Latest / Core Memory / The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth - EP 26 Kurt Terrani

Transcript

The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth - EP 26 Kurt Terrani · Core Memory

0:00
SPEAKER_00: I transitioned to this company called UltraSafe Nuclear in 2021.
0:04
SPEAKER_02: Which is the best name.
0:07
SPEAKER_02: I covered Ilya's startup, SuperSafe Intelligence.
0:11
SPEAKER_02: Don't worry, guys.
0:14
SPEAKER_02: This is really safe.
0:16
SPEAKER_02: So it was UltraSafe Nuclear.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it was a company that was there.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: I thought at the time, I wanted to...
0:28
right level of control for doing what I wanted to do,
0:29
and they had the right level of capital.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: It was primarily backed by, you know, one major investor.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: His name was Richard Hollis Helms.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: He was a patriot, ex-CIA.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Ex-CIA?
0:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this whole story is bananas, man.
0:43
SPEAKER_02: We got an ex-CIA, an Iranian nuclear scientist, a Green Beret...
1:02
SPEAKER_02: All right.
1:03
SPEAKER_02: Well, our guests today are Kurt Tarani and Thomas Hendricks.
1:06
SPEAKER_02: Do you prefer Tommy or Tommy?
1:08
SPEAKER_02: Tommy.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: Tommy.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: Tommy Hendricks.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: So Kurt is the CEO of Standard Nuclear.
1:14
SPEAKER_02: You're a nuclear scientist by trade from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Tommy,
1:21
SPEAKER_02: you are the chairman of Standard Nuclear,
1:24
SPEAKER_02: one of its main investors,
1:26
SPEAKER_02: and you're at Decisive Capital?
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Decisive Point.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: Decisive Point.
1:30
SPEAKER_02: And you're a venture capitalist.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: And a Green Beret.
1:34
SPEAKER_02: In a former life.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: In a former life.
1:36
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:36
SPEAKER_02: And so,
1:37
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:38
SPEAKER_02: a couple weeks ago,
1:39
SPEAKER_02: I went out to Tennessee and went to visit Standard Nuclear,
1:45
SPEAKER_02: which is near Oak Ridge.
1:46
SPEAKER_02: Is it technically in Oak Ridge?
1:48
SPEAKER_00: It's in the city of Oak Ridge and it's in the big Oak Ridge reservation.
1:51
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:51
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:52
And you guys are,
1:52
I just want to set a little context for people of what you guys
1:55
are doing.
1:55
SPEAKER_02: First of all, the company has an incredible story.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: You both have incredible personal stories.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: There's been quite a journey.
2:03
SPEAKER_02: The Wall Street Journal did this very interesting article.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: And then what the company is doing is fascinating,
2:07
SPEAKER_02: making a very safe type of fuel for nuclear reactors.
2:12
SPEAKER_02: In particular,
2:13
there's a focus on these small modular nuclear reactors that I
2:17
think people are
2:18
SPEAKER_02: going to start hearing a lot about.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: It's in this era of...
2:23
SPEAKER_02: AI data centers and,
2:24
SPEAKER_02: and just needing more energy in general,
2:26
SPEAKER_02: this idea that you can,
2:28
SPEAKER_02: you can do nuclear safely and a bit more portably,
2:31
SPEAKER_02: I guess,
2:32
SPEAKER_02: than we have done in the past.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: And so we're going to get into all of that.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: Um, this podcast as ever is sponsored by E1 ventures.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: Um, thank you for your support and, and, um, all right, we'll dig in.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: I did, I do a fair description of standard on point.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: On point.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: All right.
2:51
Kurt,
2:51
I mean,
2:52
I thought,
2:52
let's go back to maybe like- How was your visit?
2:56
SPEAKER_00: What did you think of it?
2:57
SPEAKER_00: You walked into a nuclear fuel fabrication building.
2:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, it was cool.
3:01
So we're going to have an episode about all this where people
3:03
will get to see it.
3:03
SPEAKER_02: I've never been to anything quite like that.
3:05
SPEAKER_02: I've been to Los Alamos labs and things like that,
3:07
SPEAKER_02: but to see supercomputers and I never got to do the nuclear stuff.
3:12
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I was taken away.
3:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm going to describe to people what I saw.
3:16
SPEAKER_02: I'm sure I'm going to mess up some technical things.
3:18
SPEAKER_02: So-
3:19
SPEAKER_02: You can help me.
3:19
SPEAKER_02: But you guys have at the front,
3:21
SPEAKER_02: it's like kind of a standard office building,
3:23
SPEAKER_02: you know,
3:24
SPEAKER_02: an office,
3:24
SPEAKER_02: open office sort of plan.
3:27
And then you go in and then there's just manufacturing
3:31
craziness on the inside.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: And so we got to see this fuel is called Triso.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: which is an acronym that you're going to help me with later.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: But it makes these sort of like, I mean, they're not pellets.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: They are kind of, they're like little.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they call them coated field particles.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: They're sort of the poppy seed size particles.
3:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're small.
3:51
And then what I learned while I was there is that they have
3:54
this coating of these
3:56
SPEAKER_02: different layers around them,
3:57
SPEAKER_02: which is what helps make them safer.
3:59
SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure we'll unpack that.
4:00
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, so I saw you guys...
4:03
manufacturing these,
4:04
these,
4:04
these tiny particles of,
4:06
of what will be nuclear fuel.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: And,
4:09
SPEAKER_02: and so then,
4:10
SPEAKER_02: um,
4:11
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
4:11
it was really fascinating that we got to create some pretty big
4:15
fires in a furnace
4:16
SPEAKER_02: and,
4:17
SPEAKER_02: and,
4:17
SPEAKER_02: uh,
4:17
SPEAKER_02: I saw like all the crazy additive manufacturing and deposition stuff.
4:21
SPEAKER_02: Actually,
4:22
SPEAKER_02: you guys brought,
4:23
SPEAKER_02: um,
4:24
SPEAKER_02: a little core memory logo that we,
4:26
SPEAKER_02: that we made while I was there.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: So, so the one thing with that is that never let that touch your phone.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: Gorilla glass ain't got nothing.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: It'll scratch it.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: What was this made out of it?
4:37
SPEAKER_02: This is super pure silicon carbide.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Which is like you cut everything with silicon carbide.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: The only thing that cuts this is diamond.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: All right.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you told me that.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: I guess I definitely chucked that in my pocket.
4:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, so we had this great day.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
4:50
SPEAKER_02: I spent,
4:50
SPEAKER_02: it was probably like five hours there,
4:52
SPEAKER_02: probably longer than you guys wanted in some ways.
4:54
Um,
4:54
but you were very kind and,
4:56
and,
4:57
um,
4:57
yeah,
4:57
well,
4:57
let's get into the story.
4:58
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
4:59
SPEAKER_02: Um,
4:59
I don't know where to begin because you both have such
5:01
interesting backgrounds and
5:02
SPEAKER_02: the company is fascinating in and of itself.
5:04
Why don't you,
5:05
I mean,
5:05
tell us a little bit about the journey of this company.
5:09
Um,
5:09
cause it's,
5:10
it's,
5:10
it sort of came out of stealth mode just in the last couple of
5:14
months.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: However, it has sort of like a 10 yearish history, I think.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a little history there.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: So as you kindly introduced, I'm a nuclear engineer by training.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: I graduated fish grad school in 2010, went to Oak Ridge National Lab.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm a nuclear fuels nerd, so I wanted to do nuclear fuels.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: And they had a good group there.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: They were working on this specific field, TRISO.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of the hub.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: There's different national labs.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: They're all great.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: They have different specialties.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: TRISO manufacturing was Oak Ridge.
5:46
Now,
5:46
2011,
5:47
something happened in the nuclear industry called Fukushima
5:49
incident.
5:50
So that kind of poured a bucket of cold ice on the big gigawatt
5:57
class reactors,
5:57
large reactors.
5:59
And after that,
6:02
there's been a big push for micro reactors,
6:05
small module reactors.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: The key thing to know,
6:07
SPEAKER_00: okay,
6:09
SPEAKER_00: all these so-called advanced reactors,
6:11
SPEAKER_00: they're all 1950s,
6:12
SPEAKER_00: 60s,
6:12
SPEAKER_00: 70s like designs.
6:14
Like the technology is not,
6:16
they've all been built and demonstrated in the past.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: What's really distinct about them is that everybody,
6:22
SPEAKER_00: every reactor that's under development today is inherently safe.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: Inherently safe.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
6:28
It means you're not relying on Billy pressing the button at the
6:30
right time or the
6:31
SPEAKER_00: pump coming on.
6:32
You're relying on laws of physics,
6:34
gravity,
6:35
natural phenomena,
6:36
natural heat transfer.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: If that goes away, you're in trouble.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: But as long as you have that, you're okay.
6:40
And a big enabler of these advanced reactors has to do with the
6:44
constituents of the
6:44
SPEAKER_00: reactor,
6:45
SPEAKER_00: has to do some with the design of the reactor.
6:47
But when you have a fuel that has silicon carbide coating
6:51
layers that kind of
6:51
SPEAKER_00: retains the fission products and doesn't melt,
6:54
SPEAKER_00: that is a key enabler of these passive designs.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: So we fast forward, you know, there's a few things happening.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: First, a big gigawatt class light water reactors.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: Who wants to pay $20 billion?
7:06
If you're a CFO of a utility,
7:07
do you want to bet the entire balance sheet or half of it?
7:10
SPEAKER_00: You're going to get fired.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to build any of those.
7:12
That's why we only built,
7:13
you know,
7:14
the Vogel plants in a regulated market.
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SPEAKER_00: The rate payer essentially backstop.
7:18
So these are the big things people are used to seeing in photos
7:21
when they think of
7:22
SPEAKER_02: a nuclear reactor.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: And there's a...
7:25
Big cooling towers,
7:26
five-mile emergency planning zone,
7:28
because there's so much there.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: The other thing that happened is there's the demand coming in from remote
7:35
SPEAKER_00: communities,
7:36
SPEAKER_00: but also defense is strongly in there.
7:38
Tommy should touch on what happened to this country over the
7:43
prior conflicts and
7:44
SPEAKER_00: getting energy to the forward operating bases.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: You've got space, which you do a lot in space.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: It turns out when you get to space, you need energy.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: So people are thinking about that, too, and then for propulsion.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: And then in the last like three, four years, this AI comes in.
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SPEAKER_00: It's just the hyperscalers are trying to take all this energy demand.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: So that's why there's an incredible advanced reactor industry out there.
8:06
Incredible with a lot of private capital,
8:08
very serious people doing development.
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SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the advanced reactors,
8:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
8:15
I would say if there's like a rotating dartboard and you're
8:16
just going to list the
8:17
SPEAKER_00: names,
8:17
SPEAKER_00: you throw a dart at it,
8:19
SPEAKER_00: there's 70,
8:20
SPEAKER_00: 80% chance that they're using trisofuel,
8:22
SPEAKER_00: this type of fuel.
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SPEAKER_00: Why are they using it?
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SPEAKER_00: This field has been around for a very long time.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: The technology goes really back.
8:31
It was really kind of codified and understood under a big
8:33
Department of Energy program.
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SPEAKER_00: And that led to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
8:39
SPEAKER_00: which is the regulator in the United States,
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SPEAKER_00: NRC,
8:42
essentially designating it as functional containment that has a
8:46
very specific
8:46
SPEAKER_00: meaning.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: And,
8:48
SPEAKER_00: you know,
8:49
that basically says instead of big concrete rebar dome in the
8:53
pictures that you
8:53
SPEAKER_00: talk about or a big pressure vessel that blew up in Fukushima,
8:57
SPEAKER_00: you've got billions of these small ceramic pressure vessels,
9:00
SPEAKER_00: so you discretize all this.
9:02
And this is why a lot of these advanced reactor developers are
9:06
using this fuel.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: So great, you know, cool story, Kurt.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: That sounds very good.
