Speaker unverified: preference

Transcript context

…ou can reduce that risk helps and it's a great kind of market fit. Yes. You were saying this new market for these small reactors today. Why not? We've had nuclear efficient technology for a long time. Yeah, why hasn't it been done? Gosh, there's so many reasons. We ended up… I think there was just a macro really negative climate around nuclear in general, so it impacted anything small as well, coming out of the seventies. So you had macro forces related to inflation, cost of capital. People stopped building, which coincided with the environmental movement, which was extremely anti-nuclear. They actually sort of conflated nuclear weapons testing even with, it was just like “no nukes” with energy. It's like, oh, that's actually pretty different. So a lot of things converged in the seventies and then by the eighties we stopped building in nuclear. Okay, so you just view it as a part of the general anti-nuclear swing and that also led to the cessation of construction of new nuclear plants in the US and everything like this. Just your corner of the market also got caught up in that and that's why we haven't ended up with them. Were there ever products available at this size range? There were, but they were pretty few and far between. Mostly test reactors, small things built. We actually put one reactor into space in the 1960s to test that out. Did it work? Yeah, for a bit. I mean a few months and was like, “Let's try to do some systems in space with power.” It's important to have power in space and I think that's a whole other frontier. Obviously the US did have this long running anti-nuclear bent. Where I grew up in Ireland similarly, there was the exact same thing and Ireland was very paranoid about a particular British nuclear power plant, Sellafield, that was just across the Irish Sea. Actually, I don’t know. Does Ireland have nuclear? Ireland has no nuclear power. The UK does. France does. Ireland does not, and I believe it's banned and so— Interesting. There's actually many states in the US that have bans as well, but they've just been falling left and right. It's so cool to see. Well, I was going to ask this. The vibe has really shifted over the past 10 to 15 years. Why? Honestly, it reminds me of gay marriage. And if you look at the polling— It came from the youth. It definitely comes from youth for sure. But it just kind of… Enough things add up and it just swings and no one ever looks back, type of thing. That's how it feels. The percentage point change we've seen in the last five to 10 years is almost 20 points. I mean, it's like 17 points or something. So it's 60 plus percent of people support nuclear. It's actually almost surprising it's that low in some ways. But yeah, I mean it's just huge public sentiment shift. And I think the old hippie nuclear weapons testing folks are kind of dying out. What is wild though is I did little activism related to Diablo Canyon Power Plant here in California, which was slated to be shut down this year. Sure. ear weapons testing folks are kind of dying out. What is wild though is I did little activism related to Diablo Canyon Power Plant here in California, which was slated to be shut down this year. Sure. And just a few years ago, Newsom had to kind of begrudgingly say like, “Oh, you know what? We probably should keep this thing on. We can't afford to have the power going out.” But I listened in on some hearings. I actually gave some testimony there, and it was so funny to me. The biggest organization that showed up against Diablo Canyon was called Mothers for Peace, and it's like, do you understand the irony of your name? This organization was that old that it was related to the nuclear Cold War, right? Totally. And it's like, gosh, we've moved on. We were joking. I sort of am part of this Mothers for Nuclear organization that's just like tongue and cheek— Our mother against their mothers. Our mothers against their mothers. And it's just funny how old school a lot of that opposition is. Yeah. So I guess there’s a “science advances one death at a time” dynamic going on here, where the memory of the 1960s and peak nuclear confrontation and Three Mile Island and all these things. As all that fades, maybe it creates an environment where people can be more supportive of nuclear. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What was your activism around Diablo Canyon? It was just exactly that. It was like, let's make sure that this actually passes and we don't shut it down. There was a lot of people just calling and saying, “Hey, listen, nuclear is super safe. It's carbon free. Sensibly in California, we care about these things. Like, let's support this. Let's overturn whatever legislation was done 10 years ago that said we should shut this thing down.” And it did pass. So now we do still have it open. Everyone on Progress Twitter likes to complain about the NRC. But for the NRC, we would be living in that Jetsons vision of the future and everyone would have their nuclear-powered car that they used to drive to their nuclear-powered office and everything. Is that true? How good or bad is the current regulatory environment? How much is that changing? d have their nuclear-powered car that they used to drive to their nuclear-powered office and everything. Is that true? How good or bad is the current regulatory environment? How much is that changing? Yeah, yeah. I think it's an overestimated headwind, certainly today. I think if you go back five years ago, 10 years ago for sure, I mean they hadn't licensed anything in decades. There had been nothing new, but I can't even tell you how much has changed in the last few years. It's kind of remarkable. And it's been across both the Biden and the Trump administration, which is amazing to see. I mean the legislation around nuclear passes 95 to 5 type of thing. It's really, really strong bipartisan. What was interesting to see is it started with Biden, a bunch of legislation related to modernizing and reforming the NRC. The biggest thing they did was they changed the mandate of the NRC and they said, “You are no longer focused just on safety.” Because what's the safest number of nuclear reactors to license? Zero. So they expanded that, “You must consider the full environment, the full civilization…” that's great. And then just change things around like the advanced reactor pathway, removing some of the barriers. And then it's continued on with Trump and in fact, he's sort of added even some more teeth and specificity. So right now they've changed it to, you have 18 months to get your answer from the NRC. License or no license. Do you pass or not? And what happens if they exceed the 18-month window? Probably it's in the details somewhere. But the point is that these have been declared that timeliness is important. There's also been some leadership change, which is just more reform-oriented, which is great, and there's just a huge microscope on it. Everyone's watching. Everyone knows now who's submitting their paperwork and what's going to come out the other side. Another thing that happened with some of these Trump executive orders is the Department of Energy pathways have been also unopened and unblocked for test reactors. And so actually Antares is part of this new test reactor program, which allows the DOE, alongside usually Idaho National Lab, to be sort of your regulator as you’re testing your first reactors so that you don't have to spend all this time upfront with the NRC for something that you're just still innovating on and iterating on. That's a really nice, I think, first step before you go through the NRC. Wait, so let me make sure I'm getting this right. There is now a Trump-era change where we essentially, for the first time ever, have a second nuclear regulator where you can go the NRC path, but also there's a regulatory sandbox where you can start by working with the DOE and get up and running. Yeah, that's essentially right. How big is the sandbox?…

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