversion system is in many ways more complicated than the reactor itself. So two things can be true at the same time, right? This is an incredibly hard task, an insanely impactful achievement that deserved celebration in the Oval Office, especially given how long it's been since we've done it. But we still have plenty of hard work ahead of us too. By the way, I think President Trump called you guys the greatest in the world. Did that feel premature? Or do you feel that that's... Is that a leading question? What do you think? Do you think it's premature? I'm not going to answer that question.

8:07Look, I've got a lot to learn. I mean, I think we as a company have a lot to learn. There's a lot of growth ahead of us. Same thing, right? It's a, I mean, the achievements of the last 60 days that we at Interes have made and, and others have made too, by the way. And by the way, outside of the government, the national lab or outside of industry, right? The national labs, the DOE, extraordinary accomplishments, but we still have a long ways to go. And I think our humility in that, you know, we try to always maintain a beginner's mindset in everything that we do. That's how you maintain the highest rate of learning possible.

8:44Sure. Well, I think that's going to propel us forward. Let's not be humble for a second, right? Okay. So you just announced a$470 million funding round. 100 million of that is debt. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Congratulations. Thank you. I think that brings your total capital raised over the last few years to about$600 million. More than$600 million at this point. More than$600 million. So what is that going to enable you to do? So something that makes us really special is in addition to the private capital that we're making, we generate revenue, right? And so we've been very kind of focused, laser focused on our first market is defense and space.

9:17So we have defense contracts. You know, fall goes well and continues to go as planned. By the end of this year, we'll have more than a billion dollars in defense contracts. and I think that's exceptionally rare for a nuclear company. It's rare for defense companies, period, that are three years old, right? And so when you put together the revenue that we're generating, right, we have customers that are sharing in the risk and development of this technology because it's so important to their mission. So when you put that together with the private capital, which by the way, aligns incentives with our customers, we're investing at exceeding a one-to-one rate with the taxpayer.

9:53When you put those two things together, we're going to put well over a billion dollars to work to get this technology into commercial scale. So maybe to stick with this like non-humility train. Yeah. So how did you get to criticality first before everyone else? I think there were a lot of decisions that we made that I think it's hard to just point to one. I think it's overdetermined in a sense, but culture is a big part of it. So one, we focused on being first. That was really important to us. We chose a fuel spec that is being produced right now. So the Triso that we used was originally developed for Project Pele, which is a DOW-funded program out of Strategic Capabilities Office.

10:38And so we were able to get our fuel done well before we needed it. When the pilot program was announced, we already had a$40 million strategic partnership with Idaho National Lab where we were developing our own test facility. And so we invested several million dollars of our own money into a DOE facility to turn it into the Antares testbed. What that meant for us was we didn't have to spend a bunch of time on these kind of civil works projects, which, by the way, these are things we do every day in this country. That's not like the first order bit. We got to just stay focused on the reactor, on the safety basis, the regulatory case, the safety basis would support.

11:16And that, by the way, was the next thing that I think we took very seriously. For us, all regulation is downstream of safety. Safety can be thought of as an engineering discipline. And so we integrated that tightly into the design process itself. All of our requirements sort of flowed down in a simple way from, you know, what does it mean to be safe? And once we had that in place, it made it really easy for us to just get the regulator bought into the design process itself. So we included them in our design reviews before we ever submitted anything formal to them. And I think that kind of working cadence, that rapport that we built, also just simplified the process a lot.

11:54I think also using Triso as a fuel form, the safety is concentrated in the fuel itself at the particle level. If you can prove through physics that you can keep the fuel below 1600 C, it's already proven that this fuel is safe, as long as it's met the manufacturing spec. And so that means you can delete these redundant active safety systems. You don't need a large containment. And that, plus some of the other decisions we've made, really drove down the number of unique parts in the design. And that just really simplified the process.

12:31Maybe the less special stuff that counts for a lot, a lot of nights and weekends, a lot of 80-hour weeks. I actually, I'm going to take my first days off a couple weeks from now in years. Okay, where are you going? So my wife has another baby on the way. We're going to do a babymoon. So we're going to go to Cabo for a couple of days. OK, amazing. But yeah, there's no substitute for hard work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to actually go back to a past life of yours for a second. You worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where historically sort of where nuclear plant projects go to die.

