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.
01:08:27 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
And so these things stack up. Then you want to look at all those and figure out how do we resource that primary schedule driver, and then how do we watch out for the ones behind it. So if we take care of that path, that driving schedule, what's the next thing that's going to drive schedule, and how do we address that ahead of time and over resource it so we can just keep pace going as fast as possible. And so the more and more things you're doing in parallel, the more complicated this gets. But, yeah, taking that big picture, decomposing it, breaking it down to all the line items, understanding what your schedule drivers are, and then resourcing them and addressing areas where we're stuck or need to make a decision, that's that's how you pull it in. [01:09:12] S1: I think we like to prepare for the last disaster. And so if you see some, like, major earthquake or a fire burn down your house, suddenly everyone wants to buy earthquake insurance or, like, fire insurance. I I saw Elon tweet a while back where he's like, war with China is basically virtually guaranteed. It's just a question of when. And, like, Anduril has this internal policy where they want, you know, most done by, like, 2027 or something like this. In a very, like, unfortunate scenario where we were to go to war with China even earlier than 2028, how does that impact, like, our ability to produce energy?
01:09:12 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[01:09:12] S1: I think we like to prepare for the last disaster. And so if you see some, like, major earthquake or a fire burn down your house, suddenly everyone wants to buy earthquake insurance or, like, fire insurance. I I saw Elon tweet a while back where he's like, war with China is basically virtually guaranteed. It's just a question of when. And, like, Anduril has this internal policy where they want, you know, most done by, like, 2027 or something like this. In a very, like, unfortunate scenario where we were to go to war with China even earlier than 2028, how does that impact, like, our ability to produce energy? [01:09:45] S0: In the nuclear supply chain, it it doesn't, fortunately. So right now, all of our enriched... You know, if... We can talk about the different steps in the supply chain, but from mining to conversion into gas to enrichment to deconversion and then fuel fabrication, These five steps currently in The US don't don't involve China. So mining is in The US in places like Wyoming and Texas, but also Canada, Australia, other places in in Europe. Like Kazakhstan. Mhmm. Yep. So uranium comes from a bunch of sources that are not China. Conversion today is done in The US and Canada and also in Europe, and most US utilities purchase from US and Canada. And then enrichment is a European and Russia supplied step of the supply chain. And then finally, fuel fabrication is primarily done in The US by a mix of US and European companies. And so in nuclear, there really is not much impact. Other sources of energy, there would be. [01:10:51] S1: Like solar panels?
01:10:52 · Scott Nolan
[01:10:52] S0: Yeah. Like solar, yeah, probably batteries range of things. If we rewind like five years ago, China was very, very tiny part of global enrichment capacity. If you look today, they're roughly 15%. Next decade, if if they keep growing, they will be 30%. So to your question of, you know, conflict with China or China's role in the nuclear supply chain, it's growing extremely rapidly to where, yeah, they could be neck and neck with Russia and China next decade if The US does nothing. But the same thing was true of of launch. If we're if we're going back to the SpaceX story again where 2002, US was below 30%, I think, of global launch capacity and now is over 90% of global launch capacity with China as number two. And if The US had stayed where it was, China would be number one. So I think on this question of The US's role and China's role in this industry, The US has primarily just stayed flat for decades. China's growing rapidly. This is not the only sector where that's true, but it's it's one of these situations where if The US doesn't do something and bring back, you know, bring back its own capability and expand that capability rapidly, China will dictate where the industry goes. And so that's certainly part of our mission is to bring back The U. S. Capability, but not just for an onshoring thing, but for a move the whole industry forward thing. And so it's not just, Is The U. Capable? Can we supply our own power plants? But can we do that in a way that's so low cost that advanced reactors become much, much more viable? And we get them everywhere, and we get even safer baseload power, even cleaner baseload power at much lower cost. And so, you you look at the stats, and nuclear energy statistically has been the safest, cleanest form of baseload for a very long time by a wide margin. But it has not been the cheapest form. It's been more expensive than other forms. And so
01:12:58 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[01:12:58] S1: Is that mostly, like, a regulatory issue? [01:13:01] S0: I think it's a bunch of issues. A lot of people like to blame the regulator and say the regulator makes it too hard to do things. In our experience, that's not true at all. I think the first industry I worked in, space launch, people would have said, why is space launch so expensive? And you'd say, well, it's really hard, and you need to get this reliability. And maybe the regulations are hard. And then it just turns out that a lot of the organizations were just doing things the way that they'd always done them, that they were cost plus organizations, that they didn't have a lot of incentive to to actually push the limits, to actually innovate and question why they were doing things, question the requirements. And I think what we've seen now in in space launch, for example, is it's even safer, even more reliable, even lower cost, and that's just through getting iterations and by scaling up. So, yeah, our goal is not just bring back US capability. It's not just you know, make it lower cost. It's also make it more scalable so we can power all the things The US wants to do. [01:14:08] S1: What have been the biggest conventional wisdoms in turning on this sort of operation that were actually wrong when you, like, looked at the facts?