00:11:04 · Scott Nolan
[00:11:04] S0: So AP1000 is roughly one gigawatt reactor, one gigawatt of electricity production. And so you look at a lot of these data centers, and they used to be a few 100 megawatts. Now they're gigawatt scale. So in order to really move the needle quickly on approved reactor designs, you're gonna have to do something with a one gigawatt class reactor, and that's what you see the administration doing with deals around their deployment. In the next few years, we expect there to be a bunch of approved next generation reactor designs. Pretty much all the startups you've heard of are doing this type of design. A lot of people call them SMRs, small modular reactors. There's also microreactors in there. And so the big question people have or the big thought behind this, the big idea is, how can we take something that was historically a huge construction project and turn it into a factory build that can be done at scale? And so almost all of these companies have the premise of, we're going to take a civil works construction project, and we're going to turn it into a factory build that's modular, small modular reactors. We're going to take those modules, and we'll take them to the site. And then we'll connect everything and get it online without the same ten year construction effort that's required historically in The US. When you do that, you end up needing to make your reactor smaller. Then if you make your reactor smaller, your core smaller. Then if your core smaller, to get good nuclear reactions, to get good burn up, good efficiency, you end up wanting to run more enriched fuel.
00:12:39 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:12:39] S1: So That's like the difference between, like, three or 5% and, like, 20%? [00:12:42] S0: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's typically three to 5% or 19.75% is where most reactors are going. [00:12:48] S1: And what is the difference in the process for, like, enriching uranium if you're just doing, like, 3% or 5% versus, you know, 19.75 or 20? [00:12:55] S0: I I would think of it like a refining process or a... You know, even a distillation process. It's just like refining another time. So most enrichment methods are a series of steps to just further and further and further refine material. And so all you do is further refine it some more. So when when uranium comes out of the ground, it's about point 711% u two thirty five. And so that's the fissile material that you want, and that is elevated to 3% to 5% for the reactors on the grid today. So it's refined until you get to that threshold. For advanced reactors, that's taken up to 19.75, but the process is not fundamentally different to do that. [00:13:37] S1: And is this something where, like, tomorrow if there was a small, you know, SMR that could be turned on, does the fuel even exist right now to to make that, like, work? Or is this something that has to be kinda scaled in parallel?
00:13:37 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:13:37] S1: And is this something where, like, tomorrow if there was a small, you know, SMR that could be turned on, does the fuel even exist right now to to make that, like, work? Or is this something that has to be kinda scaled in parallel? [00:13:50] S0: Yeah. Not in the West. So the... Yeah. If we go back to the whole origins of General Matter, it was it was around this question. To answer your question directly, if if there were $25,000,000,000, what would I do? I would probably... You know, if you wanna get started today, you would deploy some some large reactors. You'd deploy some AP1000. There's a huge wave of advanced reactors coming through many startups, some incumbents. These are very promising. It is likely the path to bring down the cost of nuclear and to scale it rapidly. And so I would save some of that money for when they are licensed and they are ready to deploy deploy and some of those. You might do a mix of some microactors for some environments, for some remote applications, or if you can get their costs low enough, you can tile them together, and then other SMRs for applications like data centers and behind the meter.
00:13:50 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:13:50] S0: Yeah. Not in the West. So the... Yeah. If we go back to the whole origins of General Matter, it was it was around this question. To answer your question directly, if if there were $25,000,000,000, what would I do? I would probably... You know, if you wanna get started today, you would deploy some some large reactors. You'd deploy some AP1000. There's a huge wave of advanced reactors coming through many startups, some incumbents. These are very promising. It is likely the path to bring down the cost of nuclear and to scale it rapidly. And so I would save some of that money for when they are licensed and they are ready to deploy deploy and some of those. You might do a mix of some microactors for some environments, for some remote applications, or if you can get their costs low enough, you can tile them together, and then other SMRs for applications like data centers and behind the meter. [00:14:42] S1: When we were talking before we started recording, you mentioned that basically with Founders Fund, the way that you guys decide or, you know, you decided to start this company is almost under duress. Like, you ideally are trying to go find someone else that's doing it and, you know, go fund them. But if, you know, something is super critical and no one else is doing it, then maybe you're the right person to do it, and you go do that. How'd you kind of make that decision?
00:15:07 · Scott Nolan
[00:15:07] S0: Yeah. So the the origin story was really... At Founders Fund, I was looking at many different engineering companies, everything from transportation to space to nuclear, and so met a a number of nuclear companies, other energy companies over the years. By the late twenty... Early 2020s, there were a bunch of interesting advanced reactor companies, and Founders Fund invested in one of them, and I was talking to them about the path forward. And the prior on this was that the hardest thing would be getting license, because for a long time, no one had gotten a license on a new reactor design. And they said, yeah, there's something there that's not trivial, but there's a known process, and we're going do that process. It's just that no one's really tried to do that or no one's done it well, and we're gonna do it well. That was that was what the reactor company told me. And then they said the much bigger challenge besides getting a license is actually getting the fuel. And so I started looking into this and trying to understand, you know, what do you mean why the fuel is so hard to get? Clearly, we have reactors on the grid today that are running on fuel. Is it that much harder to make, HALEU, the more advanced fuel that you need, than to make LEU, you know, the 3% to 5% enriched fuel that all reactors run on? And I said, why the companies in The US that make that fuel make HALEU? And they said, aren't... What do you mean? There is no company. Yeah. There are no companies that make it in The US. We completely import it from Europe and from Russia. And so I said, well, okay. Where are you gonna get HALEU? And they said, there's there's one place. It's Russia. We have to import it. And so this, you know, combined with the... This was already challenging for them, but then combined with the Russia ban, it was extremely difficult. So
00:16:51 · Ty Morse
[00:16:51] S1: When you, like, initially get that information, what's going through your mind on this this clearly doesn't work? Like, there's this massive roadblock that's going to happen that you can see is going to happen. And for some reason, people are just kinda, like, saying, you we'll figure it out.