00:30:28 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:30:28] S1: Oh, but you were there really early. Yeah, pretty early. [00:30:31] S0: Yeah, one of the first So was founded in 'two? 'two. Yeah. Yep. So very, very lucky to graduate at the right time in aerospace where prior to SpaceX there wasn't too I much interesting to remember the first summer I was working on test stands. We were getting ready for an engine to be able to be mounted vertically and put on a test stand. First winter break was working on a surrogate for the engine and then after I graduated I worked on the engine systems. So the Merlin engine, a bunch of components on there. Didn't design it myself. Were much more experienced people doing that but I helped make sure that individual parts could withstand the thermal and structural loading. And then after that did a series of engines across a few vehicles including the Dragon capsule which at the time was just cargo. And I was part of the early team and got to work on a few subsystems there. So I was there 2003 to 2007. [00:31:26] S1: And I was struck in US manufacturing and Chinese manufacturing for that matter, how influential Elon's management style and philosophy has has been where, you know, most of the kind of companies founded later kind of explicitly reference some tenets. Mhmm. Just what has been influential for you in terms of design philosophies? [00:31:53] S0: Yeah. Well, I think the thing that I actually draw more out of the SpaceX experience is working on something that not everyone agrees is the most important thing. It kind of overlaps with Peter's Yes. Sort of philosophy. So...
00:31:53 · Scott Nolan, John Collison
[00:31:53] S0: Yeah. Well, I think the thing that I actually draw more out of the SpaceX experience is working on something that not everyone agrees is the most important thing. It kind of overlaps with Peter's Yes. Sort of philosophy. So... [00:32:07] S1: Picking up flying cars and not a 140 characters type problem? [00:32:10] S0: Yeah. Pick something that's almost like, in some ways, you know, what industries have not lived up to their promise over the last fifty years. What are the actual bottlenecks to these things like what are the markets that we know need fixing even if it sounded completely new greenfield sort of thing but that is a big lever on a much bigger industry. And so at the time early 2000s everybody was talking about modern satellites. How do you do smallsats? How do you do CubeSats? And then it turned out there was no good way for them to get to launch. When your satellite costs a billion dollars a 100,000,000 for a launch isn't so bad. When it costs $1,000,000,000 now you really need to think about it. And so it's almost the same thing. It's you know you have a small reactor SMR small modular reactor and now you're no longer doing a you know multi billion dollar construction project but now you need the fuel. And in fact the fuel cost matters proportionately more to where some of these SMRs their total LCOE could be 50% fuel cost within Richmond. It's that high. In some cases. Yeah. It depends on the exact design, but at today's market prices it can be. So... [00:33:23] S1: LCOE is levelized cost of energy, like, but basically the energy cost, right?
00:33:23 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:33:23] S1: LCOE is levelized cost of energy, like, but basically the energy cost, right? [00:33:26] S0: Basically the cost of producing energy if you factor in both the upfront capital into the reactor and then the operating cost. And so, yeah, the fuel cost starts mattering a lot, is the second part of what I appreciated in 2023. Not only did we need to remove this bottleneck, Yes. But for advanced nuclear to really scale on HALEU you would want to bring down the cost. And so the biggest piece that felt like we could influence actually turned out to be enrichment as well. [00:33:54] S1: So it feels to me one of the big challenges for you guys is the same challenge that many hardware companies face, which is dollars required and time required until you're profitable or even you kind of have meaningful revenue to fundraise against because so many hardware companies have had good ideas and have gone out of business because they couldn't prove that the idea was good to investors Mhmm. Before, you know, they run out of money. And so, ultimately, there's kind of fundraising risk. How do you burn down that fundraising risk that's inherent in the company?
00:33:54 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:33:54] S1: So it feels to me one of the big challenges for you guys is the same challenge that many hardware companies face, which is dollars required and time required until you're profitable or even you kind of have meaningful revenue to fundraise against because so many hardware companies have had good ideas and have gone out of business because they couldn't prove that the idea was good to investors Mhmm. Before, you know, they run out of money. And so, ultimately, there's kind of fundraising risk. How do you burn down that fundraising risk that's inherent in the company? [00:34:32] S0: If you really look at the big picture, you've got equity funding, you've got debt funding, and then you've got non dilutive funding. And in our case when we began we competed for a program that Congress authorized to help address this ban on uranium. As part of the bond. Exactly. And on the lack of availability for fuel for advanced reactors. And so we competed for that. We were down selected under the Biden administration, awarded under the Trump administration earlier this year for a $900,000,000 award for capacity building, which helps us stand up that first facility and takes a lot of that cost off the table. And so it's it's a it's a big lever for getting past some of these challenges that companies often have in getting their first project online. [00:35:16] S1: Oh, that's great. Okay. How do you spin up on all this material? Like, you're not a nuclear physicist by background. Luckily... You are?
00:35:16 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:35:16] S1: Oh, that's great. Okay. How do you spin up on all this material? Like, you're not a nuclear physicist by background. Luckily... You are? [00:35:28] S0: Lucky... Not. I'm definitely not, and luckily don't need to be. So everyone thinks of enrichment, they hear nuclear. They think is your team half nuclear scientists?: Ah.: And the answer is it's actually relatively few. It's very [00:35:40] S1: few.: Just chemistry?: [00:35:42] S0: Not even chemistry. So in our facility there's no nuclear reactions. There's not even any chemical reactions. What you have is a separation of a gas. And so you actually still need chemists. You still need nuclear scientists. Yes. But mostly for safety analysis. Mostly for making sure you don't have those things happen. No chemical reactions. No nuclear reactions. [00:36:05] S1: I... Looks... Is there another question? Because actually, I don't know much about enriching uranium. So this is good. It's filling in some gaps for me. You mine uranium out As of the a solid? Exactly. As a solid. It's like a rock looking thing. Like, it should look like a rock to you. Mhmm. And then you boil it to, you know, pressure and temperature.
00:36:05 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:36:05] S1: I... Looks... Is there another question? Because actually, I don't know much about enriching uranium. So this is good. It's filling in some gaps for me. You mine uranium out As of the a solid? Exactly. As a solid. It's like a rock looking thing. Like, it should look like a rock to you. Mhmm. And then you boil it to, you know, pressure and temperature. [00:36:25] S0: Then someone else says step two after it's out of the ground, and that's called yellowcake out of the ground, U-three zero eight. Classically it would be open pit mining and then you have a milling process to turn into U-three zero eight Today from the that's done with in situ recovery like enhanced techniques that involves pumping a fluid underground and collecting the uranium out rocks. That will come out as U308. So step one get the U308. That's mining and milling. Step two, take the U-three zero eight and chemically convert it into a gas. So that's a separate chemical facility that does that work. [00:37:03] S1: I see. So that's a chemical process converted into a gas? [00:37:05] S0: And then it would arrive at our as a gas that we can separate. [00:37:09] S1: And you just spin it in a centrifuge and what else is in there? Like, are you separating it from?