00:48:00 · Scott Nolan
[00:48:00] S0: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's when you're specifically making hardware that then goes and launches and performs a service. In our case, the service that we're performing is enrichment. I would say it's commonly understood to be an energy input problem, so a little bit harder to get the exact idiom index on that. Like, how efficiently can you use energy to enrich? I think in the gaseous diffusion world, it was a lot of energy cost, and so that was the focus of how do we bring this down. But if you actually look at a facility that's doing enrichment, there's a tremendous amount of CapEx, upfront spend in fixed equipment that does the enrichment. And actually, the energy cost is relatively low. And so the version of your question is like the idiot index, as popularized by SpaceX, is a guide on how much should we be able to bring down the cost. And SpaceX has always said we can bring it down 10 times, an order of magnitude over time, maybe two orders of magnitude. Get it all the way down from that $100,000,000 not to $1,000,000 but maybe even lower if we can reuse this hardware and not throw it out every time. For us, the focus has been how do we make the most economical enrichment service in the world? How do we make it extremely safe and reliable but primarily scalable and lower cost? And that comes through really thinking through, how do you design a much, much better facility? How do you do better building construction? How do you make the guts of it better? How do you site in a better location? So on and so forth. And so we think there's easily potential for a 2x reduction in the cost of enrichment versus where it sits today and likely more, and there's a lot of ways you get there. You get there through designing your own technology, not using off the shelf. You get there through building your own in house EPC rather than outsourcing everything to a GC. Instead, manage your own subcontractors and run your own project. And maybe even site in a place with relative... To do those final optimizations, pick locations that have available energy at reasonable cost.
00:50:18 · Ty Morse
[00:50:18] S1: When you were starting out, because there's literally only one, like, operational enrichment facility that's just not, like, r and d focused in The United States, and you know that it's gonna take, like, a multiple multiple years, maybe half a decade in order to get this thing operational so you're actually producing your rich uranium. How much were you thinking you were gonna vertically integrate and try to do all in house versus, like, go find other suppliers and things and take learnings from other people that are currently doing it?
00:50:42 · Scott Nolan
[00:50:42] S0: Yeah. I think the intuition was that we would have to do it in house. That was almost out of the gates and almost an assumption. And we did question this a little bit, but it became very obvious that a lot of things we would have to do ourselves in house, really drawing on the lessons that we saw in the early days of SpaceX. And so our team comes from a whole mixture of places. There are people who worked at SpaceX and then went to work at other companies and wanted to get back something very mission oriented. Places like SpaceX and Tesla and Anduril, the whole tech world who has actually broken into incumbent dominated, high capital, government partnered industries. So that's the tech world. We also have people from National Labs who have seen the full range of the most advanced technologies, and then even people from other parts of the nuclear fuel supply chain who are very aware of how this works. And so combining that experience and just talking through how should we do this, really in the first months of the company, it was pretty obvious that there were certain things you could use existing supply chains for, but some things you would just have to do yourself. Those were pretty straightforward. I'd say the thing that we learned in the first year of the company that maybe is more surprising is that not only did you have to do that, but you really should design and build the buildings yourself. Not with every single piece of expertise, not with every trade inside the company, but you need to project manage your own project, not just for cost but for schedule. And the minute that you throw your building design over the wall and you say, Hey, some outsource firm, can you figure out what we want and design a really great building for us? There's so much that has to be explained in that process that it's unreasonable for someone else to figure that out unless you're... If if you're building a warehouse, if you're building, like, an Amazon warehouse, maybe it is so standard that it's just it could be done by someone else in a cookie cutter fashion. But when you're doing something more bespoke
00:52:50 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:52:50] S1: Is this a little bit more of the product is the factory, and that's what you have to get great at building? [00:52:56] S0: That's right. Yeah. And that extends to, obviously, the guts of the factory. But the thing that was unexpected or that we learned over time and that's now obvious in hindsight is you should design your building the way that you need it to be, and you should manage that project just like every other piece. Did you [00:53:12] S1: try to outsource this initially? [00:53:14] S0: We didn't go too far down that path, but it's what's typically done in the industry. You hire a GC, they run your project, they do all that. And we felt like it was important to do that in house. And that's something we saw and learned by talking with people who had been part of the Tesla Gigafactory builds and just hearing what their experiences were when they tried to do certain things with third parties with who are going to need more guidance than you can provide versus just doing it in house. [00:53:45] S1: So we were just talking about the IDEA index in reference to basically the cost of the finished good versus the raw material inputs. I also think something that's interesting to think about is how long a conventional timeline is versus what the actual timeline is if you kind of eliminated all the unnecessary requirements and all these other [00:54:02] S0: things. Yep. [00:54:03] S1: How do you think about kind of the idiot index for timelines?
