00:37:09 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:37:09] S1: And you just spin it in a centrifuge and what else is in there? Like, are you separating it from? [00:37:14] S0: So there's a few techniques that one might use to go do this. Where we're doing it in Kentucky, we are at the site of the last place that The U. S. Did in Richmond which is in Western Kentucky, Paducah. There was a facility that was shut down in 2013 on a DOE site that was a gaseous diffusion process. And that's the first thing that was pioneered. The Europeans use gas centrifuge. Other countries have done aerodynamic processes and there's even aqueous processes as well as laser enrichment. So at least five techniques that are classically used, and our technique is one that we'll unveil first half of next year when we'll talk about it. [00:37:59] S1: But it's gaseous diffusion, and so you... [00:38:02] S0: That's what was done in Paducah. That's not necessarily what we're doing. We're building a fresh facility in Paducah on the same site in the last community that did enrichment in The US. [00:38:12] S1: Got it. If it's kind of simple, why do you need to be in Paducah where the last version was? Do you just... Do they leave a bunch of machines behind and you get to say, wow, there's all this free stuff here? Or is there expertise amongst local employees or... [00:38:27] S0: Yep. [00:38:28] S1: So
00:38:28 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:38:28] S1: So [00:38:29] S0: our search for Paducah lasted over a year. Mhmm. We went to over 10 states, looked at over a thousand plots of land. And the answer in the end was kind of the obvious one, go to where the community most recently did this. So you have a combination of two things. Like we always felt like the community was the most important part. We're building a facility that's going to last decades. And so we wanna make sure that the community that we're building in actually welcomes us there. [00:38:56] S1: Yes. [00:38:56] S0: And Paducah was extremely familiar with enrichment, comfortable with it, understood it you know to be a positive thing for the community and has the talent. So it's this combination of community support for what we're building and the talent base there above Now anything the DOE site had other benefits. By building on a DOE site we were able to be you know have some shared services. So out of the gates a little bit less to stand up. Already a piece of land there that's a 100 acres just big enough for us to build a first facility. Yep. DOE security around it. So lots of different benefits. [00:39:31] S1: Do believe it's actually simpler from a permitting point of view because you're working with DOE rules and not county and municipality rules? [00:39:38] S0: Could be. We we are primarily doing commercial sales out of this facility, so we will be NRC regulated. [00:39:44] S1: But but I mean federal and not kind of state and local.
00:39:44 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:39:44] S1: But but I mean federal and not kind of state and local. [00:39:47] S0: The biggest benefit was that the site had been heavily characterized environmentally. Mhmm. And so the environmental work that was required to get to a point where we knew what the environmental impacts would be was quicker than it would have been on a completely uncharacterized separate piece of land. [00:40:01] S1: Yep, that makes sense. And so, okay, going back to the enrichment, what are you separating the uranium from when you're enriching uranium? From itself. You have Ah, okay, it's two sets different isotopes. [00:40:12] S0: I see. So, uranium out of the ground is point 7%, point 711% U-two 35. That's what you want. That's the number when we talk about three to five or 19.75. Okay. [00:40:25] S1: So it just... It exists in the world as point 7%, and then you're enriching it to some number beyond that. Exactly. [00:40:30] S0: Yeah. The rest is primarily U-two 38, which is not the fissile material you want. [00:40:36] S1: And if the isotopes have different masses, why can't you just spin it around in a centrifuge and have it... [00:40:41] S0: Many people do. I see. Yeah, many people do. Or you can do a sort of osmosis type process, which is gaseous diffusion. Or you would do it, you know, you might split the gas using an aerodynamic process, and so there's a lot of options. [00:40:55] S1: It does sound quite simple when you put it that way. [00:40:57] S0: When you put it that way. [00:40:58] S1: Why is it hard?
00:40:58 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:40:58] S1: Why is it hard? [00:41:00] S0: Know, the hard part about most of nuclear, think, like nuclear is perceived as incredibly complicated thing. I think fusion is pretty difficult. That is really new physics. That's new science, but fission has been around for a long time and if we just talk about reactors it goes back to economics I think more than anything. And so to me for all the advanced reactors versus the gigawatt scale the most interesting thing is not just the technology it's really what is the cost implication going to be. For us enrichment has been done before. A number of countries do it but the real challenge is we don't only want to bring it back in The U. S. We want to make it globally competitive. We want The U. S. Capability to be truly commercial, be able to compete with Europe, Russia, And China over so it's all about cost. And so I think the hard thing is not simply doing enrichment, it's doing it in a way that can be scalable and highly cost competitive. And so that's the North Star. [00:42:00] S1: You don't worry that this is a bad market somehow, like the fact that there isn't a US producer suggests there's something a bit broken about the market and the buyers? [00:42:07] S0: No, I don't think so. I think there's a path dependency of how we got here. Mhmm. And we can talk through that, but it's, it's, Yeah, Please [00:42:14] S1: tell me the path to Hennessy.
00:42:14 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:42:14] S1: tell me the path to Hennessy. [00:42:15] S0: Yeah, I think I think the history of it was really, you know, The US did a first generation technology to win World War II to stay dominant in the Cold War. We were over 90% of supply globally. And ultimately that that approach that specific design and technology was not cost competitive with the European and Russian approaches. And so we shut those down, we shut them down following the Cold War. So the Berlin Wall fell, The US entered a trade agreement with Russia, it was called, nicknamed Megatons to Megawatts, so we imported Russian warheads, blended them down, ran our reactors on it and started trade with Russia that way. We, since the seventies, had been trading with Europe. And once we felt like Cold War's over, there was less reason to keep these plants running in The US. [00:43:05] S1: Yeah. So there's a gloss moment in The US basically?
00:43:05 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:43:05] S1: Yeah. So there's a gloss moment in The US basically? [00:43:08] S0: It was, yeah, why are we running these more expensive plants when we're now in a world of free trade and we can trade for this? At the same time there were efforts inside The US to develop new technologies, but they didn't really hit the cost structure required to compete internationally and they're still in development to some extent to try and get on that curve and so I think it's simply a you know we used to do it, we then relied on free trade and then only more recently does this seem like an issue and the issue is really around HALEU availability for advanced reactors and low uranium availability for the larger reactors given the ban on Russian imports. So if you tried to start a company like this ten years ago you know you might say what's what's the market? Yeah. The utilities are fully contracted. There's no gaps. Why would they leave gaps? They're going to make sure that they have reliable source and then there is not a really big advanced reactor market that you could sell into. And so both on the LEU side and the HALEU side it would have been much more challenging to get to some critical mass that could support a new entrant today that window is open. [00:44:19] S1: Classically cost advantages in manufacturing come from scale. That's that's one common one. Or simplicity in design. It feels like... I mean, the market is what the market [00:44:34] S0: is.