13:09And maybe that's not the right characterization. But what I really mean to say is like, yeah, the question I want to ask is like, since then, how is the perspective around nuclear evolved from the government, from the government's perspective? Yeah. So it's funny, you know, I'm in a role now, like the way my role as CEO has evolved, probably now meet with OMB several times a month. I mean, before we were in the Oval Office, we were in the Eisenhower Building meeting with OMB to discuss space nuclear. And the way that I think of OMB is it's probably one of the least appreciated, most powerful organizations in Washington.

13:54So that's really the organization that is responsible for executing the president's agenda from within the White House. And that's both programmatically and budgetarily. And so it's typically staffed with people who are deeply technical, but also have policy chops, right? And I think that's, by the way, something in our culture that I think we do really well here at Interis is bridge both of those worlds exceptionally well. And I think working in OMB, you know, the organization that I was in, the team that I was on is effectively what is now Doge, right? So Doge is part of OMB. So you get a lot of breadth and technical depth at the same time.

14:33And you're sort of forced to build that in a very, very short amount of time.

14:41So, you know, what I see from OMB, I mean, we meet with the NASA examiners, we meet with the defense examiners. you know, they're taking their cues from what the National Security Council and what OSTP, Office of Science and Technology Policy, what they're illuminating as priorities. And so what's really changed in this administration, space nuclear power systems are a top R &D priority for the country as set by OSTP. In response to these executive orders, nuclear energy, both for resilience and for kind of winning this AI race is also a priority. And so you see this showing up maybe much more substantially than you did in years prior in OMB's list of priorities and the things that they're working on.

15:26So, okay. So let's take a look at your tech for a second. So walk me through your specific... So you build micro reactors. Right. Right. What does that mean? And how does that fit into sort of the landscape of reactor technology that's out there. So all the way to kind of SMRs to like gigawatt scale plants. Right. So correct. We're a micro reactor developer. So think anywhere from kilowatts to low number of megawatts. I think the DOE will define this as kind of 20 megawatts and below as a micro reactor. Now we would say there's a huge difference even between a one megawatt reactor and a 20 megawatt reactor.

16:06Right. But, you know, the spirit of all of this technology at micro reactor scale is really about being able to produce them in factories and being able to ensure passive safety features, right? And this is also, this focus on micro reactors in the U.S. is also what's led to the NRC creating Part 57, which is a licensing pathway for kind of low consequence, low source term reactors, where, you know, the safety or risk calculus is just entirely different than what you have from a grid-scale reactor. Therefore, we should be able to operate them autonomously or license them in fleets, do things that will drive down the OPEX in ways that you just can't do with the larger power plants.

16:47And what that really unlocks, and I think is very different about the micro-reactor segment, and one of the reasons why we work on it, is before the term micro-reactor existed, they used to call them special-purpose reactors. So they typically have some special purpose other than just producing the cheapest electricity possible, right? In our case, what we're focused on at Antares is what we call strategic energy. And, you know, that's really using the characteristics of nuclear power to enable mission effects for the country that would otherwise be impossible, right? So national security related.

17:22So what we're doing on Earth, terrestrially, that's where we'll deploy first. Our first use case for the Air Force is focused on powering a cyber warfare center, right? So these are assets that need to be 24-7, 365. These are in remote locations, I assume, remote austere locations. Yeah, we're looking at sites that are not always, right? Actually, most of the first use cases are here in the continental US. And that's because those are the easiest to deploy to start, right? You want to prove out the technology in the places where it's easiest. And then certainly where you can get some of the most value is like the north slip of Alaska to power our North Warning radar sites or islands in the Pacific that perform a missile defense function.

18:03You know, this is the, I mean, we will have Golden Dome assets, right, along the coastal US, along the southern border, in the north slope of Alaska that are going to be nuclear powered by micro reactors. I feel very confident saying that because, you know, if you just look at the mission calculus of if you war game it all out, right, if you don't have 24-7, 365 power, If you have an adversary that's capable of disrupting your fossil fuel supply chains, that's capable of disrupting the civilian grid, that's a huge vulnerability in the architecture, right? So you need to bake in resilience from the very beginning.

