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…The US did have this long running anti-nuclear bent. I can't tell you how much has changed in the last few years. They changed the mandate of the NRC and they said, “You are no longer focused just on safety.” How capital-intensive is it going to be to get your product to market? In the hundreds of millions. Mothers against their mothers. And then I brought some graphite. Okay. Do you want to take that out? I'll show it to you. Sure. Yeah. This is what we are using for our moderator in our reactor. It has been designated a critical mineral. It's an important one— But this is just graphite. This is not Uranium 235 or something— I wouldn't have brought you that, would've been a little bit dangerous to be holding. Julia DeWahl is the co-founder of Antares, designing nuclear micro reactors for the military and other off-grid use cases. Cheers. It's great to be here. So you started out at first Opendoor and then SpaceX. What did you learn at each one of those that you took to Antares? Yeah, sure. I think one of the big things is always about customers. I mean, at the end of the day, this is why you build a business. At Opendoor, a lot of us were pretty young starting the business. I was one of the early employees there and none of us had ever bought, let alone sold a house. So a lot of it was learning what that was all about and I remember in the early days we were working on writing the copy for the website and we're like— You have no idea what a homeowner— We don’t really know much about this whole thing, so what can we do about that? We just went and sat outside a bagel shop for a Saturday and a Sunday morning and just bought people bagels and asked them about their processes, buying and selling a home, and learned a ton. And really thought about what language they were using, what were the pain points, and that was really important to just really get to know what we were trying to deliver on as a business. And then fast forward to joining SpaceX after Opendoor, I joined as Starlink was coming out of R&D and into go-to-market. That's why I was joining, to lead that team and the business operations there. And we launched and we got our first customers and so I invited our first customers to come join us via Zoom for an all-hands. And it was honestly the first time that many of the engineers had actually heard from the words of a customer themselves about the experience, and of course everyone loved the internet. The fast internet was amazing. Rural Idaho, this is a dream. But when we got to talking about the setup process, everyone kind of was like, “Oh, that sounds rough.” They're talking about multiple Home Depot trips. They didn't know if they had to cut down trees on their property, they couldn't get a pole long enough. And so— A lot of it was simplifying people's understanding of what it would mean. e Depot trips. They didn't know if they had to cut down trees on their property, they couldn't get a pole long enough. And so— A lot of it was simplifying people's understanding of what it would mean. People kind of didn't realize how the setup was so painful and it led to basically this cross-functional SWAT team that was dedicated to mounting options to be sold alongside the dish. And if you hadn't— First-party or third-party? We did it ourselves actually. We said it's important that we have a good experience for that because actually it is a big part of the experience and so we spun up a whole team. A lot of attention was given to mounting, which is like who ever would've thought? And I think, customers, again, they are the reason you start a business. Just bringing this back to Antares, I mean the reason we started Antares was to say the government, particularly the military, needs more energy resilience, especially for critical infrastructure. We just do so much more now in the cloud with satellites. Our missile defense sites are sitting there being powered by diesel generators still. Shouldn't we upgrade that? Okay, so I'll bite. What is Antares? Sure, sure. We're building micro-reactors, so small nuclear reactors and we are building in particular for critical infrastructure, largely for the military. Although we do think that as costs come down, there will be an interesting commercial market too. But basically anywhere where you're off grid for sure, or you just want resilience behind the grid as it exists today. Cyber attacks or whatever the grid goes down, you want backup power. It's a really great option. And if one megawatt is a small neighborhood, if one gigawatt is a big nuclear power plant like in The Simpsons, what are your SMRs? Sure, yeah. There's basically three classes size-wise. You have the really small ones, which are the micro-reactors, and we're actually one of the smallest of those. So we're even sub one megawatt. We're kind of in the hundreds of kilowatt scale. You could think of that as hundreds of houses worth of electricity. Then you have the SMRs, which is kind of this middle ground bucket, which is an interesting kind of neither here nor there, but potentially interesting. I'm sure we'll get into it. Kind of in the hundreds of megawatts or even 50 megawatts. And then you have the gigawatts, a thousand megawatts and that's what the current power plants are today. So you're a sub a megawatt. So we're super small. I see. Okay. So you're kind of similar nuclear reactor size to what would be on a submarine or something like that. Smaller than that even. Those are megawatt scales. So we're like, think about we're the size of a car reactor. Think about replacing a diesel generator that's used to power something that would be on the order of 200 to 300 homes of electricity. So it's quite small. And so a big part of your focus is providing power in places where you really need that reliability. You're talking about replacing diesel generators, is that kind of the design center for you? small. And so a big part of your focus is providing power in places where you really need that reliability. You're talking about replacing diesel generators, is that kind of the design center for you? Yeah. And anywhere where you're going to enable a capability, a mission capability, that wouldn't really be possible otherwise. So there's actually some really interesting space applications, potentially underwater applications as you move to… So you move away from what they call exquisite systems to attributable systems. This is where a really small reactor can come in very handy for the submarines are obviously multi-megawatt-powered systems, but these could be kilowatt-powered, smaller systems underwater. But yes, anywhere where you're off grid where today you're relying on what they call the fuel supply chain of bringing in fuel via helicopter or barge repeatedly and that being a vulnerability, this is a great option. So you're the Starlink of electricity, bringing it to places where— We're actually perfectly paired. And I wish we could offer a consumer product, that's not on our roadmap right now, but maybe one day, like backpack-sized nuclear reactor. I presume it kind of can't be on your roadmap, but why not? Is selling to the government is much easier than selling to something— So many reasons. I think that you always want to try to get your beachhead where it's the easiest to achieve. And so we believe, I believe, that premium power is where you need to go with nuclear. And there there's two places for that. One is what we're doing with Antares, which is to go to the military, help them with mission-critical needs where they're not cost-sensitive, where they already pay more for power, and go there and support them with this next gen better version of resilient power. Or you go and you sell, what we're seeing now I think, which is really interesting with the hyperscalers is they have carbon commitments. They want clean firm, they want 24/7 power. They're actually willing to pay above market rates for that and they will pay above market rates. So this premium power thing is a really interesting dynamic of where nuclear is kind of well positioned. What are the underwater applications? Well, it's really just, think mini-submarines. Oh, okay. Just really small systems. What drones are to maybe larger missiles. That's kind of the equivalent. It's not super far along just yet. Got it. Okay. What does the path look like between now and producing power for the military? I guess, first in a pilot environment and then kind of at scale outside of a pilot environment.…

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