9:11
But it turns out these reactors,
9:14
like this is like a very modern,
9:16
very advanced mathematics.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Somebody figured out that these reactors don't turn on without fuel.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm being facetious to say.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: So it's Triso, even though it's been around and whatnot,
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And the facility that you saw,
9:28
SPEAKER_00: it's the largest production facility anywhere outside of China,
9:33
SPEAKER_00: but it's still really small,
9:34
SPEAKER_00: right?
9:34
So it needs to come out of PowerPoint land and workshop land
9:37
and actually be
9:38
SPEAKER_00: industrially manufactured.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: So that was my mission and that was my passion.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Seeing kind of this big wave of advanced reactors come in,
9:46
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to come in and actually deliver this fuel in industrial scale.
9:50
I transitioned to this company,
9:52
uh,
9:52
called,
9:53
uh,
9:53
ultra safe nuclear in,
9:55
in,
9:55
in 2021.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: Which is the best name.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: There's, I covered Ilya's, Ilya's startup, super safe intelligence.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: It's just, don't worry guys.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: This is really safe.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: So it was ultra safe nuclear.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: It was a company, you know, that was there.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: I thought at the time,
10:16
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:16
SPEAKER_00: it had the,
10:17
SPEAKER_00: I wanted the right level of control for doing what I wanted to do,
10:20
SPEAKER_00: and they had the right level of capital.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: It was primarily backed by, you know, one major investor.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: His name was Richard Hollis Helms.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: He was a patriot, ex-CIA.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: Ex-CIA.
10:31
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this whole story is bananas, man.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: We got an ex-CIA, an Iranian nuclear scientist, a Green Beret...
10:40
SPEAKER_00: We've got all the different cast of characters that you want.
10:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
10:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: No, Richard was a believer.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: First of all, he was a patriot.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: I really believe that.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: He had invested in other companies.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: He had good resources.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: And he poured a lot of resources.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: He put about $140 million of his money into that company.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: And that company was making fuel,
11:08
SPEAKER_00: which I was making fuel there,
11:09
SPEAKER_00: but it was also making a reactor.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: But wait, it was making another reactor.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: But wait, it was also making a space reactor.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: But come on, let's do some engineering procurement construction.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: So it was really spread.
11:21
It sounds cool to be vertically integrated everywhere,
11:24
but you get a lot of resources.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: No, I saw the list of things.
11:26
Yeah,
11:27
I mean,
11:27
so he wanted to make a reactor for craft in space,
11:30
like a rocket engine.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: Propulsion, nuclear propulsion.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: And then, sorry.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: And then there was the, the fuel, the reactors, that thing.
11:37
SPEAKER_02: And then the,
11:38
SPEAKER_02: I remember,
11:38
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
11:38
SPEAKER_02: the third one was,
11:39
SPEAKER_02: uh,
11:39
SPEAKER_00: they wanted to do like,
11:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
11:40
SPEAKER_00: they wanted to operate their own reactors.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to do engineering procurement construction.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: So there's the whole value chain, right.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, which is, which is a lot.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, Richard unfortunately passed away, uh, in May of 2024, uh,
11:54
a new board came about which i i went on that board and uh you
11:58
know we looked at
11:59
the situation i think the decision was to let's go through a
12:03
supervised structured
12:05
chapter 11 uh restructuring a sale process uh and then and then
12:09
i get a call you
12:11
know this is this is summer of 2024 very tough time it's uh
12:16
it's we can kind of get
12:17
SPEAKER_00: into a little bit you know i didn't get paid no a lot of people
12:20
nobody got paid for eight months and you know everybody's still
12:23
driving to work
12:23
which is in hindsight it's uh it takes some brain computation
12:27
can i can i hit on
12:28
that for one second i mean the this is you know i'm definitely
12:33
not making a lie to
12:33
him it's a crazy story i mean the the wall street journal piece
12:37
when you guys came
12:38
out of stealth mode got into this but yeah so like you said for
12:40
eight months these
12:42
SPEAKER_02: employees
12:43
are coming to this company on faith and not knowing what's
12:47
what's going to
12:47
transpire and i mean and then when i came and met some of the
12:52
employees yeah i mean
12:53
what it was an interesting group of people you could tell it is
12:56
it had this like
12:57
sort of family almost um feel to it for the people who had
13:00
stuck through this but i
13:01
SPEAKER_02: mean that is a that's a
13:04
SPEAKER_02: you know,
13:04
SPEAKER_02: there's high risk technology and then there's nuclear falls into this,
13:08
SPEAKER_02: I feel like into this like quantum computing,
13:10
SPEAKER_02: like some of these aerospace,
13:12
SPEAKER_02: anything where it's just,
13:13
SPEAKER_02: it's like,
13:15
SPEAKER_02: you know,
13:15
SPEAKER_02: this is not a SAS software product where you're like,
13:18
SPEAKER_02: this is probably has a good chance it could work out.
13:20
SPEAKER_02: This is a pretty high risk bet for these people to make.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: It is.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: And,
13:23
SPEAKER_00: and a lot of these folks,
13:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: we worked together like 10,
13:26
SPEAKER_00: 11 years before,
13:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
13:27
I used to imagine nuclear fuels group at the lab and I worked
13:30
with a lot of these
13:30
SPEAKER_00: guys.
13:32
you know,
13:33
whether you call them smart or otherwise,
13:34
they followed me to this new venture.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: And then there was a lot of other new folks that came in.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: You know,
13:40
SPEAKER_00: Ashley,
13:41
SPEAKER_00: like every day we would come in,
13:42
SPEAKER_00: look at each other and say exactly what I told you.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: The wave is coming.
13:47
these reactors don't run without fuel we should make fuel and
13:51
so so we kept
13:52
thinking like this is a valuable asset what we've built and
13:55
what you saw and it's
13:56
like you know but a month goes by the pressure builds up i i
13:59
was single i didn't
14:00
have kids uh uh but you know you've got families you've got
14:04
kids it's really really
14:05
incredible and i'm so incredibly grateful to my team and that's
14:09
why there's you
14:09
SPEAKER_00: know incredible trust there
14:11
And the team is mostly a lot of Oak Ridge National Lab
14:17
scientists,
14:17
employees.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: There is a good deal of that.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: You know,
14:22
the science of making nuclear fuel is esoteric and then
14:26
definitely making triso is
14:27
SPEAKER_00: even more esoteric.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: And you remember I said kind of Oak Ridge has been the hub for that.
14:31
They've been making triso fuel since 1960s in small laboratory
14:35
batches and then
14:36
SPEAKER_00: understanding how to do it better,
14:38
SPEAKER_00: codify it,
14:38
SPEAKER_00: improve it,
14:39
SPEAKER_00: all that stuff.
14:41
can you bring engineers uh you know fresh out of school and
14:44
then they do research
14:45
and figure it out 100 it's going to take them five six seven
14:49
years and it's going
14:50
to take a lot more money whereas you bring folks that have been
14:52
doing it for 20
14:53
years they are very very familiar with it so there was a there
14:55
was a good group out
14:56
of oakridge national lab and you know oakridge national labs
14:59
ornl has been great
15:00
SPEAKER_00: They're there.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Their mission is to, you know, facilitate the industry.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: So great partnership, great support from them.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: And lots of just, you know, fresh, early career folks, highly driven.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: And those folks, like, you know, stalk around too.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: So it's, yeah, it was really incredible.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: So anyways, this is like we're in this...
15:18
SPEAKER_00: It's a very tough position to be in.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: You can't just go through chapter 11 to secure finance and to do that.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Going bankrupt is very expensive, by the way.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: You have to secure a lot of financing and whatnot.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: And when you have a technology like this,
15:32
SPEAKER_00: it's not like,
15:32
SPEAKER_00: oh,
15:33
SPEAKER_00: you have an inventory of potatoes that I can put a value on.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of IP and infrastructure.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: So,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: uh,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: you,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: you have to have essentially a,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: a buyer and,
15:41
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Tommy can get into,
15:42
SPEAKER_00: it's called a stocking horse buyer.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: So I was out there trying to secure somebody who's interested on a,
15:47
SPEAKER_00: on a,
15:48
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Wednesday night in July,
15:49
SPEAKER_00: essentially a year ago,
15:51
SPEAKER_00: I got a call from this guy.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: His name is Tommy.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: He's like, I've researched you.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: I know everything about you and I'm going to buy the field business.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: You want to take it from here?
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Um,
16:02
I mean,
16:02
it was definitely a nonstandard transaction for a VC to
16:05
undertake.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Because the background was,
16:10
SPEAKER_00: we had been investing in national security,
16:12
SPEAKER_00: defense,
16:13
SPEAKER_00: energy,
16:13
SPEAKER_00: infrastructure,
16:14
SPEAKER_00: anything that touched the government,
16:15
SPEAKER_00: highly regulated markets,
16:18
SPEAKER_00: for about the last seven and a half years.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: About four years ago,
16:22
SPEAKER_00: we made our first nuclear investment,
16:23
SPEAKER_00: and it is in one of the advanced reactor companies.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Which one?
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Radiant.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Radiant, yeah, sure.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: And...
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Along the way,
16:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
16:33
we had made that bet when it was just a couple of folks sitting
16:37
at desk saying
16:37
SPEAKER_00: they're gonna build a nuclear reactor.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: And there was always an expectation that the fuel was gonna be there.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: And then as it went on and on and on,
16:45
SPEAKER_00: it became,
16:45
SPEAKER_00: I think,
16:46
SPEAKER_00: more and more clear that maybe that wasn't a good assumption.
16:52
And then I think as we got closer and closer to the point where
16:57
they would start to
16:58
SPEAKER_00: demonstrate the reactor,
16:59
SPEAKER_00: and they've made incredible progress.
17:03
we saw that they could be put in a position where they would
17:07
have to get fuel from
17:08
a competitor um and of course why would any competitor have any
17:13
incentive to move
17:15
them along in their own demonstration licensing process so like
17:18
this is an
17:18
industry-wide problem it wasn't a radiant problem it was
17:21
everyone um so there are
17:23
SPEAKER_02: some people making small modular reactors who
17:26
SPEAKER_02: are trying to make their own fuel?
17:29
SPEAKER_00: In very small batches.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: In very small batches.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: And it's for vertical integration.
17:35
I would say in some cases it's a necessity because they also
17:39
see there's no fuel.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: But this isn't how
17:44
SPEAKER_00: you know, commodity markets function.
17:46
You know,
17:47
a healthy commodity market relies on high volume,
17:50
low cost competition.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: And so,
17:53
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:53
SPEAKER_00: the challenge with these reactors,
17:55
SPEAKER_00: when you take that approach and you're gonna make these small batch,
17:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:59
SPEAKER_00: fuels and you're gonna vertically integrate,
18:01
SPEAKER_00: well,
18:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
18:02
the fuel is a input cost that drives the price on the output
18:07
for the actual energy
18:08
SPEAKER_00: going out of the reactor.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: And so, very high cost fuel is gonna result in very high cost
18:14
electricity and it's you know the reality today that if we
18:18
don't get the cost down
18:20
this this technology will never get commercialized even if they
18:24
work which they all
18:25
will but they have to reach a customer at some point that's
18:29
going to be willing to
18:30
SPEAKER_00: the math gets skewed so um
18:35
SPEAKER_00: You know,
18:35
we made a decision in about January of last year that we were
18:41
gonna incubate a fuel
18:42
SPEAKER_00: company.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: And our logic was we understood the regulatory process and we said,
18:47
SPEAKER_00: well,
18:48
SPEAKER_00: even if it takes a couple of years to get through the licensing process,
18:51
SPEAKER_00: we'll be there when these reactors are hitting commercial viability,
18:55
SPEAKER_00: like post demonstration,
18:56
SPEAKER_00: post licensing.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: And so we could slow roll, you know, that process and build over time.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly,
19:04
SPEAKER_00: as we went down that path,
19:07
SPEAKER_00: I had been told at some point,
19:09
SPEAKER_00: if you can only poach this guy Kurt Turani from Ultrasafe Nuclear,
19:12
SPEAKER_00: he's the guy that knows how to build one of these facilities.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: So I knew all about Kurt and Ultrasafe and what their facility was like.
19:19
We were literally looking at plots of land on the same campus
19:24
down there with them.