18:38But we're also going to focus on space power. And so through nuclear power in space, we will be able to power high-powered assets, whether those are directed energy systems or much more powerful EW systems, or even taking existing capabilities but moving them up to higher orbits where they're safer and the cost to take them out is much higher. Now that all sounds like military use cases. Are there any space-based civilian use cases? I mean, considering the Artemis missions coming up. Great question. So NASA has the SR-1 Freedom Mission, which is a nuclear-powered and propelled spacecraft to Mars to perform a science mission.

19:22So solar efficiency declines. It's one over R squared, right? So there's an exponential relationship between distance and solar efficiency. In other words, solar panels would have to grow exponentially for every unit that you move distance-wise. And so this makes solar, like high-powered solar applications, increasingly less feasible as you get further from the sun. So imagine, you know, we wanted to send a mission to the icy moons of Jupiter to look for extraterrestrial life under the surface of Europa. You need nuclear power to do that, to generate enough power to do so. Most of our deep space missions, like New Horizons, those are fly-by missions, right, where we fly by once.

20:00We don't actually have the power or the Delta V to go into orbit around these celestial bodies and do long-term imaging, long-term mapping, things that would be incredibly valuable. This NASA has also announced the desire to build a moon base and stay there permanently. if we're going to have human habitation on other celestial bodies, if we are going to have sustained and scaled industrial activity in space, whether that's propellant production or, you know, in-space manufacturing, other kinds of resource utilization, the combination of power density, low sustainment tail, and the ability to operate without view factor to the sun just tells you that, like, anything life-supporting, you need nuclear power to do it in space.

20:45So we think those applications will come a bit later. You know, it'll be military and science applications. And then eventually the commercial economy in space will really scale. And we want to be there for it. Right. Now, one thing we didn't talk about, just to go back to your fuel choice, TRISO. Yeah. Fuel availability is a big issue when it comes to, I mean, really, I mean, not just TRISO, but in general, amongst the reactor startup, the nuclear reactor startups. How are you thinking about fuel availability and the supply chain risk? Well, we think about it a lot. I'd separate it into two components.

21:24So one is the feedstock itself. So enriched U-235, typically in U-308 form or uranium hexafluoride, so as a gas. That's historically where the bottleneck has, you know, sort of the first bottleneck in the supply chain. now what's changed in the last few months is the DOE has put 2.7 billion dollars to work funding multiple enrichers to scale up so centrist uranko general matter and i think urano is the fourth um we've publicly announced an agreement with uranko let's just say we've done multiple enrichment uh agreements that we think will start to come online uh depending on the provider between 2027 and 2031.

22:09So HALU is like imminently here. Now, here's the other thing that I think is a unique advantage that we have. All of our first deployments, our first 20 reactors are all going to be military focused. Federal government has a stockpile of HALU today that is enough for us to build hundreds of reactors, by the way, that they will allocate on an as-needed basis. Right. And so as we're deploying in 2028, means we're going to need material in 27 or end of this year, we're already working on those agreements with the federal government now. And so we'll have all of the halo that we need to bridge that gap.

22:45We view that as a competitive advantage, right? We're able to make more performant, more economical reactors with fuel that we have that's not yet commercially available. And then we'll be able to scale commercially as that fuel is commercially available, right? On the Triso piece, so the BWXT Triso line was stood up, was capitalized under Project Pele. I don't know if I can comment on the amount that they're making per year, but for, let's call it the next few years, they're able to satisfy our needs. We also have made 9KGU as a test batch with Standard Nuclear. They have now scaled to their third facility that's DOE authorized.

23:23So excited to potentially work with them as a partner. And BWXT has publicly announced they're working towards a much more scaled footprint for triso fabrication in Wyoming. So we're tracking all of these things. We've got close relationships with all of these fabricators. They can definitely scale up to meet their needs. At the same time, we're partnering with National Labs and other companies to develop the Antares Triso spec and the manufacturing process for it so that if we ever had to bring this in-house, we would be able to. And in fact, even if we're relying on a scaled commercial supply chain for fuel, we still want to have our own R &D capabilities.

