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?
01:14:17 · Scott Nolan
[01:14:17] S0: Maybe the most... Like, the least obvious thing on questioning requirements around a company like us or even even some of the nuclear companies in general, reactor companies, people would think that the entire team must be comprised of people with nuclear PhDs. And I think that's the natural intuition. You would say, hey. This is a nuclear energy company. Therefore, it's a nuclear science company. Therefore, you need nuclear engineers. And you do, and you need people who understand the licensing, the safety, in the case of reactors, nuclear reactions. And so it's a part of the team, but it's not the whole team. And so now you look at some nuclear reactor companies, and, yes, they have a handful of nuclear engineers, but it's mostly mechanical, aerospace, electrical, software, building the other systems that go into it with only a core group that's really looking at the nuclear reactions and making sure that you're gonna get the power production you think out of a reactor. In our case, it's even it's even one step further where, yes, there's nuclear engineers on our team, and they're they're a really important part for making sure that our system's safe and that there are not nuclear reactions. But you look at an enrichment facility, and there's actually no nuclear reactions occurring. There's no chemical reactions occurring. It's simply phase change and separation. And so the team that you need to do that again, yes, we'll have some nuclear engineers. We'll have some chemical engineers, not for the sake of chemical reactions but process development, making sure you're getting the performance of the system that you need, making sure that your pumps, power systems, everything are what you think they should be, what you think they're gonna do. But it's mostly software, electrical, mechanical, aerospace engineers, and which is why we're... You know, we chose to locate the company in Los Angeles, really the the hub for that. So your number one assumption would be, oh, we need a lot of nuclear engineers. We need to be located in or at a national lab or right next door to one in a historically nuclear community. And after thinking about that at the very beginning of the company and, okay, should we locate the company in Oak Ridge? There's an incredible amount of talent there in the nuclear industry. Should we locate it somewhere else? We real...
01:16:39 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
You know, Los Alamos. We realized, no. We need to locate the company where most of the employees are gonna be coming from and where we think we can recruit great nuclear engineers to, which is LA. [01:16:51] S1: Yeah. This is similar to what Elon has kind of done where Dwarkesh was asking about, like, do you try to, like, optimize for PhDs or something? And he was like, no. I just want great engineers. Yep. And great engineers don't always have PhDs. [01:17:03] S0: Yeah. I mean, great engineers even might not even have a master's degree or even an undergrad degree. There's people who are incredible technicians who are basically very hands on engineers who might not have gone to college, but maybe they have worked on all sorts of mechanical systems for decades, even from when they were a kid, because they were tuning up their shifter cart or doing car engine rebuilds or they were working on hot rods. And so I've worked with people before who are some of the best engineers who don't have a formal degree at all but have really built a lot of systems and have really smart ways of doing things that someone who maybe spent four years in university wouldn't realize.