19:25
And one day I got a phone call from someone at one of the
19:28
larger nuclear companies and said,
19:31
You know,
19:31
this is a bit outside of our wheelhouse,
19:33
but we've heard about what you're doing.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: It seems credible.
19:37
You know,
19:37
we've gotten word that ultra safe nuclear is going to go into
19:39
bankruptcy.
19:40
Would you be interested in talking to them about buying their
19:42
fuel assets?
19:43
SPEAKER_00: And so we, of course, said yes.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we got involved here.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:47
And so,
19:47
you know,
19:48
we we spent a lot of time at Oak Ridge and with the team.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: And I think what we saw instantly was
19:54
the exquisite asset here wasn't the building or the equipment
19:57
or really even the IP.
20:00
It was that if we let this team disperse and go elsewhere and
20:05
go on their way,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: we'd never be able to reassemble
20:09
SPEAKER_00: the depth of talent and the experience in this very, very niche field.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: And at some level,
20:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
20:16
we we did view this as a critical national security asset that
20:20
we couldn't let go
20:21
SPEAKER_00: away.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:22
SPEAKER_02: OK, there's so much to get into.
20:23
SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
20:25
SPEAKER_02: Why don't we let's explain
20:28
SPEAKER_02: Triso, let's explain why.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: Something you said when I was visiting really struck me.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: You're like,
20:33
SPEAKER_02: and you've talked about it already,
20:34
SPEAKER_02: but you're like,
20:34
SPEAKER_02: look,
20:35
SPEAKER_02: we've known how to do this,
20:36
SPEAKER_02: you know,
20:37
SPEAKER_02: since the 60s.
20:38
SPEAKER_02: And then we sort of forgot everything.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: And you mentioned China in this, that they're making Triso.
20:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, so this is like a technology, it sounds like the Americans
20:48
SPEAKER_02: Is my, is that, is that.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: The whole nuclear era is the dawn of it.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: It was in that,
20:53
SPEAKER_00: in fact,
20:53
SPEAKER_00: it was in K25,
20:55
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:56
SPEAKER_00: in,
20:56
SPEAKER_00: in,
20:56
SPEAKER_00: in the place that,
20:57
SPEAKER_00: that,
20:57
SPEAKER_00: that you were.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the country, this country started all this.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, uh, you know, that, that place that you visited, um,
21:08
That's where the first uranium was enriched for,
21:11
you know,
21:12
purpose of defense back in 43 to 45.
21:15
So Oak Ridge was making fuel back then for the Manhattan
21:19
project that was being
21:20
SPEAKER_02: shepherded in New Mexico.
21:23
yeah so so uh you you watch oppenheimer the movie yeah you've
21:27
got groves general
21:29
groves he goes and buy he goes and gets uh 60 000 acres over
21:33
there okay and you've
21:35
SPEAKER_00: heard of these things k25 y12 x10 these are it's a grid system and it's a
21:39
SPEAKER_00: locational places so
21:41
uh fermi does it does an experiment i think 41 or so where they
21:47
show that you can
21:48
have a chain reaction in chicago in chicago under the
21:51
universities like you know a
21:52
racquetball field or whatever that reactor operates for like a
21:55
very short amount of
21:56
time like a like a second or so and it has like a watt or some
22:00
very small power
22:02
then they're like all right let's build a nuclear reactor that
22:04
runs continuously
22:06
SPEAKER_00: So where did they build that?
22:08
SPEAKER_00: X10, which is now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Next to it, they have a facility called Y12, which they had calutrons.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: What's a calutron?
22:19
SPEAKER_00: It's California cyclotron.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: So there was a guy named...
22:23
Ernest Lawrence,
22:24
who's got multiple national labs in the Bay Area and named
22:27
after him.
22:28
And he,
22:28
it's essentially a mass spectrometer and you can separate
22:31
different isotopes of uranium.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: And then that wasn't efficient at low enrichments.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: So then they build a gaseous diffusion plant, which is in the K25.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: When they built it, it was the largest man-made building.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: I love those.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: But the craziest thing.
22:47
SPEAKER_02: Oh,
22:47
SPEAKER_02: I,
22:47
SPEAKER_02: maybe I'm fast forwarding,
22:48
SPEAKER_02: but not only the largest building,
22:50
but then it ends up consuming something like 1.5% of America's
22:54
electricity.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: Higher.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: More electricity than New York City.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: 14%.
22:57
SPEAKER_02: 14% of the US electricity.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: You tell this to people and they're like, no, no, no, you're wrong.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't, that doesn't make sense.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: So like it was consuming a very large amount of electricity.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: Like in the peak,
23:08
SPEAKER_00: it was one and a half,
23:09
SPEAKER_00: one and a half percent of the US,
23:10
SPEAKER_00: but it was running all the time.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: So it really,
23:13
SPEAKER_00: from 1943 to 45,
23:15
one-seventh of the United States electrical power went into the
23:20
effort of enriching
23:21
SPEAKER_00: uranium to make the fuel for the bombs.
23:25
And it was the largest building for a lifetime until the Tesla
23:27
Gigafactory.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you saw how massive it was.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: It's been remediated.
23:33
So that's actually one of the success stories of the Department
23:36
of Energy.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: They have different offices.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: One of the offices is called Environmental Management.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: They remediated that site.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: It's a brownfield.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: They turned it to industrial use.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
23:45
SPEAKER_00: They were processing uranium.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: We're processing uranium.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: So it really makes sense for us to be out there.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Triso Technology.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: You know,
23:54
SPEAKER_00: you hear about sodium fast reactor,
23:57
SPEAKER_00: gas reactor,
23:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
23:58
SPEAKER_00: blah,
23:59
SPEAKER_00: blah,
23:59
SPEAKER_00: molten salt reactor.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Again, they were all built and operated in 50s, 60s, 70s.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: So we know they all work.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: There's no debate on the technology.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: So it's execution and, you know, economics question.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: I will say that TRISO was a little bit of an art.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: There was US TRISO,
24:15
SPEAKER_00: then there was German TRISO,
24:16
SPEAKER_00: and there was Japanese TRISO,
24:18
SPEAKER_00: and this was better than this.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: And people didn't really quite understand why.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Until really the early 2000s,
24:24
there was a program under Department of Energy called the
24:26
Advanced Gas Reactor
24:27
SPEAKER_00: Program.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: And it took it from this art into a science.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: And that really kind of unlocked the potential of TRISO.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: And so why TRISO?
24:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll say it one more time.
24:39
It's that you've got billions of discrete pressure vessels made
24:42
out of silicon
24:43
SPEAKER_00: carbide that's very strong,
24:45
SPEAKER_00: doesn't melt,
24:46
SPEAKER_00: can go to extreme temperatures.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: And the issue is you don't want to release radioactivity.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: And if you can entrap radioactivity at the core,
24:56
SPEAKER_00: the field itself,
24:57
SPEAKER_00: then you don't have a radiological problem.
25:00
SPEAKER_02: So when you talk about these billions of vessels, I'm not sure.
25:03
SPEAKER_02: I just want to make sure I'm understanding it right.
25:05
SPEAKER_02: Because I saw the tiny poppy seeds.
25:07
SPEAKER_02: And so they have their own coating on them.
25:09
SPEAKER_02: And then they're embedded in these pellets of silicon carbide.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Is that the right?
25:13
SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of encased?
25:14
SPEAKER_00: You can put them in a carbonaceous.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: They call it a graphite matrix.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Or you can put it in silicon carbide.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: You just don't want to pour loose pellets into a core.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: So you want it to have a shape.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's a form of like a tennis ball, like a sphere.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: You call that a pebble.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're like a cylinder, you call that a compact.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: And if you can have fancier shapes like that too.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: So that's just the fuel form, so it's not a loose particle.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: So they've been around,
25:38
we operated reactors in the United States built by General
25:41
Atomics in the 70s,
25:42
SPEAKER_00: 80s.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: They built a lot of fuel in the US.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: The Germans had reactors for a number of decades.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Japanese had a high temperature gas cold reactor.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: UK had them.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And then...
25:54
SPEAKER_00: The only reactors that are operating today are in China.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: Of TRISO reactors?
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Of TRISO-based high temperature gas coal reactors.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: They literally bought the German blueprints and they're making them.
26:05
And,
26:06
you know,
26:07
this is,
26:08
it's one of these things that,
26:11
it's very interesting.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: You look at the history of this.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: I used to work for the National Lab System Department of Energy.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: I used to go to China every year under Obama administration, every year.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: as a cooperation and all that.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: And it was a lot of...
26:28
SPEAKER_00: I remember I used to sit in the van with Under Secretary of...
26:32
SPEAKER_00: Assistant Secretary of Energy.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: His name was Pete Lyons.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: He passed away.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: May he rest in peace.
26:37
But Pete used to tell me,
26:39
like...
26:39
I used to tell Pete,
26:40
like,
26:40
why are we here?
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Why do we keep giving them stuff?
26:43
And Pete would say,
26:44
well,
26:45
you know,
26:45
let me tell you,
26:46
kid,
26:47
it's all about being open.
26:49
And,
26:49
you know,
26:49
it's like that thesis out of Francis Fukuyama's End of History.
26:53
You know,
26:53
we just need to teach them our liberal democracy and free
26:56
market ways.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: And that's what they're going to adopt.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: That's not what happened.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: It didn't work out.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: That's not what happened.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: And really, it didn't change until 2017.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: But now there's this need to do it and reinvent a lot of this here.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: In the 90s, the nuclear sector was really decimated.
27:16
SPEAKER_02: Well,
27:16
SPEAKER_02: that's what I was – I mean,
27:17
SPEAKER_02: it seems like there's kind of like two underlying problems,
27:20
SPEAKER_02: right?
27:20
SPEAKER_02: One is we – it sounds like the TRISO was – we knew how to make it,
27:25
SPEAKER_02: but it was still at that science,
27:27
more science-y level and we hadn't figured out – or we hadn't
27:30
put effort into
27:31
SPEAKER_02: mass-producing it like we – on the scale.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: And then,
27:33
SPEAKER_02: you know,
27:34
SPEAKER_02: there's the bigger megastory,
27:35
SPEAKER_02: which is the world soured on nuclear power,
27:38
SPEAKER_02: at least – well,
27:39
SPEAKER_02: a lot of the world in the United States.
27:41
SPEAKER_02: And so – because,
27:42
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
27:43
SPEAKER_02: when I came to visit you guys,
27:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm like,
27:44
SPEAKER_02: well,
27:44
SPEAKER_02: why the hell have we not been –
27:46
making reactors out of this thing if we do how to do this and
27:48
it's safe and and so
27:50
so it seems like there was there were such headwinds against
27:53
nuclear is that it but
27:55
you and then you but you've been looking at the sector for a
27:59
while so i mean i
28:00
guess you saw that then that the need was gonna you were
28:05
betting that the world
28:05
would would maybe turn well i mean it was not without pushback
28:09
yeah um you know i
28:11
SPEAKER_00: mean
28:12
we invest in some prickly things you know weapon systems you
28:16
know we've never shied
28:17
away from that even from our earliest days um before it was
28:20
popular um and I
28:23
remember I got a phone call from one of our LPs after we made
28:27
the announcement that
28:28
SPEAKER_00: we had invested in radiant and you know uh it was questions like
28:34
SPEAKER_00: what happens if it gets hijacked by terrorists?
28:39
What happens if one of these containers rolls over on the side
28:42
of the highway?
28:42
SPEAKER_00: And so we had to really explain why these reactors were passively safe,
28:50
how they were different than the reactors that captured the
28:54
headlines decades ago.
28:56
um and i you know i told that investor that if terrorists were
29:00
to capture one of
29:01
these reactors they would have five to seven years of clean
29:04
energy for their
29:06
terrorist camp i guess yeah you know meaning just meaning they
29:09
wouldn't be getting
29:10
like enriched uranium this is triso is probably the worst you
29:15
know in form of
29:17
SPEAKER_00: nuclear fuel to try and do anything because because of the coatings and
29:23
SPEAKER_00: Trying to break that down is no easy feat.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: So if you want to pry it open to get the uranium for a weapon,
29:30
SPEAKER_02: it's sort of...
