00:58:34 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:58:34] S1: more Maybe than eighty fifty percent. [00:58:37] S0: Maybe in some cases, like 50%. Maybe there's cases where, hey, these two things we really understand, they're both pretty good paths. Instead of figuring out which one is 10% better, let's just pick one and not waste three months, and let's just go, and let's let's make forward progress because that momentum... Like, every day we're waiting. We're spending money. There's salaries. There's other costs. The opportunity might be going away. The industry might be struggling because we're not there to help. And so it's this concept of if something is reversible, if it's a easily reversible decision, just go. And so I think that can shave months as well. [00:59:14] S1: I remember Elon said that he had... Or like in Walter Isaacson's biography, they had this mental model where he would say every day that they didn't, like, get to orbit or, you know, some other metric was basically a lost future day of 10,000,000 of revenue. And so if there was something that they could just move one day sooner by, like, spending a $100,000, that may make sense, like flying one part from, like, LA to quads or something like that. Yep. How do you kind of think about taking risk and what things are you willing to basically take risk on in order to move the timeline just slightly faster or maybe move the probability of the timeline happening faster?
00:59:51 · Scott Nolan
[00:59:51] S0: Yeah. Yeah. There's two versions of that metric. One version is the tail end. Like, okay. What date do we go online, to your point? How much... How many dollars per day of of launch revenue or, whatever business you're in? So that's the once you're online date. And if you're building, like, a pharmaceutical plant, okay, a million dollars a day of revenue. Every day we can bring that in is worth a million dollars. The other version of it, if you're a very early stage company, imagine, like, three people in a garage working, and they say, well, our product, it's out there, we'll be making hundreds of thousands a day. We need to spend $100,000 today to go one day faster. You could run out of money. So there's a current burn version of this. There's a future revenue version, and there's a current burn version. And the current burden version is basically how much are we spending today on salaries if we can bring our schedule in by one day? We know it's at least worth that. So there's two bounding versions of it. Probably the big picture one to really focus on is the once you're online version and not be myopic and just worry about today's spend because you're trying to really get to that end target. But you've got to survive to get there. And so the right answer is typically somewhere in between those two things, subject to one requirement, which is you're not increasing your cost structure of the company with that decision on an ongoing basis. So if you said, Hey, my burn today as a company is $10 a day. Let's bump it to $20 a day to bring in schedule one day. The next day, when you evaluate this question, you're going say, Our burn today is $20 per day. We should bring it in by day. You can get into sort of escalating spend, but when they're one off decisions, usually there's opportunities that are not marginal. It's not like, Oh, we're going to earn an additional million in revenue by spending $900, it's usually much more like, hey, everybody take a step back. We can shave this amount of time off the schedule and increase revenue, like total revenue that we ever collect by a million dollars by spending $5. I think that's a good trade. Let's do that.
01:02:05 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
And people are very reluctant to, in a big company, propose those things, like propose we're going to spend a lot more money on this project to get it there faster, but I think that's one of the tools that's in the toolkit to accelerate. And you see the same thing even in the film industry. Sometimes they will have to wrap up filming of a movie faster to actually save money. And so a lot of people think, going back to the speed question, people associate going faster with spending more. Sometimes you can actually go faster and spend less and get a better product. So I think that's not commonly appreciated, remembering that's really important. [01:02:45] S1: What's been a moment over the past, like, two years while you've been working on this where you've been able to make one of those rapid decisions that was able to kind of bring in timelines or, you know, you spend a little bit of money and shave some massive hurdle off your checklist?
01:03:00 · Scott Nolan
[01:03:00] S0: Yeah. Maybe maybe one of the decisions that we made over the last couple of years that in hindsight is kind of obvious, but that we could have spent years and years trying to think about was where to put our facility. And so the first year of the company, we spent a lot of time going around looking for the right sites to put in a Richmond facility. And one direction we approached this one from was which states... You know, really thinking about this from a commercial perspective, which states and areas are very supportive of energy production in general, and which ones have some history of nuclear energy or uranium mining or different parts of the supply chain. And let's go to those places, and let's look for vacant land that could potentially work. And so we spent about a year visiting something like, I think it was 11 different states, looking at over 1,000 pieces of land, not in person, but one way or another, and certainly hundreds in person. And we could have really boiled the ocean on that and just tried to come up with complicated frameworks for evaluating these things and trading them all off each other. And after some time of looking at it this way, we came across Paducah, Kentucky, and we realized this community is extremely supportive of enrichment. It's the last place in the country that it was actually performed at scale. It was shut down in 2013, so people remembered what it was like to have the facility and understood that it was safe and an important part of Yeah. The And so really this question of what is the right place to go, you could do a really exhaustive search and do community surveys and look at costs and look at tax incentives and look at the cost of land and look at your supply chain and shipment and all these things. Or you could just say, where's the last place this was done in the country that we know people are happy to have it in their community and appreciate it and understand how important it is? And it would point you straight to Paducah, Kentucky. And so once we realized that that community... You know, once we had visited that community, we understood their support for nuclear and for enrichment, and then we're able to work out a lease with the Department of Energy on a part of the land on that site.
01:05:14 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
It was it was a very obvious choice that we could have otherwise spent years trying to figure out and which other companies have spent years trying to figure out looking around The US. So we made a a really well informed choice because we'd done all that work in other areas, but it was very obvious to us once we once we finally picked Kentucky, and it's it's been awesome since. And that allowed us to to really get started on all the different pieces required to to bring the facility online. [01:05:43] S1: I think with this sort of company, this is gonna be a multi decade journey. And even setting out, I think, your guys' timeline is trying to have the first facility online in the next five years producing enriched uranium. How do you kinda think about maintaining this, like, maniacal urgency while also understanding that these are, like, multiyear timelines just to turn on the first facility and then scale up as quickly as possible?
01:06:08 · Scott Nolan
[01:06:08] S0: Yeah. I think from a from a motivational standpoint, how do we keep the urgency? I think that's simply a consequence of of the market as it stands today. So you asked about the Russia uranium ban that's... Goes into full effect 01/01/2028. We know that we need to be online as quickly as we can so that there's a reliable backstop for that and a reliable source to really offset that loss of US supply as soon as possible. So if that's happening in '28, we wanna be online before end of decade to help support that. Then you look... That's that's just for low enriched uranium. Then you look at HALEU for the advanced reactors, and they have no no reliable source of fuel other than the DOE today, who only has so much to to give out to reactors. And you realize, okay. These are primarily venture backed companies. If they can't show deployment and scale up in a few years, that's an issue. So from the market's perspective, the motivation is very obvious. And so we're trying to serve that market as quickly as we can for its sake. And then how do you do it internally? I think it comes down to... It's probably two things. One, let's look at that finish line and how quickly we have to actually do certain things to hit it by that date. And let's break the schedule into big blocks and think internally in terms of those big milestones of, to hit that date, when do we have to begin construction? When do we have to begin scale manufacturing, etcetera? And then it's decomposing that into a very detailed, almost day by day schedule that we call the master schedule and keeping track of literally every major item that's either under work today or coming up very soon. And so we actually had a review meeting today, which we do once a week on each of these items. Where does this item that's that's active right now that someone's working on, where does it stand? What's its required completion? What's its expected completion date? How are we doing in that, are we ahead of schedule, are we behind schedule, what does that drive? And so it's looking at every piece of work that's going on, understanding how that's either pulling in or pushing out schedule based on completion, and then using that as a tool to understand where should we put more resources and how can we accelerate that thing that is the primary schedule driver, which we call the long pole in the schedule.