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…t's a bit of a race. I think it's going to be fun. I mean, I wonder what Polymarket would have to say. Several reactor companies out there, even at the end of the market that you guys are going after. Everyone has their different niche. I think our niche is, again, the smallest, the most DOD-oriented. There's a lot of micro-reactor companies or SMR that are going after data centers and the data center buildout, which is an amazing market. I mean amazing. I think people will pay a lot more. Again, going back to the premium power point, they will pay more for power for this. Not exactly our target market. So your niche in the market, it seems like you guys have selected a part of the market where maybe there's less competition. There's still some people going after the military applications. There always are. I mean, if you have a good idea, there's going to be a few people working on it. How capital-intensive is it going to be to get your product to market? In the hundreds of millions. It depends on what you mean by to market. So I think our big milestone is like, can you build a reactor, prove it, turn it on, it's producing power. Then I think you can think about interesting layers of capital in terms of pre-orders for your reactor. This was going to be my next question. When does the money arrive? Yeah, exactly. Bigger government grants. So we're kind of still in the hundreds of thousands of… Single-digit millions of dollars of grants that we are getting right now. But you're moving into the tens of millions of dollars R&D grants, and then you want to eventually move into that kind of program-of-record real dollars. There's a really interesting program right now that the Army has put out called the Janus Program. Are you familiar with the COTS program that SpaceX used to bring to kind of develop their first reactor? Not by name, but I'm familiar with— Commercial Orbital Transport System. Yeah, yeah. I'm familiar. It was like the innovation basically to say, “Let's try something that's not cost plus and let's actually do something that's milestone-based and basically we'll cut you if you don't hit the milestone. And it’s fixed contract, we're not going to pay you for whatever.” So anyway, the Army has taken that model a bit and I think used that as inspiration for this Janus Program where they're saying we're going to fund up to three to five companies to build their first prototype alongside us, kind of out of base. And then we will choose a winner and we want to build five to 10 reactors, if not more, on bases. So they're like, the demand signal now is hot. This is great for our future fundraising for the industry in general. It's very, very good demand. A lot of ink gets spilled on military US defense contracting. What is your experience as someone who's attempting to sell to the military been? or the industry in general. It's very, very good demand. A lot of ink gets spilled on military US defense contracting. What is your experience as someone who's attempting to sell to the military been? I mean, people are actually kind of well aware that this cost-plus model is not great. The question is like, well, what are the alternatives? Who's going to go do it? Anduril has been an amazing example of that. So I think a lot of us in hard tech really look to them as what we try to emulate. Every branch of the military has these innovative arms that tell you, “Hey, we want to hear about your ideas.” And they do, actually. You can go talk to them. They're giving out grants for things. I do think everyone wants the innovation. In this day and age of information everywhere, you can learn a lot quickly. They do want to work with startups, so I think we'll only see more of it. But you have things like the government shutdown and the pace of government is slow. So you got to just kind of be able to keep pushing those timelines, again while not running out of money, to be able to make it through that valley of death. What's been harder than you expected building Antares? Because presumably you expected it broadly to be hard. You expected there to be a lot of technical risks— Harder than expected. There's a couple things. I mean, I think, gosh, recruiting is always hard. You're up against the SpaceXs of the world that have just a lot more credibility when you're the no name person at the very beginning. It can be hard. I think there's a lot of complexity, and even though I said we're making so much progress in regulation, there's still red tape everywhere. Things cost more than they probably should. We spend a lot of money paying the national labs to do things like clear out a pit so that we can test our reactor. And it's like we're paying for that and they're like, here's hundreds of thousand dollars. Here's the bill. So there's stuff that you're like, “Gosh, there's really a lot of expense everywhere and it just slows things down.” And so I guess we were somewhat ready for that, but some of this stuff just seems silly and when you're building in software, you don't have to worry about it. You just sit there code and do your thing and go right to market. When you have to work with the real world, you have to kind of play their games a little bit and you have to follow the process in some ways. And there's not always a way around it. Sometimes it's just through. You said there's still a lot of red tape despite the fact that there's been the first Biden-era and then Trump-era improvements. If 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? 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.…

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