29:31
SPEAKER_02: Well,
29:31
SPEAKER_00: it's such small amounts,
29:32
SPEAKER_00: and then you'd have to enrich that further.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: And it is a processed product.
29:40
And one of the amazing things that Curt and the team had done,
29:45
and the value of...
29:47
all the work that had been put into this facility wasn't just
29:51
that they could make
29:51
SPEAKER_00: Triso,
29:53
SPEAKER_00: it wasn't just that they could make it in big batches,
29:55
SPEAKER_00: is that they had optimized so that the yield of the process was very,
30:00
SPEAKER_00: very high.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: And when you think about,
30:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
30:02
SPEAKER_00: unpacking all of the implications of something like that,
30:06
SPEAKER_00: right,
30:08
SPEAKER_00: you don't just take uranium that doesn't meet the spec and toss it out.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: It's very expensive.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: It's also a hazardous material.
30:18
And so the ability to take those particles after they're made
30:21
and then break them
30:22
SPEAKER_00: back down into their
30:25
into their parts to be able to reprocess it is something that
30:30
they spend a lot of time on.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: And it also drives down the price.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: It increases efficiency.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: And so those are all the same reasons.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: That difficulty is all the same reasons why,
30:40
SPEAKER_00: from like a counter-proliferation standpoint,
30:43
SPEAKER_00: there's not a lot of concern about trisophyll.
30:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
30:46
SPEAKER_02: Even the big picture, you know,
30:49
SPEAKER_02: From where I sit,
30:50
SPEAKER_02: I get bombarded these days the last five,
30:52
SPEAKER_02: six years with fusion,
30:54
SPEAKER_02: fission startups of all kinds,
30:56
SPEAKER_02: right?
30:57
SPEAKER_02: And so like you get this, you're like, okay, people are,
31:01
interested in this hundreds of millions,
31:02
billions of dollars are being invested.
31:04
SPEAKER_02: And then I still think like,
31:05
SPEAKER_02: if you're the general public,
31:07
SPEAKER_02: you're,
31:07
SPEAKER_02: you're kind of like,
31:08
SPEAKER_02: oh,
31:08
SPEAKER_02: we're sort of nuclear is,
31:10
SPEAKER_02: you know,
31:10
SPEAKER_02: not,
31:11
SPEAKER_02: doesn't seem to be where we're going.
31:12
SPEAKER_02: There's no, I'm always trying to square this.
31:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
31:15
what happened in the last 10 years that all these startups
31:18
started appearing all of
31:19
SPEAKER_02: a sudden?
31:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think.
31:22
One of the probably most impactful things that has happened is
31:26
the government's made a bet.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: You know,
31:27
SPEAKER_00: I think largely when we started getting interested in the space,
31:30
SPEAKER_00: we were following where we were seeing government programs go.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: And so,
31:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
31:36
SPEAKER_00: really,
31:36
SPEAKER_00: I think kind of a watershed moment,
31:38
especially for the small modular reactors and the micro
31:42
reactors was the Army's
31:43
SPEAKER_00: Pele program coming out,
31:45
SPEAKER_00: where the Army said,
31:46
we want small modular reactors and we have all these different
31:49
use cases across the
31:50
SPEAKER_00: Department of Defense.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: The Army has operated its own reactors in the past.
31:55
And so once we saw programs like that starting to come online,
31:59
then you follow the money,
32:01
right?
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Congress is appropriating money for programs like that.
32:05
That's where you started to see startups get more and more
32:07
interested in the space.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: And then venture capitalists followed.
32:10
And the Army,
32:11
I mean,
32:12
Kurt hit on this,
32:12
but you – so we talked about it a bit on my visit.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
32:16
when you have these long supply chains and they're very
32:19
vulnerable and you're
32:21
SPEAKER_02: trying to get fuel to all the people and the vehicles.
32:24
SPEAKER_02: So the idea is that – like when we talk about a small modular reactor,
32:28
SPEAKER_02: I know they can vary in size,
32:29
SPEAKER_02: right?
32:29
SPEAKER_02: But we're talking about something that could –
32:32
um well tell me i mean what what's the gamut of the size and
32:36
then what would be the
32:36
military yeah i mean i think like and even this seems to have
32:40
been a bit of a
32:41
moving target uh smr small modular actors used to be like one
32:45
big homogeneous
32:46
bucket um and i think what we've seen is there's there's been a
32:50
little separation
32:50
SPEAKER_00: there in that
32:52
SPEAKER_00: We also have micro-reactors.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: Micro-reactors are things that are actually small, actually modular.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Some of the larger SMRs,
33:01
SPEAKER_00: they're not actually that small,
33:02
SPEAKER_00: and they're also not really that modular.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: It's like a building size.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:06
And it's still campus,
33:07
albeit much smaller than what we've seen in the past.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: But these micro-reactors,
33:13
SPEAKER_00: which are gonna fall anyone for one megawatt to 10 megawatts,
33:17
SPEAKER_00: can be the size of a shipping container,
33:18
SPEAKER_00: can go on a truck,
33:19
SPEAKER_00: can go on the back of a C-17,
33:20
SPEAKER_00: so it can be deployed forward.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: They require no external hookups to it.
33:26
The cooling is in there,
33:30
the fuel is in there,
33:31
and so really there's just an output from it.
33:34
So when you start to think about that in terms of deployment
33:37
for the military,
33:39
SPEAKER_00: You're replacing diesel generators.
33:41
The movement of diesel in Iraq during the global war on terror
33:47
accounts for the
33:48
SPEAKER_00: majority of the casualties during that conflict.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: Because you're kind of a sitting duck on this.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: those,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: the IEDs,
33:55
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:57
SPEAKER_00: through the major,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: routes in Iraq were,
34:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:02
SPEAKER_00: treacherous.
34:02
And at different points of the war,
34:04
you know,
34:04
that was peaking up and down.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: I think in 2007,
34:07
SPEAKER_00: the first time I went to Iraq,
34:08
SPEAKER_00: I think that summer,
34:10
SPEAKER_00: we were losing about 100 soldiers a month.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: The majority of those casualties were on the roads.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:14
SPEAKER_02: And you were in Iraq.
34:17
SPEAKER_02: Where did you serve?
34:18
SPEAKER_00: Iraq.
34:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Several times, yeah.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: How long were you in the military?
34:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I did 10 years, um, in active service.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, I got out, uh, in 2015.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: So.
34:32
SPEAKER_02: And became an investor.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: I did.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: This happens a lot, right?
34:35
SPEAKER_02: With the special forces guys.
34:37
And,
34:37
you know,
34:37
um,
34:38
actually when I got out,
34:39
there weren't that many,
34:40
uh,
34:41
guys on wall street.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: Why?
34:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:43
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I, and I kind of went broader than I met.
34:45
Well,
34:46
so I always got the impression that finance was,
34:48
was like a,
34:49
a tempting,
34:50
um,
34:50
path.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
34:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm from New York and a lot of my friends,
34:54
SPEAKER_00: uh,
34:54
they were either cops or firefighters or they worked in finance
34:56
and I had already
34:57
SPEAKER_00: kind of played the carry heavy things and get tired game.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I, I tried my hand in finance.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: I was very fortunate to, you know, have people take a chance on me.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, made my entry point there.
35:12
SPEAKER_02: So you, like, I mean, and defense tech is so hot now.
35:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
35:15
SPEAKER_02: when Andrel first started,
35:16
SPEAKER_02: you know,
35:17
SPEAKER_02: I think that first year when they did the border surveillance stuff,
35:20
SPEAKER_02: they had Bloomberg where I worked at the time.
35:22
SPEAKER_02: I think,
35:23
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if Bloomberg named them the most evil company,
35:25
SPEAKER_02: but it might have been Fast Company.
35:26
SPEAKER_02: But, you know, times were different.
35:28
But I saw,
35:28
I mean,
35:28
it looked like you were investing in stuff,
35:30
yeah,
35:30
back then.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, yeah.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: I had finished business school,
35:36
SPEAKER_00: I was working at Blackstone,
35:38
saw some of the traditional aerospace type of transactions they
35:41
were doing.
35:42
I think I realized that a lot of the advice they were getting
35:47
on these specific
35:48
SPEAKER_00: transactions were coming from consultants and generals.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: And I think in my own experience, generals are pretty far from the fight.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: They have incredible historical perspective and see the big picture,
35:58
SPEAKER_00: but they're not the ones getting down the weeds with
36:01
SPEAKER_00: with the soldiers per se, and the same is true of those companies.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: And so as I thought about the startup landscape,
36:08
SPEAKER_00: there was interest in startups getting into government,
36:10
but I didn't think it was putting a couple of generals on the
36:14
board that was gonna
36:14
SPEAKER_00: solve that problem.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: It was gonna be injecting people
36:18
SPEAKER_00: in the early days into the company.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: And so that was the genesis for our firm and our fund.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: But at the time in 2018, I mean, there are defense focused VCs today
36:33
who when i was starting this up told me what a awful awful idea
36:38
this was and that
36:39
defense was a completely uninvestable space so the times have
36:43
changed yes they have
36:44
changed um and you know when i look at at um okay so there's we
36:50
talked about this
36:50
military just defense application um on the ai front clearly
36:55
we're building these
36:56
data centers all over the place i just i was telling you i went
36:59
to stargate with
36:59
SPEAKER_02: sam altman and
37:01
um they've got natural gas you know just being pumped directly
37:04
in in west texas
37:05
straight into these these turbines out there so there's a world
37:08
where people see
37:09
these reactors being put right next to data centers to to fuel
37:13
them um there's one
37:15
other big bucket oh well the space is you know we've for a long
37:17
time we've been um
37:19
i mean same thing the u.s government's been looking at nuclear
37:23
in space for decades
37:24
SPEAKER_02: and decades yeah
37:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
37:26
SPEAKER_02: So you have these big buckets,
37:28
SPEAKER_02: then there's the mega story,
37:30
SPEAKER_02: which is like China seems to be building energy supply.
37:34
If the world is heading towards this AI revolution where
37:38
compute is the defining
37:41
SPEAKER_02: characteristic of your success in this field,
37:44
SPEAKER_02: which just on how this technology works is
37:48
the more gpus you throw at this stuff the better it does um so
37:52
you know some of
37:52
this at the moment is just math uh it looks like china has
37:55
embraced the math more
37:56
than than the u.s has and so you know would this would try so
38:03
all these new
38:03
reactors would that be kind of like a sufficient response um or
38:07
is that our is that
38:08
SPEAKER_02: our best bet
38:11
SPEAKER_00: It's definitely a part of the response.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: And all of this is that we seeded our leadership.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: The muscles atrophy when you don't use them.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: And you see kind of all that coming up.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: Again, a great analogy, as involved as you are in the space sector.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we sent people to the moon in the 60s.
38:29
And so why did it take so long for all these other folks to
38:33
come in and kind of reinvent it?
38:35
SPEAKER_00: So that's what's happening in nuclear, too.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm always like all the above kind of guy.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm like picking again.
38:43
This is the energy that we're going to use,
38:44
and every other energy is bad.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of absurd.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: You need all of it.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: You do get very limited once you leave the planet.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: Your choices are a little bit, it's hard to find coal on Mars, I hear.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:54
So,
38:54
you know,
38:55
you do need to,
38:57
nuclear is going to be a part of the equation.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, it is.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: In hindsight,
39:02
SPEAKER_00: it's kind of ridiculous that,
39:03
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:04
SPEAKER_00: they call it the valley of death in nuclear in the 90s,
39:06
SPEAKER_00: in the Clinton era,
39:07
SPEAKER_00: kind of shutting everything down,
39:09
SPEAKER_00: all the infrastructure is going away.