00:54:06 · Scott Nolan
[00:54:06] S0: Yeah. The the idiot index is a pretty harsh way of saying it because often... I mean, often things are the way they are, and the people working on them are really smart. Like, they're really smart people. They're not idiots. They're, they're trying pretty hard to to do their best, but people are often working on something quite narrow, or their piece of the puzzle is just what they're working on. And the the thing you really have to do is just rethink the puzzle from from big picture. And so, yeah, the schedule piece. So I I think commonly understood it's a cost thing. Like, a rocket, yeah, it costs a $100,000,000 for a launch. You throw the rocket away every time. Why is it that $100,000,000 comes from only $1,000,000 of parts? How can we make this thing cheaper? There's the same thing on schedule side where if you just take the conventional approach and you say, Okay. This is how it's been done. Let's continue doing it that way. We do this step first. We do this step next, and we keep, you know, working our way down the chain. It's gonna take five years, and that's just how we should do it. A lot of times, you can just question, do you really need to do everything in sequence? Which things can we do in parallel? Maybe we're taking some financial risk to do it in parallel. Maybe we will have to go back and redesign something that's inconsequential for some other paths but to do it better. But how do we just get going, and how do we get something started or online or launched as quickly as we can because time's wasting? And in our case, the industry needs us to do this. And so how do we go quickly in safe, responsible way that may end up being slightly higher cost but may actually be cheaper because we did it in half the time? And so the cost side is pretty well discussed at this point. On the schedule side, I think there's really probably two main variables. One is which things are you doing sequentially versus in parallel, and then how long does each step take? And both have to be interrogated to really get to get the shortest amount of time.
00:56:13 · Scott Nolan
In our case, that means everything from, at the same time, doing engineering work, tech development, standing at manufacturing capability, finding the location of the facility, preparing the grounds of the facility for construction, working on licensing, all these things at the exact same time so that you're not just waiting for something to be completely done and perfected and then going to the next step, which could make your project take twenty years versus Five. Five, three years. So one big dimension is parallelization. I think that's pretty obvious. The second dimension that's probably not fully appreciated is one that wasn't even, to me, evident at SpaceX in the early days. It's how much are you really questioning each block of time? What's the resolution of a Gantt chart? Is it one month? Is it one week? Is it one day? Is it an hour? And so can we question these tasks of like, oh, yeah, that'll take me a week. Okay. Is it really a week, or is it like four days? And how do we start really pushing on the limits of what can we do? How quickly can we get this stuff done? Why are we gonna wait for a week from now when someone's waiting on the decision from us to go design this other component? When we're all in a room right now, no one's leaving this room. Let's just decide right now in the next fifteen minutes based on what we know. If we can't get to a decision because we need more information, let's reconvene tonight. Please go get that piece of information. Let's decide because that other team over here is waiting on that. We need to get them that information, or they're gonna just be burning time, and we could be moving forward. So I think it's really those two things of how do you parallel path things. Second, how do you bring in the time or bring in the resolution of this? And I guess there's a military saying about this, that minutes make hours, hours make days, days make months. And so how do we just really focus on the minimum amount of time that we can get something done? There's probably a third piece that I did see at SpaceX even from the earliest days I was there, which was this idea that instead of deliberating over something to get to 99% certainty, let's just get to where we think it's probably the right choice with some degree of certainty,