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.
00:12:39 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:12:39] S1: So That's like the difference between, like, three or 5% and, like, 20%? [00:12:42] S0: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's typically three to 5% or 19.75% is where most reactors are going. [00:12:48] S1: And what is the difference in the process for, like, enriching uranium if you're just doing, like, 3% or 5% versus, you know, 19.75 or 20? [00:12:55] S0: I I would think of it like a refining process or a... You know, even a distillation process. It's just like refining another time. So most enrichment methods are a series of steps to just further and further and further refine material. And so all you do is further refine it some more. So when when uranium comes out of the ground, it's about point 711% u two thirty five. And so that's the fissile material that you want, and that is elevated to 3% to 5% for the reactors on the grid today. So it's refined until you get to that threshold. For advanced reactors, that's taken up to 19.75, but the process is not fundamentally different to do that. [00:13:37] S1: And is this something where, like, tomorrow if there was a small, you know, SMR that could be turned on, does the fuel even exist right now to to make that, like, work? Or is this something that has to be kinda scaled in parallel?
00:13:37 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:13:37] S1: And is this something where, like, tomorrow if there was a small, you know, SMR that could be turned on, does the fuel even exist right now to to make that, like, work? Or is this something that has to be kinda scaled in parallel? [00:13:50] S0: Yeah. Not in the West. So the... Yeah. If we go back to the whole origins of General Matter, it was it was around this question. To answer your question directly, if if there were $25,000,000,000, what would I do? I would probably... You know, if you wanna get started today, you would deploy some some large reactors. You'd deploy some AP1000. There's a huge wave of advanced reactors coming through many startups, some incumbents. These are very promising. It is likely the path to bring down the cost of nuclear and to scale it rapidly. And so I would save some of that money for when they are licensed and they are ready to deploy deploy and some of those. You might do a mix of some microactors for some environments, for some remote applications, or if you can get their costs low enough, you can tile them together, and then other SMRs for applications like data centers and behind the meter.