39:10
SPEAKER_00: So we're paying a little bit of a hangover from that.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: But I think the infrastructure is there.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: Like I said,
39:16
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:17
we just want to make sure that all these advanced reactors that
39:20
are developing it,
39:20
SPEAKER_00: they're not going to be left,
39:21
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:22
SPEAKER_00: without fuel.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: And this vertical integration,
39:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
39:25
SPEAKER_00: going back to like the ultra safe nuclear,
39:26
SPEAKER_00: it's a tricky thing to do.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: Like you look at a car industry.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: You know,
39:30
SPEAKER_00: it's like Toyota is not making a Toyota Petroleum,
39:33
SPEAKER_00: that if you drive a Toyota,
39:34
SPEAKER_00: you go to a Toyota gas station.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Ford, oh, buddy, you got to go to a Ford gas station.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: You know,
39:39
SPEAKER_00: this is a key enabler of these systems,
39:43
SPEAKER_00: and we just want to make sure that,
39:44
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:45
SPEAKER_00: be it data center application,
39:47
SPEAKER_00: defense application,
39:48
SPEAKER_00: space application,
39:49
SPEAKER_00: or just,
39:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:49
SPEAKER_00: clean energy application,
39:52
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:52
SPEAKER_00: this is not the issue.
39:53
You don't have to go source it from our adversaries,
39:55
which is a little embarrassing.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:56
SPEAKER_02: So,
39:56
SPEAKER_02: but even when you guys explain how safe this is and that we've,
40:00
we've done decades of studies and it's like impossible for this
40:04
to go wrong,
40:05
SPEAKER_02: you know,
40:06
SPEAKER_02: because everyone,
40:06
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
40:07
SPEAKER_02: if you've seen
40:10
chernobyl on hbo i mean the image you're left with is some guys
40:14
you know not paying
40:14
enough attention these rods are sinking through and and i think
40:17
that's what sticks
40:18
with the public right and then now you're talking about hey
40:21
we're going to put a
40:22
nuclear reactor like all over the place you know because
40:24
they're going to be right
40:25
by these data centers they're going to be in all these spots i
40:27
still don't and then
40:29
and then i still just don't think the public yeah let me hit
40:32
this directly yeah so
40:33
SPEAKER_00: so um
40:36
SPEAKER_00: Dawn of nuclear era, 40s, 50s, and atoms for peace.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: They're like, okay, let's use this awesome source of energy.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be too cheap to meter, by the way.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: So let's build these reactors.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: So engineers come in and they're like,
40:49
SPEAKER_00: well,
40:50
SPEAKER_00: there's an awesome amount of power in there,
40:52
SPEAKER_00: awesome.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh,
40:53
SPEAKER_00: it's,
40:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
40:54
SPEAKER_00: like a light water reactor,
40:55
SPEAKER_00: typical light water reactor is,
40:57
SPEAKER_00: it's like multiple gigawatts of thermal energy in a,
41:00
SPEAKER_00: in a volume,
41:01
SPEAKER_00: uh,
41:02
SPEAKER_00: less than this room.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: This, this is not a big room.
41:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: So that's enough to power.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: It's like at 3 million homes.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, so, so it's a, it's a huge amount of power.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: The power density per unit volume, you have a huge amount of power.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the thing is like when you shut these, when you turn the reactor off,
41:21
SPEAKER_00: you still generate a lot of heat.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: And 6%, 5%, 1% of awesome amount of power is still a lot of power.
41:28
So they came in,
41:30
they were like,
41:31
okay,
41:31
let's scale these things to make them really big.
41:33
And they knew that there's a lot of power and there's danger
41:36
associated with that.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: So then they said...
41:38
SPEAKER_00: Hey, man, what do you think is the worst thing that's going to happen?
41:40
SPEAKER_00: And this guy said, you know, I think this is the worst thing.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get to the name of the accidents and all that.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: And then there's this other thing.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: So then they said, OK, this is going to be our bounding accidents.
41:50
OK,
41:51
we designed a reactor so that if these extreme events occur,
41:56
you know,
41:56
it can be safe.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: And it has to do with a pump turning on or something happening.
42:00
That's called an active safety system where something kicks in
42:04
to control your system.
42:05
But then if you ask,
42:07
okay,
42:07
well,
42:07
what happens if something worse than this happens?
42:09
SPEAKER_00: The long tail, what Nassim Taleb calls the black swan event.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: They call that beyond design basis accident.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: So we don't worry about it.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: We don't design for that.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: You know,
42:17
SPEAKER_00: so that's,
42:18
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:19
SPEAKER_00: if you think about it,
42:19
SPEAKER_00: that was,
42:20
SPEAKER_00: I guess it was a sound judgment in the 50s,
42:21
SPEAKER_00: 60s,
42:22
SPEAKER_00: 70s.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, that's what it is.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: So you look at an incident like Fukushima,
42:26
SPEAKER_00: a 9.1 scale earthquake,
42:29
SPEAKER_00: the reactor is actually shut down.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: And 52 minutes later, the waves came in.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: I actually visited Fukushima site.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: I was very involved with that.
42:36
The highest amount of dose I've ever gotten was driving between
42:39
unit two and unit
42:39
SPEAKER_00: three with like the whole thing blown up years after.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: But you have an awesome amount of power.
42:44
You got a 1960s design that's not designed for a reactor under
42:49
ring of fire.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: All that's been done,
42:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: again,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: the analogy is like those big reactors with a huge power density.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: Imagine you take one of the dragons from...
43:00
game of thrones you put in a cage and you're like hey man if
43:03
that thing gets out
43:03
it's like really bad so let's put another cage so they call
43:06
defense in depth but
43:07
occasionally this thing is going to get out and it's going to
43:10
be mayhem so the new
43:11
reactors have much lower power density so it's a bunny that's a
43:15
gun running on a
43:15
wheel it's uh they've they've accounted for that long tail and
43:20
again they're
43:20
relying on natural phenomena to be safe not not an active
43:23
safety system so
43:25
SPEAKER_00: That's how they're safe.
43:26
And it's just really truly a design choice that's been around
43:29
since the 80s,
43:31
90s.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: We just haven't built these reactors.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: I will say that Chernobyl is its own class.
43:38
Complete disregard for any actual,
43:42
the reactor was designed so it's runaway unsafe.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: No Western reactor is like that.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: They were using it to produce power.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: They were using it to produce weapons.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: They were using it to do experiments.
43:53
SPEAKER_00: Insane.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: Like in the US, you have different classes of reactors.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Chernobyl is its own class of disaster with very,
44:01
SPEAKER_00: very poor judgment and designer operational choices.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: And,
44:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
44:05
SPEAKER_00: the reactors that are being developed today,
44:07
SPEAKER_00: literally by everyone,
44:08
SPEAKER_00: are inherently safe.
44:10
And,
44:10
you know,
44:10
I think the proof is going to be in the pudding when these
44:14
units come online.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: And they're safe.
44:17
based on certain design choices and based on having
44:19
constituents that don't melt,
44:21
that can withstand extreme temperatures and kind of ride out
44:25
these transients if
44:26
SPEAKER_00: you have a really improbable event.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: And what still happens to the fuel?
44:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you still have to deal with that at the end, right?
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you have to deal with that.
44:37
The reality is that the entire nuclear fuel,
44:41
spent nuclear fuel,
44:43
discharged from reactors.
44:44
There's about 100 light water reactors being operated today in
44:47
the United States,
44:47
SPEAKER_00: 400 across the world.
44:49
SPEAKER_00: All that waste fits in a high school football field.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
44:52
SPEAKER_00: this is kind of,
44:53
SPEAKER_00: again,
44:54
SPEAKER_00: ridiculous in my opinion,
44:55
SPEAKER_00: because you've got tons of other waste being thrown into an environment.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: These folks have actually been responsibly storing it.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: There's also other double standards.
45:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, you see like this is a cup of water, right?
45:07
And then let's say this thing has like cadmium in it or lead or
45:11
something that we don't like.
45:13
And then so I'm like,
45:14
hey,
45:14
what's the limit of EPA for lead in this water?
45:17
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, it's 15.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh my God, it's like 20.
45:20
So then I take a cup of water from his and pour clean water
45:23
into it,
45:24
and it goes to 14.
45:25
And the birds are singing,
45:27
we're high-fiving,
45:28
we're drinking the water,
45:29
we're hydrated.
45:30
SPEAKER_00: In nuclear, for some reason, unlike any other thing, there is no limit.
45:35
SPEAKER_00: Anything above zero we consider bad.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: That's called LNT.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: That basically we say anything above zero is bad.
45:40
Now,
45:41
I got a lot of dose flying yesterday from Tennessee to San
45:44
Francisco.
45:45
And I'm going to get a lot more dose going back,
45:48
way more than I'm getting in that facility.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: So we also have kind of this irrational view of any dose is bad.
45:55
And all the doses that we're getting is well below what we're
45:57
receiving natural
45:58
SPEAKER_00: background radiation.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: So it's all those factors.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: So the fuel is used and it needs to be disposed of.
46:05
SPEAKER_02: Well,
46:06
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
46:06
SPEAKER_02: and I get everything you're saying,
46:07
SPEAKER_02: but I mean,
46:08
SPEAKER_02: don't we dispose of it in Colorado today in some...
46:11
SPEAKER_00: No,
46:12
SPEAKER_00: no,
46:13
SPEAKER_00: it's a political stalemate.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: Right, yeah, there's this nightmare.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: So there was Yucca Mountain, Nevada, it's not happening.
46:18
The defense,
46:20
you know,
46:20
nuclear waste was going to a facility called WIP in New Mexico,
46:24
you know,
46:26
SPEAKER_00: The Finns know how to dispose of it without fuss.
46:28
The Swiss know how to dispose of it,
46:30
but we managed to make a big fuss out of it.
46:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because it's like Yucca Mountain thing.
46:33
Sorry,
46:33
I forgot it was in Nevada,
46:34
but I mean,
46:35
it's just like sitting there.
46:36
SPEAKER_02: The most expensive and most studied piece of rock.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: And nobody can make a decision ever to like actually use it, right?
46:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
46:44
SPEAKER_02: But I mean, so like, how do we get over...
46:47
SPEAKER_02: I,
46:48
SPEAKER_02: you can say what you said and then there's obviously,
46:50
SPEAKER_02: there's this continued hang up about all this stuff.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: It's because,
46:52
SPEAKER_00: it's because US government said,
46:55
SPEAKER_00: hey,
46:55
SPEAKER_00: when you make fresh fuel and run reactors and all that,
46:57
SPEAKER_00: that's all private.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: When it comes out of reactor, it's my property.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: And they said, we're gonna come up with a way to dispose of it.
47:04
SPEAKER_00: And it went into the government system.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: So they couldn't come up with a solution.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of commercial solutions.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of nations that have solutions.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: And it's just, it's one of these things.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: Maybe, again, there are private companies working in that space.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should, you know, let them run.
47:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I did a story a long time ago on deep isolation.
47:22
SPEAKER_02: They were trying to make boreholes.
47:23
SPEAKER_00: Those guys are solid.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, deep boreholes.
47:26
SPEAKER_02: To bury it way underground.
47:27
SPEAKER_02: Okay, the...
47:32
SPEAKER_02: When you're investing in this stuff,
47:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
47:35
clearly you think we get over some of these psychological
47:38
hurdles or it's just a
47:39
SPEAKER_02: necessity and,
47:40
SPEAKER_02: and.
47:41
I think the nuclear spent fuel problem just turned out to not
47:46
be a problem.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: There's like the volume of it's so small.
47:51
Most of it's stored on site at the reactor site and it's going
47:56
to stay there and
47:57
SPEAKER_00: it's,
47:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:59
SPEAKER_00: dry cask and it's not going to bother anyone.
48:01
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, right now, the
48:08
SPEAKER_00: Problem that we're staring down in terms of energy scarcity in the future
48:11
SPEAKER_00: outweighs,
48:13
SPEAKER_00: like I said,
48:14
SPEAKER_00: the effectively non-problem of what we're doing with this spent fuel.
48:18
The spent fuel,
48:19
by the way,
48:21
still has a tremendous amount of potential energy in it.
48:24
So it's very likely that at some point in the future,
48:28
it is actually an asset,
48:30
not a liability.
48:31
You're going to take that spent fuel and you're going to do
48:33
something else with it.
48:35
SPEAKER_02: Well,
48:35
I remember it wasn't a Terraform originally that wanted to like
48:38
use the old fuel
48:41
SPEAKER_00: to...
