Speaker unverified: preference

Transcript context

…f you were in charge and no Energy Czar, or we'll give you a role with enough powers across all these departments, what would you change? What do you think the specific improvements we could make are? If I were fully in charge of energy, I would love to see the US government be a buyer. Just like the NASA was a buyer for SpaceX's eventual launch product. I think having the US government be a customer for nuclear would be great. And so we have this a little bit with the DOD. It was a very interesting announcement that just came out a week or two ago that doesn't have a ton of detail, but it's starting in this direction. I think it's very positive. I'm a small government person, so I don't say this lightly, but I do think there are certain things when it's national security related and things like energy resilience, there should be public-private partnership. But anyway, the announcement is that the US government now wants to spend $80 billion on nuclear development alongside Westinghouse. So they’ve basically chosen the technology, and I think that's actually a good thing, because you want to be able to build one thing and then repeatedly build it so that you are not reinventing the wheel every time, you actually have economies of scale, the learning curve that you go down from doing that. So I'm excited about that news. I think that's the type of policy I'd want to see more of. And we will see how it goes. I mean, this is the biggest ever commercial nuclear public-private partnership we've seen. And sorry, specifically they're buying from Westinghouse, just a large amount of nuclear power? Well, it's a combination. So this is where, I mean the details are a little fuzzy, but they've announced $80 billion. They've announced Westinghouse as the partner of choice. Not all those dollars are going right to Westinghouse. Granted, and that's a company that makes just the reactor itself. So there's money that you would spend on a plant or licensing fees or whatever else that surrounds that, but I think it's really positive. I think what it does is it's a catalyst for the whole industry, like supply chain, workforce. People are now paying attention like, oh, there's real dollars to be made here. There's a huge trillion dollar asset under management company called Brookfield Asset Management, and they've actually just gotten in the game as well in the last couple of weeks. I'm sure there was talk, right? To take the V.C. Summer plant that never got completed in South Carolina and actually finish it. And so again, they now have some nice tailwinds with those new production subsidies. They are partnering with the local utility to, and again, a local utility doesn't have the risk appetite to do this themselves or the balance sheet to do this themselves. And so there's some really nice, I think, market signal you get when the government's saying, “We're going to spend 80 billion on this,” but I think it gets the rest of the industry moving. hemselves. And so there's some really nice, I think, market signal you get when the government's saying, “We're going to spend 80 billion on this,” but I think it gets the rest of the industry moving. As you guys were exploring and developing the early stages of your business plan, did you consider for a product that is as tightly regulated as this, did you consider doing any jurisdiction shopping where you develop a product that you sell in Singapore or the UAE or Prospera or some more favorable jurisdiction? We really didn't. It felt like there was enough signal that we would be able to get through regulatory and see some positive change. There was enough basically demand signal within the US and I don't know, we take pride in also building for our country and it feels good to be developing something for our military and our allies. So yeah, we didn't really shop it around too much. And I guess the US military is a large buyer, in this case. Very large buyer, the largest buyer of non-commodity energy, if not all energy. How soon afterwards will you go to… I presume you want to do civilian premium power use cases, like you're saying an oil rig seems like the obvious one that ironically, that it would be hard to get gas. It would be hard to get refined diesel or gasoline to an oil rig. Does that come right afterwards or is that such a different bottlewax from a regulatory point of view that maybe it's like 10 years later? You're developing concurrently. We are talking with oil and gas already, just understanding them. What do you need? What do you think you'd pay? That sort of thing. So I would say it fast follows, right, a few years later. I think it's going to be such a nice proving ground. If we can make it through and test on a military base, for example, and get a first reactor live and get some revenue from that, then I think it's opened the aperture pretty broadly for what else is out there. Does this movement towards reinsuring manufacturing in the US and various blockers people talk about to that between supply chain is difficult in… You've talked about in the fuel context, but also supply chain for manufacturing, talent and the roles that people go into and finding talent in specific areas. I'm just curious, what has your experience been of building a hard tech company in the US? upply chain for manufacturing, talent and the roles that people go into and finding talent in specific areas. I'm just curious, what has your experience been of building a hard tech company in the US? Supply chain is… Yeah, the bottlenecks. Supply chain is challenging. When you need to work with nuclear grade material and no nuclear plants have really been built. It makes for a very limited number of suppliers, which means costs are higher. Options are just fewer. So if they're not responding to your email like, well, what are you going to do? There's only one other option. And I don't know, they're busy or whatever. So those dynamics are really challenging. The graphite that I brought here is actually from a Japanese company. No one's even processing that stuff in the US. And so you're literally going all over the world for these supplies. So that's challenging. Talent is challenging in the sense that there are so many options for hard tech in the LA region, so you need to have a compelling mission, but nuclear is compelling. So it's been challenging, but not in some ways. If you want to work at SpaceX and you love space stuff and you want to be at that name brand place, we've lost you. But if you're interested in nuclear and being able to build from the very beginning, that's a compelling piece. Yes, it's the Shackleton pitch of— Totally. High risk of failure. And that's the pitch that you're making. I like that. What trends in nuclear should we be excited about right now? So the trend I'm excited about is bringing back online these recently shuttered plants because they don't take too much money to bring back online. And we've seen a couple big power purchase agreements where you have Google partnered with I think NextEra or the Iowa-based utility to bring on Dwayne Arnold, which was shut down about five years ago. And then you have actually Three Mile Island. The site of the infamous accident is also— Almost accident. Well, it was an accident but it was not really a big deal. This much radiation came out. It was the amount of a chest X-ray. Completely overblown. That's being brought back online, partnership between Microsoft and Constellation, I believe. So that's kind of fun. I mean, you're seeing, let's go take these assets that are just sitting there that shouldn't have been turned off. Bring them back online, bring them back to life. Tons of power coming out of them, and we need it yesterday, right? Yeah. I mean, it's so striking. The big trend in the US right now, being that grid demand was flat for the longest time. We were completely not adding power generation nor adding power transmission. And now because of data centers, essentially we have this enormous boom that is just leading to things that maybe previously would've been competitive. People can't get enough of anything. People can't get enough of nuclear, they can't get enough of solar, they can't get enough of natural gas. Just everything is backlogged. It's really interesting. Even the natural gas turbines are backlogged. Totally. Multiple years. Across all the manufacturers.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.