24:01Because one of the things that we believe, that I believe, is I think, you know, the common knock against micro-reactors is the levelized cost of electricity is not competitive with the alternatives or other forms of nuclear. But that's assuming you're putting a micro-reactor to power a home, which I assume you're not. No plans for that. But, you know, even small reactors for like data centers or other industrial power. Right. That is something we would look at. And, you know, I believe these tiny micro reactors can be way more economical than most people think. And, you know, the reason for that is in the early 2030s, we'll have uranium nitride triso, right?

24:34It'll be 40 % more cost effective and more uranium dense than the uranium oxycarbide triso that's available today. we can change some of the materials in our core, you know, as we master refractories and other things that are more transparent to neutrons. We also improve the neutron economy. These tiny reactors with HALU, eventually you'll be able to get them to 12, 15, 16 plus years of operating without the need to refuel. And the economics look really incredible when you do that, especially, you know, even if you believe relatively conservative estimates for how cheap triso fabrication can get at scale.

25:12We think those economics can get quite attractive, not just for the military, but commercially as well. So not to diminish the challenges, but it sounds like fuel is not necessarily your main concern right now. I think it's moving in the right direction. Right. You know, a year ago, two years ago, when we would try to raise capital, I think this is what most of capital markets saw as maybe one of Antares' biggest risks, if not the biggest risk. And, you know, keep in mind, that was a time where the DOE had this stockpile of HALU, but they were not allocating it. Yeah. You know, we're out of that era now.

25:49Yeah. Right. We have fuel, right? We have fuel to build multiple reactors. Yeah. So right now, what I'm focused on is just getting these reactors built and proving out the technology, first and foremost. So you expect your target is electricity in 2027. Yes. What causes that timeline to slip? What kind of keeps you up at night? Well, I think about what do we have to do to make sure it doesn't slip? So to make electricity, you need a power conversion system. That's what we're focused on. So if you look over there, I know we're on camera, so maybe we won't look. Let's just look. That's our primary heat exchanger vessel.

26:27So that sits on top of the core. Heapes go in the bottom. We flow gaseous nitrogen through a tube and fin heat exchanger. There's an outlet at the top, and then it goes over there, skid-mounted, kind of connex container size. We're building our power conversion system as we speak. So you can see the waste heat exchangers, the fans have all been stood up. We're completing some rotor dynamics and turbo machinery testing right now. It's a nitrogen-closed Brayton cycle. So we're going to build and test it here, targeting end of October, first week of November, same time my baby's being born, by the way, we'll be producing electricity here in Torrance.

27:04And then there'll probably be some iterations from there before it goes into a reactor in Idaho. We test it in a reactor before it ever goes to a customer site, right? So that's really the next big test campaign that we need to get through. So now map that timeline against the regulatory side. I know it's unique for you because you're serving the military and there's sort of, for lack of a better word, shortcuts to field reactive technology. But just maybe walk me through what you have left to do on the regulatory side to also be able to... So there's a technical side of it, but how much of the risk is also regulatory?

27:42Well, this was something that I think our work on the pilot program has really developed our confidence, our know-how. Before we did this, the DOE 1271 licensing standard and its precursor, DOE 1189, had never been used by a private company to test the new reactor. Now we have mastery of that standard. We still have a lot to learn, but we have kind of seen the MVP of that process end to end. And that same team, that same regulatory standard is informing what the Army is going to do with their Janus program, right? It is a viable pathway for the Air Force's ANPI, Advanced Nuclear Power Initiative program.

28:30We also now have policy that's in the works for DOE authorizations to be transferable through reciprocity to NRC. And so, you know, what we'd want to do now is the subsequent test reactor at INL. And again, the facility that we stood up to test our first reactor is now a nuclear facility. So like that risk is taken off the table. It's now really about thermomechanical analysis, showing that our reactor is safe through the range of transient and steady state scenarios. We've sized all of our materials correctly for creep life. And, you know, we don't just want to size and design this stuff for the demo test campaign, but really for the commercial operating life, right?