48:41
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of companies working on recycling the fuel.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: And it's really valuable,
48:46
SPEAKER_00: by the way,
48:46
SPEAKER_00: like we also make radiosal power units that,
48:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:50
SPEAKER_00: again,
48:50
SPEAKER_00: when you go to space,
48:51
SPEAKER_00: you need energy.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: Like Mars Rover has plutonium at 238.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: we don't make that in this country anymore,
48:57
SPEAKER_00: but we can recycle it from used fuel,
48:59
SPEAKER_00: or you can have other radioisotopes that can generate power.
49:02
So there's a lot of value in the spend of your fuel that you
49:05
can recycle to make
49:07
SPEAKER_00: fuel that you can burn again,
49:09
SPEAKER_00: or to make radioisotope power systems.
49:12
SPEAKER_00: Jimmy Carter dismantled all that in the 70s,
49:15
SPEAKER_00: and then afterwards Reagan tried to bring it back,
49:17
SPEAKER_00: but again,
49:18
SPEAKER_00: when you take that infrastructure away,
49:21
SPEAKER_00: you're going to pay a penalty having to bring it back up.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: But again, private capital is working on that too.
49:26
I think what we're seeing right now though is that the current
49:30
administration is in
49:31
SPEAKER_00: such lockstep,
49:33
SPEAKER_00: whether it's Department of Interior,
49:34
SPEAKER_00: Department of Energy,
49:34
SPEAKER_00: Department of Defense,
49:35
SPEAKER_00: that we need more energy.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: And so what we're seeing is
49:42
SPEAKER_00: probably a once-in-generation opportunity to push and say,
49:47
here's how we're going to solve these problems and here's how
49:49
we're going to do
49:49
SPEAKER_00: them safely,
49:50
SPEAKER_00: and here's why it's better than what's done in the past,
49:52
SPEAKER_00: and they're receptive and they're listening.
49:53
Right,
49:54
except these are multi-year,
49:55
you know,
49:56
if four years is enough to see.
49:59
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I misspoke.
50:01
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't Terraform.
50:02
SPEAKER_02: That's my friend Casey's company.
50:03
SPEAKER_02: It was TerraPower, which was a company Bill Gates backed.
50:06
SPEAKER_02: I'm just reminded, I mean, Bill Gates has been, you know,
50:10
20 years of politicking on this and trying to get the US to pay
50:15
more attention.
50:16
And then I have reported on terror power in the past,
50:20
but now I forget some of the particulars.
50:22
SPEAKER_02: But I remember them going at it for a while and then just being like,
50:27
SPEAKER_02: well,
50:27
SPEAKER_02: China's going to do this.
50:28
SPEAKER_02: We're just never going to have the political will.
50:33
SPEAKER_02: In this moment, there's a window to do this.
50:38
SPEAKER_02: Kurt, I think you're fine talking about some of this stuff.
50:42
SPEAKER_02: I mean, just your background.
50:44
Yeah,
50:44
I mean,
50:45
it's a sort of extra politically sensitive moment in some ways,
50:49
I guess.
50:50
SPEAKER_02: But you were born in Iran.
50:53
SPEAKER_02: I'm fresh off the boat.
50:54
SPEAKER_02: You're the Iranian nuclear scientist.
50:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but you, and it wasn't like you moved here when you were one or two.
51:02
SPEAKER_02: I was 16.
51:03
SPEAKER_02: You were 16.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
51:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
51:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, okay.
51:06
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I just have obvious questions.
51:07
SPEAKER_02: Like, what is that like trying to become a nuclear scientist in the U S?
51:12
SPEAKER_00: Um,
51:13
Moving when you're a 16-year-old boy from Iran to US,
51:18
that's a little bit of a culture shock.
51:19
SPEAKER_00: So it was great.
51:21
SPEAKER_00: I was like, well, I don't have any friends.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: I can't even speak English.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, might as well study math and all this stuff.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: But no, my dad was a citizen.
51:31
My dad actually worked in Shah's government,
51:33
the previous government of Iran.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
51:35
And he was like the head of the council in San Francisco and
51:37
all this other stuff.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: So anyways,
51:39
SPEAKER_00: he was a citizen,
51:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
51:40
SPEAKER_00: I was born in the 80s,
51:43
SPEAKER_00: in the middle of the war that was going on over there.
51:46
It took us 11 years to immigrate,
51:48
but once we immigrated,
51:49
I became a citizen.
51:50
And,
51:51
you know,
51:51
if you're a citizen in this country,
51:52
there is no discussion.
51:54
SPEAKER_00: There's no challenge.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: It's been really great.
51:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
51:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
51:59
SPEAKER_02: And so,
51:59
SPEAKER_02: and,
52:00
SPEAKER_02: and obviously,
52:00
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
52:00
that's what makes America great is to get the world's best and
52:03
brightest to work on
52:03
SPEAKER_02: these important things,
52:05
SPEAKER_02: but you don't,
52:05
SPEAKER_02: there's no,
52:06
SPEAKER_02: never been,
52:06
SPEAKER_02: it wasn't extra difficult as you were like starting to take over.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: Honestly,
52:12
SPEAKER_00: no,
52:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
52:13
SPEAKER_00: I lived in Arizona first and then I,
52:15
SPEAKER_00: uh,
52:15
SPEAKER_00: Bay area,
52:16
SPEAKER_00: I went to grad school here and then,
52:17
SPEAKER_00: uh,
52:17
SPEAKER_00: and then Tennessee.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: No, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's been incredibly solid.
52:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
52:21
SPEAKER_00: you see the people I work with,
52:22
SPEAKER_00: they're just mostly good old boys from East Tennessee and,
52:25
SPEAKER_00: uh,
52:25
SPEAKER_00: and,
52:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
52:26
SPEAKER_00: and then,
52:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
52:28
SPEAKER_00: I, yeah, it's, it's all good.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: And,
52:29
SPEAKER_00: and now this guy,
52:31
I was talking to him one time in the car and he starts speaking
52:33
Farsi to me,
52:34
SPEAKER_00: which is like,
52:34
SPEAKER_00: so I guess it's good.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: We're, we're all feeling at home.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: So we bonded over our love of, uh, Persian pop music.
52:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:41
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
52:42
SPEAKER_00: Now, why does he know Farsi is a separate question.
52:45
SPEAKER_02: Well, we were talking to Tennessee.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what have you made?
52:49
SPEAKER_02: Obviously,
52:49
we bombed and then it seemed like the next week it was a bunch
52:53
of armchair analysis
52:55
SPEAKER_02: on whether it worked or not.
52:57
SPEAKER_02: When we were there,
52:58
SPEAKER_02: you were just explaining to me some of these,
53:00
SPEAKER_02: I think it's like turbines that have to spin,
53:04
SPEAKER_02: like be fed with electricity,
53:07
SPEAKER_02: you know,
53:07
SPEAKER_02: at all costs to spin for decades.
53:09
SPEAKER_02: And I'm butchering this,
53:11
SPEAKER_02: but it sounded like you were like,
53:12
SPEAKER_02: wow,
53:12
SPEAKER_02: you know,
53:13
SPEAKER_02: that part's gone for sure.
53:15
SPEAKER_00: That part's gone.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: So what you were just talking about is called the centrifuge technology,
53:21
SPEAKER_00: which is- Yeah,
53:21
SPEAKER_00: please correct.
53:23
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
53:24
You remember we talked about K25 and catatrons and gaseous
53:29
diffusion plant.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: That's like the beginning of the nuclear era.
53:32
SPEAKER_00: Then they figured out that,
53:33
SPEAKER_00: hey,
53:33
SPEAKER_00: just like a dryer,
53:35
SPEAKER_00: when you put your clothes in a washer and just pushes all the water out,
53:38
SPEAKER_00: you can separate the heavier 238 isotope from 235.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: You want 235, okay?
53:44
SPEAKER_00: When you dig uranium out of a ground, 0.7% of it is the stuff you want.
53:50
SPEAKER_00: And 99.3% of it is the stuff you don't want.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: So you have to get that light stuff out.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: So they figured out,
53:55
SPEAKER_00: hey,
53:56
SPEAKER_00: if I can put it in a tube and spin it,
53:57
SPEAKER_00: I can kind of separate these isotopes.
53:59
SPEAKER_00: And there's cascades of this.
54:02
SPEAKER_00: Turns out,
54:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
54:02
SPEAKER_00: the modern technology today,
54:04
SPEAKER_00: those are the fastest spinning objects made by humankind.
54:06
SPEAKER_00: They spin at like 60,000 RPM.
54:09
SPEAKER_00: Incredible.
54:10
SPEAKER_00: So...
54:12
SPEAKER_00: centrifuge technology had been around for a long time.
54:14
A lot of work around proliferation was that,
54:17
well,
54:17
it's hard to make that material.
54:19
SPEAKER_00: That was definitely the case in the 40s, 50s, 60s, but it's 2025.
54:24
SPEAKER_00: Those technologies are not so inaccessible now.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: The key is that those are very susceptible to any variation.
54:32
SPEAKER_00: So if they lose electrical power or things like that,
54:36
SPEAKER_00: it's very damaging when you're going supersonic speed spinning.
54:39
SPEAKER_00: So they definitely took out the centrifuges.
54:42
But one of the key things to say,
54:45
and I'll say this just so everybody understands,
54:47
SPEAKER_00: Nobody enriches the 60% for fun or research.
54:53
SPEAKER_00: You're enriching the 60%.
54:54
First of all,
54:55
you can make a not very good weapon with 60%,
54:58
but you can make it.
55:00
And what people don't understand,
55:01
they're like,
55:01
well,
55:02
they only went to 60%.
55:03
SPEAKER_00: Ideally, you need like 90 something for a weapon.
55:07
SPEAKER_00: So they still have a long way to go.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: The way you measure enrichment,
55:12
SPEAKER_00: like effort,
55:13
SPEAKER_00: it's this weird unit called SWU,
55:16
SPEAKER_00: separative work unit,
55:17
SPEAKER_00: okay?
55:18
SPEAKER_00: And so the amount of SWU you need to go from natural 0.7%,
55:22
SPEAKER_00: remember,
55:24
SPEAKER_00: to 2.5% is the same amount of energy you need to go from 60 to bulb.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: So the point is,
55:29
SPEAKER_00: like,
55:30
SPEAKER_00: I think what they were doing,
55:31
SPEAKER_00: they were like,
55:31
SPEAKER_00: you know,
55:31
SPEAKER_00: like,
55:32
SPEAKER_00: we've done 99% of the work.
55:34
SPEAKER_00: And we took out the centrifuges.
55:37
SPEAKER_00: But listen, the material is still there.
55:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the material doesn't disappear.
55:41
I don't know,
55:43
you can gather it,
55:43
and I don't know if they moved it,
55:45
nobody knows.
55:46
SPEAKER_00: So...
55:47
This game is going to continue until you have a regime there
55:50
that doesn't want to do this.
55:52
SPEAKER_00: So, okay.
55:53
And I mean,
55:53
you,
55:54
you obviously just went into it,
55:55
but so like net net,
55:57
um,
55:59
okay.
55:59
It comes down to the regime,
56:00
but did you,
56:02
so what we did was effective on some level,
56:04
perhaps.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: It definitely a nice, you know, kick in there behind.
56:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:08
It's,
56:09
it's,
56:09
it's,
56:09
it's highly disruptive,
56:10
but I don't know what you think.
56:12
SPEAKER_00: You have to keep go doing this again.
56:15
SPEAKER_00: I think that we have some choices to make.
56:20
SPEAKER_00: There's always trade-offs with these decisions,
56:22
SPEAKER_00: specifically the use of force,
56:24
SPEAKER_00: the projection of military power.
56:26
SPEAKER_00: We have to choose between,
56:27
SPEAKER_00: do we want to,
56:30
SPEAKER_00: at some cadence over a period of time,
56:33
continue to have to do these sorts of actions with our partners
56:36
in the region?
56:37
Or do we want to,
56:38
in one action,
56:41
go and deal with the problem to its natural conclusion?
