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?
00:09:22 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:09:22] S0: Yeah. Even at a bigger level, if you look at China's grid, in 2010, we were tied completely neck and neck, roughly 4,000 terawatt hours. Since then, they've doubled their grid, almost tripled it, while we've stayed flat. Yeah. And so this, you know, this issue of capacity and and power production is... It's upstream of everything. And it's like, yeah, all the things that you hear about, like, probably half the companies that you'll talk to are doing something that has a major energy input, especially AI. So AI, data centers, manufacturing driven companies, defense, all of these things require a solid grid and good baseload. And China now has two x what we have. This is something we have to fix as as quickly as possible. So it's... This is why we're working on this. It's really upstream of everything. It's... The ability to enrich is upstream of making nuclear fuel. Making nuclear fuel is the required input for every reactor, and it seems like the only clean... You know, it seems like we're going to go with... For the grid to expand, it needs to be clean baseload. And I think the only form of clean baseload that we have today that's economical is nuclear. It's always been the cleanest. It's always been the safest baseload. So we see that as being the the way that the grid expands, through existing reactors, advanced reactors, but, without the fuel, you can't do that. [00:10:44] S1: This is kind of a hypothetical, but let's say you were given, like, $25,000,000,000 today and just said, go turn on as many reactors as possible. How would you actually do that?
00:10:44 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:10:44] S1: This is kind of a hypothetical, but let's say you were given, like, $25,000,000,000 today and just said, go turn on as many reactors as possible. How would you actually do that? [00:10:54] S0: The administration is doing a version of this right now with AP1000. And so that's the reactor that we have that really moves the needle on the grid. [00:11:02] S1: And what is that?
00:11:04 · Scott Nolan
[00:11:04] S0: So AP1000 is roughly one gigawatt reactor, one gigawatt of electricity production. And so you look at a lot of these data centers, and they used to be a few 100 megawatts. Now they're gigawatt scale. So in order to really move the needle quickly on approved reactor designs, you're gonna have to do something with a one gigawatt class reactor, and that's what you see the administration doing with deals around their deployment. In the next few years, we expect there to be a bunch of approved next generation reactor designs. Pretty much all the startups you've heard of are doing this type of design. A lot of people call them SMRs, small modular reactors. There's also microreactors in there. And so the big question people have or the big thought behind this, the big idea is, how can we take something that was historically a huge construction project and turn it into a factory build that can be done at scale? And so almost all of these companies have the premise of, we're going to take a civil works construction project, and we're going to turn it into a factory build that's modular, small modular reactors. We're going to take those modules, and we'll take them to the site. And then we'll connect everything and get it online without the same ten year construction effort that's required historically in The US. When you do that, you end up needing to make your reactor smaller. Then if you make your reactor smaller, your core smaller. Then if your core smaller, to get good nuclear reactions, to get good burn up, good efficiency, you end up wanting to run more enriched fuel.