29:10And so, you know, we don't want to just run these reactors at INL for a couple days. We want to run for six months straight, maybe more, right? Really, the only thing bounding us is we also have to shift focus to get these reactors onto military sites too, right? So that's really what's going to drive it. We, you know, are going to take a lot of the material that we produce for Mark Zero, iterate and increment for Mark One. Mark One's the electricity producing reactor. We'll have the preliminary documented safety analysis in here in the next few months. So depending on when this podcast is going to air, it might be weeks away from submitting it.

29:49To me, the PDSA is really the big, depending on how you structure your regulatory engagement, that's kind of the tallest hill to climb. If you do that in the right way, you can make the final documented safety analysis much easier. And then it's all readiness operations procedures and like our fueling procedures. We just tested all of that, developed the tooling to do it for this first reactor. So a lot of that's going to carry over, right? So, okay. So 27, you hit the timeline, you're producing electricity, right? We're sitting in a 300 ,000 square foot facility right now. Yes. What is the next 10 reactor builds look like?

30:28And talk to me about sort of the production line that you're building here. Well, you're sitting in the assembly line right now. So the Mark one reactor in 27, in 27, sorry, uh, we'll get assembled here and it'll go out that door. It'll truck out that door and get sent up to Idaho. Um, and you know, getting to 10 reactors a year is roughly once at one a month. Right. Um, I feel like we've largely already proven that rate, even just for Mark zero. Uh, and we'll do that again for Mark one. Um, You know, we can stand up multiple assembly lines where we can eventually get assembly of these systems down to days, right?

31:06So somewhere between 30 to 50 a year of production, we can do right here. The vision for this facility is that we will do all the non-nuclear components here. So, you know, at all of our deployment sites, those are going to be licensed nuclear facilities, right? That's just the way the regulatory standard works. So we'll fuel and defuel there. we deploy multiple reactors on the same site. So we'll be able to reuse a lot of that standard equipment across multiple reactors, really spreading out a lot of the fixed costs. And that's really the model. Can you share, by the way, 30 to 50 reactors? What is that worth revenue-wise for you?

31:42Scale? Give me a sense of scale. Yeah. We would be doing more than a billion dollars a year. And I think quite a bit more than that. Got it. So the other thing that really enables that is the speed of component production. So the other thing you see over there, that construction site, that's a clean room with a molten sodium loop where we will be able to fill and seal heat pipes. So what we've done is, you know, we've really perfected the process techniques and the test techniques for heat pipes at low rate. Now we need to maintain all of that as we scale production where we can produce hundreds and then eventually thousands of these a year.

32:16Sure. Right. And that's where we're going to be able to do that. So fabricating the graphite, machining the graphite is really about just scaling the machine tools. So we've got a lot on order right now. You see our existing graphite machining capability behind you over there. That's all going to go and close and have its own filtration system. So those are kind of the two areas of the supply chain that I would say most predict production rate. Right. The other area right now that's more of a lead time or procurement challenge is nuclear instrumentation. So the electronics equipment for the reactor we have.

32:56You know, we'll be able to share more on this in the coming months ahead, but we have a few strategies that we're investing in that will both drastically compress lead times and increase the rate that we're able to do things like neutron detectors, for example. and who knows maybe that even turns into a business unit where we're monetizing our supply chain because universities need neutron detectors nuclear facilities need neutron detectors you know these things shouldn't have to be many millions of dollars they should be like tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars so uh there i want to talk about the market again for a second so you're you're focused on government you have the space angle there is another nuclear startup out there who's focused primarily on data center power production.

33:40How big is that opportunity in your mind? And is that an area that you're spending time on? Or just also just the commercial market in general? I know you mentioned briefly earlier that you're looking into one use case, but maybe talk to me about the data center market as well. Yeah. You know, I think purely from a top-down viewpoint, if you just look at the power demand and the CapEx investment that's happening, data centers are an extremely attractive market and certainly one that we would have interest in serving. we've chosen to focus on the military as a first customer primarily because we believe it will be the fastest path to market and the military is a customer that's spending billions of dollars now in developing this technology to bring it to market and that's the kind of customer we want to be aligned with right so what you've seen from the data centers right now is you know if you can bring us the power will pay for the electricity.