56:46
SPEAKER_00: And I just think there's not a lot of appetite
56:49
on either side of the aisle and certainly by the American
56:51
people to put troops on
56:52
the ground in Iran I don't get I don't approve of that I think
56:56
what we're seeing
56:57
though is and why parts of this feel different is certainly the
57:04
support that Israel
57:06
has received from um other countries in the region and I think
57:11
very clearly the
57:13
SPEAKER_00: Saudis want to reach a normalization um and that
57:18
is inherently bad for the iranians um so it leaves them with
57:22
very few friends in
57:24
SPEAKER_00: the region and if your goal is to be the regional hegemony
57:28
it gets hard when everyone else is against you yeah i mean and
57:32
this this is a giant
57:35
broad question okay you know i see all the a lot of the defense
57:40
tech companies
57:40
pointing to like spacex as their model um which makes yeah i
57:45
think i've covered
57:46
spacex about as much as anyone so i feel like i've got a good
57:49
handle on that and
57:50
SPEAKER_02: you know it's like a
57:53
SPEAKER_02: there's a chance this is like a once-in-a-lifetime sort of company.
57:56
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
57:56
SPEAKER_02: they just,
57:57
SPEAKER_02: you know,
57:57
SPEAKER_02: knocked it out of the park on every possible metric,
58:01
SPEAKER_02: but it took them about 12 or 14 years,
58:04
SPEAKER_02: really,
58:04
SPEAKER_02: to,
58:04
SPEAKER_02: like,
58:05
SPEAKER_02: sort of...
58:06
achieve their goals and then hit this point where they were
58:10
starting to lap the
58:11
SPEAKER_02: rest of the world,
58:12
SPEAKER_02: really.
58:12
And,
58:13
you know,
58:13
I've covered Andrel a bunch and I'm impressed by what they do.
58:18
SPEAKER_02: I feel like they're,
58:19
SPEAKER_02: of all these military defense startups,
58:23
SPEAKER_02: the biggest,
58:23
SPEAKER_02: the most ambitious,
58:26
SPEAKER_02: it's clear to me that they have a lot to prove.
58:29
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
58:29
SPEAKER_02: they have not yet hit that SpaceX level at all where,
58:33
SPEAKER_02: you know,
58:33
SPEAKER_02: they're making hundreds of things when they need to be making...
58:36
tens of thousands,
58:37
hundreds of thousands,
58:37
which I know they're starting to do,
58:39
but yeah.
58:39
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, part of me, I see so many, it's like, is SpaceX a one-off?
58:47
Are,
58:47
are,
58:48
are these defense tech companies kind of chasing the money and
58:52
the appetite now?
58:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
58:53
SPEAKER_02: It's hard for me to like gauge how this actually plays out.
58:57
Um,
58:57
cause heart,
58:57
you know,
58:58
heart tech is hard and it might be the case that,
59:01
um,
59:03
SPEAKER_02: Elon and Gwen Shotwell were uniquely suited to marshal this team.
59:10
SPEAKER_02: Especially on a new prime that really fixes a lot.
59:14
SPEAKER_00: There's so much value in being early and having that white space.
59:18
It's not just being early,
59:19
it's being early and well capitalized and having the right
59:21
strategy.
59:23
SPEAKER_00: I think when you look at the defense tech space, Andrew Roll's done it.
59:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
59:26
SPEAKER_00: they were early,
59:27
and being early isn't just time to develop the market and the
59:31
product and the
59:31
SPEAKER_00: customers,
59:32
SPEAKER_00: but in the government sector,
59:34
SPEAKER_00: it's the time to be in front of decision makers,
59:36
SPEAKER_00: congressional members,
59:38
SPEAKER_00: permanent staff.
59:41
SPEAKER_00: you know, the program offices.
59:43
And so when you have that space and you are capitalized in a
59:47
way that allows you to
59:48
SPEAKER_00: move really quickly,
59:50
SPEAKER_00: it's very hard to compete with that.
59:52
And so especially in a time where the barrier for people to get
59:56
involved wasn't actually one of
1:00:00
resources it was one of will right it wasn't until the russian
1:00:05
invasion of ukraine
1:00:07
that all of a sudden i think socially politically it was okay
1:00:11
to want to support
1:00:12
these industries um you know i uh especially in the early days
1:00:17
of you know decisive
1:00:19
point when we were investing in the space a lot of it was
1:00:22
trying to pull companies
1:00:23
in and now there's of course companies that from day one this
1:00:26
is what they want to
1:00:27
SPEAKER_00: do
1:00:27
SPEAKER_00: And I remember,
1:00:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:30
I definitely personally had some heartburn about the wave of
1:00:35
people who overnight,
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: went from being,
1:00:37
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:38
SPEAKER_00: experts in building dating apps and now they're experts in the fence.
1:00:44
And the feeling that,
1:00:45
well,
1:00:47
it would have been nice if while we were in war,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: there was some of this interest.
1:00:52
I definitely vividly remember taping diesel glow plugs to the
1:00:56
end of a pole out in
1:00:57
SPEAKER_00: front of our Humvees to try and set IEDs off ahead of us.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_00: But as this has evolved,
1:01:07
I think that there has probably been more of a national
1:01:10
recognition than I had
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: expected there would be that this is important.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_00: And so...
1:01:16
SPEAKER_00: We're thrilled that people have come around to it.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's not too late.
1:01:22
I mean,
1:01:22
I think you wouldn't be investing in the space if you thought
1:01:24
it was too late.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I have so many thoughts on it.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_02: I just,
1:01:28
SPEAKER_02: it's like,
1:01:29
SPEAKER_02: it seems,
1:01:29
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:01:30
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:01:31
SPEAKER_02: because you can't fully do apples to apples,
1:01:33
SPEAKER_02: but it's like SpaceX has,
1:01:36
SPEAKER_02: you've always got commercial satellites that want to go up.
1:01:38
You've got,
1:01:39
you've got sort of government missions that are not totally
1:01:42
defense dependent.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_02: You've got Starlink,
1:01:44
SPEAKER_02: which is like this,
1:01:45
SPEAKER_02: is the real moneymaker,
1:01:47
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:01:47
SPEAKER_02: and is like a global consumer telco,
1:01:51
SPEAKER_02: basically,
1:01:51
SPEAKER_02: that's kind of funding all this.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_02: And then Andrew feels...
1:01:56
SPEAKER_02: To make all the math really check out,
1:01:58
SPEAKER_02: you're dependent on wars happening to some extent,
1:02:01
or at least people taking China seriously as a threat and
1:02:05
preparing for that,
1:02:07
SPEAKER_02: or just being like,
1:02:08
SPEAKER_02: hey,
1:02:09
SPEAKER_02: we are modernizing our military.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_02: When I'm hanging out to go see some of these weapons tests,
1:02:15
SPEAKER_02: you see what our military software has been the
1:02:20
SPEAKER_02: This is like America's great advantage.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_02: You know, nowhere does software better than us for 40 years.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, the stuff is like Windows 95 era.
1:02:31
It's like they just missed the last,
1:02:33
you know,
1:02:34
since like Google was invented.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_02: And it's like really, it's like shocking actually.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_02: And so,
1:02:41
SPEAKER_02: I feel like there has to...
1:02:43
SPEAKER_02: I just always wonder about where that will,
1:02:45
SPEAKER_02: how sustainable that will is,
1:02:47
SPEAKER_00: I think.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's structural challenges, right?
1:02:49
SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the biggest misnomers in,
1:02:54
SPEAKER_00: let's say,
1:02:54
SPEAKER_00: defense tech,
1:02:55
or really any technology that is going after one of these
1:02:58
regulated markets,
1:02:59
SPEAKER_00: whether it's nuclear,
1:03:00
SPEAKER_00: whether it's defense,
1:03:00
SPEAKER_00: whether it's space,
1:03:02
SPEAKER_00: is that the people who have been serving in government either...
1:03:08
SPEAKER_00: are not talented enough to solve the problem,
1:03:10
SPEAKER_00: they're not smart enough to solve the problem,
1:03:11
SPEAKER_00: they only have the will to solve the problem.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_00: I promise you,
1:03:14
every single soldier in the 75th Ranger Regiment wishes they
1:03:17
had better tech and
1:03:18
SPEAKER_00: would do anything if it were in their power to get it.
1:03:22
And so are all their leaders,
1:03:23
and so are the program officers and program managers.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_00: There's a willingness, but there is a very, very difficult
1:03:32
bureaucracy to navigate that has just been built over time and
1:03:36
has become durable
1:03:37
and entrenched in a way that no one company was going to
1:03:42
parachute in and solve all
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: those problems.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: And so I think it has been,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: like I said,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: a bit of a movement that has started to make this progress.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: And then,
1:03:52
SPEAKER_00: like I said,
1:03:52
I think there's also been a recognition of willingness on the
1:03:54
government side.
1:03:56
I've said it before in our discussion,
1:04:00
but the same is true for defenses and nuclear.
1:04:02
There's a moment in time right now where the government is
1:04:06
willing to listen and
1:04:07
SPEAKER_00: they want you to show them the pain.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: Show us how you would do it better.
1:04:11
And it's the most open,
1:04:13
I think,
1:04:13
that we've seen to folks making changes and accepting that.
1:04:18
I was looking at the Trump parade and there was like two
1:04:21
soldiers carrying two
1:04:22
SPEAKER_02: Skydio drones in their hand.
1:04:24
And then I just scrolled through my X feed and China was doing
1:04:29
like a drone show
1:04:31
SPEAKER_02: with like a hundred thousand drones in this very intricate dance.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_02: I just, I was like, okay, we've got some work to do.
1:04:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, one of the things that I think is, um,
1:04:43
You know,
1:04:44
you talked a little bit about are we going to be able to focus
1:04:46
enough on China?
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: The reality is, and I think we just saw it with what happened with Iran.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: We can be very focused on China, on those sorts of big type of conflicts.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: But the type of military that's built,
1:05:03
purpose-built for those types of problems is not the same
1:05:06
that's built for small
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: wars,
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: low-intensity conflict.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, a great example is
1:05:14
SPEAKER_00: When we left Afghanistan,
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: that was basically us saying,
1:05:18
SPEAKER_00: we're done with the Middle East,
1:05:19
SPEAKER_00: we're done with fighting terrorism.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_00: Terrorism was not done fighting us.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: And so there's,
1:05:25
SPEAKER_00: in my opinion,
1:05:28
there are some forever type of conflicts out there and we have
1:05:31
to be able to do it
1:05:32
SPEAKER_00: all.
1:05:34
in that way we are in a completely different position than
1:05:36
china who has to focus
1:05:38
on their strategic objectives in the long term you know we
1:05:41
always get i think we
1:05:42
always beat ourselves up about being short-sighted and being on
1:05:45
these four-year
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: cycles but the reality is the the demands on the united states and on our
1:05:50
department of defense and on our government are changing every
1:05:54
couple months yeah
1:05:55
SPEAKER_02: okay um all right kurt so tell me
1:06:00
SPEAKER_02: let's say everything goes as well as possible.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:06:04
SPEAKER_02: what does the world look like for nuclear over the next,
1:06:06
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:06:07
SPEAKER_02: you pick your,
1:06:07
SPEAKER_02: pick your time horizon,
1:06:09
SPEAKER_02: but,
1:06:09
SPEAKER_02: but something like five,
1:06:11
SPEAKER_02: 10,
1:06:12
SPEAKER_02: 15 years,
1:06:12
SPEAKER_02: um,
1:06:13
SPEAKER_02: between you guys commercializing this fuel,
1:06:17
SPEAKER_02: all these startups.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: What is, what does it look like in the U S?
1:06:21
Uh,
1:06:21
right now we're,
1:06:22
uh,
1:06:22
nuclear provides about 20% of the electricity,
1:06:24
uh,
1:06:25
in the U S,
1:06:26
uh,
1:06:29
SPEAKER_00: It's, these are aging plants.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:06:31
SPEAKER_00: they were built to operate 40 years,
1:06:32
SPEAKER_00: they got extensions to 60,
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: now 80,
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: but they need to be replaced.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: We wanna go up as a fraction of electricity.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: You understand all the demands on the grid with the renewables.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is, I've had like discussions
1:06:47
SPEAKER_00: over drinks where people are a little more honest,
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: with like senior VPs and utilities.
