00:03:06 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:03:06] S1: So What do you mean by that? [00:03:07] S0: Congress passed, you know, a law banning the import of Russian uranium starting on 01/01/2028. And, we're we're under a waiver process where utilities can say, I don't have a good source of this uranium, this enriched uranium, or this fuel other than Russia. And so we do need to import this to make sure that we can keep the lights on. And so that's the waiver process that's going on now. On 01/01/2028, that path, that waiver process actually expires. And so as as written in [00:03:39] S1: the law today, that that is the the deadline. Would you expect The US to kinda change their stance ahead of that to basically make sure that that doesn't just immediately get turned off overnight?
00:03:39 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:03:39] S1: the law today, that that is the the deadline. Would you expect The US to kinda change their stance ahead of that to basically make sure that that doesn't just immediately get turned off overnight? [00:03:48] S0: I mean, this is why what... We're doing what we're doing. So the the Russia bit... The Russia uranium ban was a bipartisan act, extremely, extremely supported in congress, very consensus. I don't think it's something that The US wants to back down on. And so the reason we started as as a company was to address the supply chain issues that The US is facing from low enriched uranium that powers today's grid, which is 18.6 to 19% nuclear, The advanced fuel that all advanced reactors need called HALEU, high assay, low enriched uranium, that we can't get at all today. So every advanced reactor company that you've heard of is is looking for this fuel and trying to find a long term supply. And so it's this this inability to expand the grid, to expand nuclear because we don't have the missing piece of enrichment is why we're doing what we're doing. So... And and, you know, whether Russia's in the market or not, this is a major issue that we're trying to address.
00:03:48 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:03:48] S0: I mean, this is why what... We're doing what we're doing. So the the Russia bit... The Russia uranium ban was a bipartisan act, extremely, extremely supported in congress, very consensus. I don't think it's something that The US wants to back down on. And so the reason we started as as a company was to address the supply chain issues that The US is facing from low enriched uranium that powers today's grid, which is 18.6 to 19% nuclear, The advanced fuel that all advanced reactors need called HALEU, high assay, low enriched uranium, that we can't get at all today. So every advanced reactor company that you've heard of is is looking for this fuel and trying to find a long term supply. And so it's this this inability to expand the grid, to expand nuclear because we don't have the missing piece of enrichment is why we're doing what we're doing. So... And and, you know, whether Russia's in the market or not, this is a major issue that we're trying to address. [00:04:46] S1: I'd love to talk about the history of uranium enrichment. I think back in the, like, early two thousands, space and actually getting astronauts to orbit was one of the last things that, like, Russia was only able to do, and The US didn't really... Like, we were shutting down our shuttle program, and then SpaceX came in, and now that's kinda flipped. How did, like, the world kind of unfold where Russia is actually supplying us with this very critical material?
00:05:11 · Scott Nolan
[00:05:11] S0: It's an interesting history. So The US was first to do enrichment. We did it during the Manhattan Project. We did it for nuclear weapons to win World War II. And that was done using a process called gaseous diffusion. It was a first generation technology. The US did it at scale, did it across a few sites, Oak Ridge, Tennessee Paducah, Kentucky Portsmouth, Ohio, three places that we did enrichment for decades. And that enrichment was it was used for weapons originally, but very quickly then used for nuclear power. And so The US was a leader in enrichment. We were doing it 5% to 90% of worldwide enrichment was the using this gaseous diffusion process. That was something we thought was really important during the Cold War to have our own supply chain. Later, after The US got this capacity online, Europe came up with their own enrichment. Russia came up with their own enrichment capacity. These were with a second generation technology, the gas centrifuge. And so these two paths kind of diverged. The US kept doing gaseous diffusion. Europe and Russia did centrifuge. The US kept it going until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And at that point, The US said, hey, we're clearly now in a free trade world. We don't need to do this gaseous diffusion process anymore. The process that Europe and Russia went with is more efficient. We can trade for this. This is an economic decision. It's not a national security decision as much. We have a huge stockpile. We have plenty of weapons. We do not need more of that. Let's focus on nuclear energy. And for nuclear energy, we don't really need to have our own enrichment capacity. This old process is a lot more expensive. It's more energy intensive. Let's work with our our foreign allies to to trade. And so over the next few decades post the Berlin Wall, The US progressively shut down its gaseous diffusion capacity to the point of in 2013, it shut down the last plant that was owned and operated by The US in Paducah, Kentucky. And we said, we'll keep trading. And so over the last decade, it's become more obvious that that probably wasn't the right approach.
00:07:28 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:07:28] S1: Is there a reason that The US kind of made that decision in the first place? Like, it seems like a very strategic thing to have here in our borders. How did that happen? [00:07:36] S0: I think it's like a lot of industries where we said we're in a global free trade world. You know? We're we're we're allies with Europe. We're on good terms with Russia. We're trade partners with China, freely trading with them for the last, you know, decade, all the way all the way... You think of all the way back to, like, the Clinton administration. This seemed like the consensus. China's a growing economy. We can move manufacturing there. We can do other things here and then, you know, free trade. So I think we just undervalued the importance of having our own capacity, whether it's manufacturing or critical minerals or things like the nuclear supply chain. On one level, that's... It's purely a domestic US thing. Like, how do we make sure we have our capability? But the second tier of it is really global influence. So today, because we can't produce fuel for reactors unilaterally within The US, Russia and China are really driving, you know, the vast majority of reactors that are deployed elsewhere. So north of 70% of reactors internationally, I think, are are Russian and Chinese designs because they can come with a fuel supply. One of the
00:08:52 · Ty Morse
[00:08:52] S1: things that really surprised me when I was researching for this interview was, apparently, The US actually has the most reactors out of any country right now. I think it's, like, 94, and China is at something like 59. But China is turning on, like, 28 to 30 right now. Like, they're under construction, whereas The US maybe has two. And so they are, just like solar, just gonna absolutely destroy us if if the current trends persist. How do you think we kind of stop and buck those trends and get back to building nuclear?