34:43But this is an area where maybe I'd liken it to like NASA COTS, what that was for SpaceX. You really need a customer that's not just procuring the units, but with you every step of the way through the iterations that ultimately lead to a commercial product, right? Because nobody's first reactor, nobody's second reactor, nobody's third reactor is going to be truly commercially reliable and commercially performant. and you'll have to test these things multiple times over. That's very capital intensive, right? That's not where the data center, the hyperscalers are on this right now, right? They want to buy mature proven systems with operational heritage.

35:21And so what we believe is, you know, we'll emerge from our work with the military with more regulatory expertise than anybody else. Our operators will have more operational reps, right? We'll have a bolstered supply chain. You know, the military is a customer that will invest debt and equity in your supply chain to lower your input costs. Like we get to procure with the DO rating, right, under the Defense Production Act. And, you know, we'll just have more reliability proof points for the technology. And so I think even though our core focus is the military today, I think in the long term, the commercial customers who want mature proven technologies would rather work with us because of the reputation we're building with the military.

36:08Right. So we see that kind of as act two for us. We're really just sort of focused on just mastering this core market right now. And, you know, the reality is like the military market is gigantic in and of itself once this technology is proven. When you get something like this to TRL-7, the opportunities are technology readiness, right, are endless. You know, I hinted kind of on the space power applications. You know, we talked about powering the future of missile defense, powering, you know, our future strategic deterrence, our nuclear weapons enterprise. There's opportunities to build thousands of reactors across installations and other strategic assets.

36:46You know, we're going to have nuclear-powered autonomy one day. subsurface under the sea, both for patrolling undersea cables, deploying undersea sensors, weapons delivery. And so collectively, these use cases represent, I think, many, many billions of dollars of revenue potential. We just need to mature this technology. And we don't even see ourselves just stopping at the reactors, right? Like if we're powering high-powered payloads in space, in many cases, we want to build the payload too. We want to be the systems integrator. And so So all of those things just lead to a deeper and deeper relationship with the customer where you can play a bigger, bigger role in solving their problems.

37:24So I want to get back to this missile defense nuclear deterrence piece in just a second. But before I do that, there's something that's been on my mind since all four companies hit criticality. It's interesting to me that all four companies reach criticality within basically a month of each other. I mean, tell me, how should I think about that? Because it's almost like coincidental. It's like, and I think one company got, reached it, like, I think right on the deadline. I think it was like July 4th was sort of the quote unquote deadline. And it was like up to deadline. So, I mean, what does that, I mean, what does that, what does that tell you?

38:08Well, there's a lot one could say on this. You know, I think in the end, none of us were hardware constrained. and I think the reality is none of us were actually regulatory constrained either I think in the end what it came down to for all of us was operational readiness do you have the plans, procedures, the people, the training in place to actually go run a nuclear facility and have you completed a DOE audit to do so and so I think in some sense I mean, we turned on first. If you look at our regulatory approvals, we were first every step of the way. So every regulatory milestone, we led by kind of somewhere between a two week and a month lead.

38:57And that was sort of the lead that we had through the entire process. Like we kind of came out of the gate with that. But I think in the end for us, it was like, we actually built the reactor, we integrated everything. We spent a number of days, almost a week troubleshooting electromagnetic interference between the control system and some of our sensors. Yeah. That was a tough nut to crack. Yeah. We actually delayed readiness by a week to take some more time to get ready, to prepare our own people. Sure. Like to do kind of internal training. Yeah. And I think that's really what drove the timeline.

39:31So I think all of these things are surmountable. You know, what that tells you is we can constitute these supply chains at the very least for micro reactors. We can knock out these regulatory hurdles. And there are multiple venture-backed companies that have shown that they can implement Department of Energy management programs to operate nuclear facilities. Yeah. So I want you to put on an investor hat on for a second. Yeah. I mean, you're an operator, I understand. But let's just say you are an investor looking at this landscape right now. Totally. How do you distinguish whether a company has the right market, has sort of the right pathway, versus the one that doesn't?