1:06:51
I'm like,
1:06:52
so like when the hyperscaler comes and says,
1:06:54
I want zero carbon and what do you sell?
1:06:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like solar, but I got a gas plant in the back.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_00: There is no like true, true carbon free.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_00: So, um,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_00: We've got to replace some of the fossil fuels, in my opinion.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_00: They're going to be a part of the mix.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_00: I love how much natural gas we're producing in this country.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_00: We've got to keep doing that, but they're going to be a part of the mix.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_00: We've got to fill this 20% back up.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_00: I want US to be between 40% to 60% getting its power from nuclear.
1:07:23
And we want to be the ones who are exporting this technology,
1:07:26
exporting these energy sources.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: Again, maybe similar to space,
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: EU is not leading, okay?
1:07:37
SPEAKER_00: But who's active out there?
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: The Chinese are selling reactors, the Russians are selling reactors.
1:07:42
Fortunately,
1:07:43
there's Koreans are selling reactors too,
1:07:44
but we want to be out there.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: We want to bring this energy to provide power to the world.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: I think everybody's familiar with the scale of
1:07:54
SPEAKER_00: you know, energy and prosperity, right?
1:07:56
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, look at, like, Africa.
1:07:58
SPEAKER_00: Like, that is a big continent.
1:07:59
It doesn't get enough attention because the world map is,
1:08:02
like,
1:08:02
right at the center.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: It's huge.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a lot of population there.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_00: That's where population is growing.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_00: So, again, whose technology is going to be powering that continent?
1:08:12
SPEAKER_00: So,
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: let's take care of our own,
1:08:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:14
SPEAKER_00: our own house first,
1:08:16
SPEAKER_00: and then let's go ahead and provide it to the world.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's the way...
1:08:23
SPEAKER_00: The way we look at it,
1:08:24
SPEAKER_00: this is,
1:08:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:25
SPEAKER_00: that's why we're really laser focused on the fuel business.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: Because,
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: we really want to be a very large scale,
1:08:34
SPEAKER_00: very low cost supplier,
1:08:35
SPEAKER_00: enabling all these things.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_00: And Triso is a motif.
1:08:37
SPEAKER_00: It's a building block, right?
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: We talked about,
1:08:40
SPEAKER_00: you can launch space reactors,
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: you can have small reactors,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: you can have bigger reactors.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_00: And maybe, Tommy, how did you select the name of the company?
1:08:49
SPEAKER_00: Where'd that come from?
1:08:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're following the footsteps of Standard Oil.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, and how did they win?
1:08:56
It wasn't just that they were producing,
1:08:58
it's that they won on distribution.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: How were they getting it out to the places that needed it?
1:09:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:09:04
Now I'm really disappointed in myself that I didn't put that
1:09:07
together until you said that.
1:09:09
SPEAKER_02: That's terrible.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh, my dad, my dad worked for, he's, he's, my dad's quite old.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_02: He worked for Humble and that was like a descendant of, uh, Standard Oil.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_02: That's terrible.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_02: You guys answered most of my big questions.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for your time.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_02: How much do you buy into...
1:09:30
We see Microsoft,
1:09:31
Google,
1:09:32
open AI,
1:09:32
everybody buying these nuclear reactor.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:09:35
SPEAKER_02: obviously you're,
1:09:36
SPEAKER_02: you're,
1:09:37
SPEAKER_02: you're,
1:09:37
you're a believer that that they're going to buy these little
1:09:40
plants for their
1:09:41
SPEAKER_02: days.
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: again,
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: like what's really different now compared to 10,
1:09:47
SPEAKER_00: 15 years ago,
1:09:47
SPEAKER_00: it's,
1:09:48
SPEAKER_00: they're not just talking,
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: they are,
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: they are,
1:09:50
SPEAKER_00: they're investing,
1:09:51
SPEAKER_00: they're signing power purchase agreements.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: They are.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: And I think really what's different, you know, like, uh,
1:09:57
SPEAKER_00: government's a part of it,
1:09:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:09:58
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:09:59
SPEAKER_00: this administration saying,
1:10:00
SPEAKER_00: we want to get out of the way you guys go ahead and,
1:10:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: do the work.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_00: What is the demand?
1:10:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm selling fuel.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: To the government,
1:10:09
SPEAKER_00: yes,
1:10:09
but I'm selling it to actual reactor developers that are
1:10:11
selling it to the
1:10:12
SPEAKER_00: hyperscalers.
1:10:13
I'm selling it to space companies,
1:10:15
like commercial space companies are buying it.
1:10:17
SPEAKER_00: So the demand, that's how an industry happens.
1:10:20
SPEAKER_00: Like you were talking about SpaceX that,
1:10:22
SPEAKER_00: well,
1:10:22
SPEAKER_00: you got the government customer,
1:10:23
SPEAKER_00: you got Stralink.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_00: I think an energy is just ubiquitous.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_00: You need it everywhere.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_00: So I think that demand is what's really different today.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_00: And yeah.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_00: Do you have a take on Commonwealth Fusion?
1:10:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm truly not a fusion expert.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: I went to grad school in New Korea.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: I have good friends in Lawrence Livermore.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_00: You remember in Lawrence Livermore, NIF, they did a shot that went above.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: That was one of my classmates.
1:10:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm so proud of my classmates.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_00: Her name is Andrea Kreitzer.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you should talk to her.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_00: But there's different forms of fusion.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: There's inertial confinement, magnetic confinement.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm not the fusion guy.
1:11:01
SPEAKER_00: One of my other housemates, he's the president of Pacific fusion.
1:11:04
SPEAKER_00: They just raised $900 million.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_00: So get some really informed people.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to, I don't want to butcher it.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:11:09
I,
1:11:10
it's very hard for me to tell,
1:11:11
yeah,
1:11:12
what's real and what's not among all those guys.
1:11:14
SPEAKER_02: And, and, um,
1:11:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm just busy making try some stuff.
1:11:20
Okay,
1:11:20
just to put a couple dates on things,
1:11:21
and then I'll let you guys go.
1:11:22
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:11:24
SPEAKER_02: the factory that I saw,
1:11:25
I think vaguely I can say it's like a prototyping factory to
1:11:30
bear all this out.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_02: A pilot line.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_02: A pilot.
1:11:32
SPEAKER_02: And then the goal...
1:11:34
SPEAKER_02: I think I saw in my reading was by 2027,
1:11:37
SPEAKER_02: you've got like $100 million in contracts to supply this fuel.
1:11:44
So the goal is to,
1:11:45
what I saw in Oak Ridge,
1:11:46
you want to make bigger versions of that.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_02: And then, is that?
1:11:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there's a fine point there in that we're done scaling.
1:11:54
So what you saw in Oak Ridge,
1:11:56
and people look at it,
1:11:56
they're like,
1:11:57
that's industrial scale.
1:11:59
SPEAKER_00: Well,
1:11:59
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:11:59
SPEAKER_00: because you can't put a lot of uranium next to itself,
1:12:02
then you get this thing called the critical nuclear reaction
1:12:04
that has really bad
1:12:05
SPEAKER_00: consequences.
1:12:07
SPEAKER_00: So that is the scale.
1:12:08
Like,
1:12:08
you know,
1:12:08
one of those,
1:12:09
like,
1:12:09
white furnaces that you saw,
1:12:10
that's the scale.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_02: Okay, and to describe it to people, yeah, not... Not that big.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_00: Not huge.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the factory was...
1:12:18
SPEAKER_02: much like any of many factories.
1:12:20
SPEAKER_02: I, I, I, or yeah, I mean, just not a building size.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_00: So the only thing we're doing, we just copy paste those, those systems.
1:12:28
SPEAKER_00: So the modules are done.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_00: So imagine like,
1:12:31
SPEAKER_00: again,
1:12:31
SPEAKER_00: a car industry analogy,
1:12:33
SPEAKER_00: we have one assembly line,
1:12:34
SPEAKER_00: you have 10 assembly lines.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_00: That's, that's all we're doing.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_00: And will that be in Tennessee?
1:12:39
SPEAKER_00: Do we know?
1:12:41
SPEAKER_00: We're expanding in a few different locations.
1:12:44
SPEAKER_00: They're all locations that have a lot of nuclear background.
1:12:48
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we're not going anywhere from Tennessee.
1:12:50
SPEAKER_00: We're expanding in Tennessee and a couple other places.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_02: And from that building I saw,
1:12:54
would you be able to hit the 2027 contracts or you need more
1:12:59
facilities for that?
1:13:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm putting more facilities for that.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to bring a few metric ton capacity.
1:13:05
It's not going to be much bigger than that,
1:13:07
but it's going to be bigger than that.
1:13:08
SPEAKER_00: And you saw there was construction going on, so we're expanding.
1:13:13
But I think what we saw in these executive orders that came out
1:13:16
a little over a
1:13:16
SPEAKER_00: month ago,
1:13:17
SPEAKER_00: it solved two core questions for the entire advanced nuclear industry.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: One is the source of the feedstock,
1:13:24
SPEAKER_00: that halo fuel,
1:13:26
which is gonna come from government stockpiles at least at
1:13:29
first as they stand up
1:13:30
SPEAKER_00: domestic enrichment capabilities.
1:13:33
SPEAKER_00: And then the other is the licensing timelines.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: Probably the most impactful thing is planting a flag and saying,
1:13:39
SPEAKER_00: this is how long it's gonna take to get a reactor licensed.
1:13:43
SPEAKER_00: And so now that those are largely answered questions, you know,
1:13:50
Our timelines around our capacity,
1:13:53
how we're scaling,
1:13:55
there's a lot more fidelity around that.
1:13:56
And I think what you'll see is us moving a lot faster and
1:14:00
bringing more capacity
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: online than we had even expected.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_00: And it's because the demand is there.
1:14:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:14:08
that's a great point because you don't want to spend 10 years
1:14:11
just like finding
1:14:12
SPEAKER_02: your spot.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't want, I don't, I wouldn't call it demand anymore.
1:14:15
SPEAKER_00: It's another word that starts with a D. Desperation.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_02: Uh, well, thank you guys so much for checking out here.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_02: I appreciate it.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_02: And thank you for,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_02: thanks to all your,
1:14:26
SPEAKER_02: um,
1:14:27
SPEAKER_02: staff and engineers who,
1:14:29
they were super kind to us when we were filming that kind of
1:14:31
went out of their way.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_02: We got cool things made, um, along the way.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_02: It was, it was, uh,
1:14:37
SPEAKER_02: I had read about you guys and I really wanted to come visit.
1:14:39
SPEAKER_02: And then it was unlike anything I've really ever seen.
1:14:43
SPEAKER_02: And I get to go to lots of weird stuff.
1:14:44
SPEAKER_02: So it was really cool.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_00: Worked out perfect.
1:14:47
SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate it, yeah.
1:14:48
SPEAKER_02: And it's weird because when you're in there,
1:14:49
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
1:14:50
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
1:14:50
SPEAKER_02: like in my head,
1:14:51
SPEAKER_02: you're just like,
1:14:52
SPEAKER_02: oh.
1:14:52
uranium nuclear all the we're just kind of we were walking
1:14:55
around i was a little
1:14:56
SPEAKER_00: disappointed yeah the first time i thought i was going to be in full yeah
1:15:00
protective we did go through this like machine at the end she
1:15:04
counted you right
1:15:05
yeah you were good yeah i was clean i was clean like you said i
1:15:08
was probably my
1:15:08
flight was probably the worst i'm sure the worst thing i did uh
1:15:11
well thank you guys
1:15:12
SPEAKER_02: so much it was a pleasure talking to you really appreciate it thank you
1:15:18
SPEAKER_02: Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashley Vance.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_02: The show is produced by David Nicholson and me.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_02: Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
1:15:29
SPEAKER_02: And the show is edited by the John Sortland.
1:15:33
SPEAKER_02: As mentioned, the show is sponsored by Yuan Ventures.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.