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25 Nov 2025 Cheeky Pint Julia DeWahl of Antares on building nuclear reactors for the US military
“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.”
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- 25 Nov 2025
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- Cheeky Pint
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…It's producing power, and that's what we're aiming to do by the end of 2027. Wow, that's pretty soon. Yeah. What does the market look like for these small reactors? Who are you going to compete with? Well, the market for micro-reactors is one of these ones where it's like, well, there are no micro-reactors today on the market to just buy and use, so what do you think they're going to be, right? And so I think, first and foremost, it's going to be the most critical assets where you just cannot have them go down, which is why defense is the perfect first market for it. And so it's going to be all of your critical infrastructure on every single base that there is. Obviously you'll start with the most critical of critical missile defense sites and off-grid locations, things like that. And that's kind of defense. Then you think about commercial, basically you have to see where the cost curve gets you to “How cheap can it get?” This is just like space. Those first expensive launches into space that better have been a really important thing you were putting up there. But now that launch cost has come down, you can start to be like, “Oh, what else could we do? We can do some more stuff that's maybe not so mission critical.” I think we'll see the same thing in the commercial industries. Oil and gas has a lot of areas where they use diesel generators to do things like compressed natural gas along their pipelines and they actually have carbon commitments, which are really interesting that they're sort of thinking about. Ironically, can they move towards some more renewable or nuclear type resources? So I think there's going to be some commercial applications there too. Mining, for example, too. Anything that's just off grid, hard to power today, really hard to get fuel into. It's the perfect market. Yes, you're probably following the US military, there's all these controversies right now with people talking about fuel quality and fuel contamination issues in Asia, I think it is. But yeah, presumably places where you're worried about fuel availability at all times and ensuring that you constantly have access to fuel, that is the place where there'll be the most pull for these solutions. That's where generators work worst, versus— And there's a famous defense quote, I think it's “Unleash us from the tether of fuel,” which means just like, gosh, the logistics supply chain has been such a challenge. I mean it was 50% of, I think, the Afghanistan casualties were from just logistics, and so having situations where you 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. 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?…
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