40:12So I'm clearly a biased person to ask this question. I know, but I just want to get your perspective. You know what path I believe in. If I were an investor, and in some sense I am, right? I'm a capital allocator. Sure. So I am an investor. Sure. You know, what you hit on with the DOE's pilot program is kind of the technical component, the product aspect of it. And I think what's true for all of the companies is the hardware feeds, the regulatory progress is impressive for everybody.

40:42Now, there are ways that one could turn on a reactor by July 4th that are totally divorced from what their commercial product will ultimately be. and so I think alignment between what a company did with the pilot program and their actual commercial product is a predictor of how much time they still have ahead of them to bring their technology to market. I think we probably could have turned on a month faster if we made kind of some more trade-offs in that regard. We chose not to, right, because this is really about not just this reactor, but enabling the test bed and the supply chain and the component qualification so that we can move fast on this next subsequent reactor as well, right?

41:29So that's the technical component. Perhaps one could think about maybe a Venn diagram or like a two-by-two of who has achieved criticality, who's turned these reactors on, and who has a real order book. Not MOUs, not LOIs, but who's positioned to generate hundreds of millions in contract value to go deploy these reactors in a reasonable time frame, right? In the years ahead. So that's how we've architected our business. I think the intersection of the Venn diagram, we're probably the only company in that right now. Right. Maybe we will be for some time. Right. You know, I think there will be more.

42:11but I guess the other lens you could take as an investor is there were 11 companies at the start of this program. There were four that made it past the deadline and the DOE had a goal of three. So, you know, we're already seeing these roadmaps, these technical programs, you know, a small number of companies is breaking ahead of the pack. And I think what's interesting about the assortment of companies is we all sort of have our different market focuses, right? We're very focused on defense to start. Some are focused on data centers. I think that makes capital markets a lot more constructive. Because it really starts to become a question of, okay, the market traction's real, the technical traction's real for some subset of these companies.

42:59Which market do you want to be in first? Sure, sure. And data center market could be massive. military markets large and it's here now. Yeah. Two questions as we wrap here. Yeah. If you, so first, if you had to, if you could go back in time to the start of the entire story, what would you do differently? If anything? Oh man. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of things. I mean, And I think, you know, the funny thing about startups is you can get a lot of things wrong as long as you get the few very important things right. Yeah, well said. You know, life is kind of like this too, actually, when you really think about it.

43:44Like, you can get a lot wrong in your life as long as you like marry the right person. Sure. Right? Like, raise your kids the right way. Like, everything else you can take care of. Yeah. And I think that's what we've done really well with Antares is we have gotten the important things really right. And, you know, we bet on them really before they were non-consensus. I mean, when we started in 23, nuclear as a whole was non-consensus. The kind of laser focus on the military, frankly, before there was budget, before there were, you know, before there were, you know, fight-palmed programs, right?

44:20You know, we chose to focus on that. So I don't know that there's maybe one thing I would... There's a lot of lessons learned. Yeah. I don't know that there's one thing I would truly do differently. Well, I think you said it right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so when you're 80 and you're sitting with your grandkids, telling them the story of Antares, what are you going to be most proud of? That we have nuclear power in space, powering a space warfighting architecture that's allowed America to kind of maintain the ultimate high ground input in space. Nuclear power is powering science missions beyond one AU from the sun.

45:05Hopefully at that point, we have, at least robotically, we have a sustained science presence on the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, and we've discovered microbial life. I think that would be sort of perfect. That's a big one. I think that would cap my career perfectly and I'd be proud to tell my grandkids what we did to make that possible. Amazing. And my children too, by the way. I think a huge motivator for me is what am I doing every day to ensure that my sons will be proud of me and the work that I've done? I want to set a good example. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, Jordan, thanks so much for being with us.

45:47We're going to have to save of the nuclear deterrence questions I had for you for another day. But congratulations on the funding round and super excited to see the next year of Antares. Thank you, really appreciate it.