00:00:00 · Ty Morse
[00:00:00] S0: Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with The US secretary of energy, Chris Wright, and the founder and CEO of General Matter, Scott Nolan. For the past two decades, The US has basically been completely stagnant on energy growth. And because of AI, we're gonna need to turn that around and get it up to, like, 15 to 20% growth per year. So I want to start this off with how the hell are we actually going to power this massive AI data center boom.
00:00:22 · Chris Wright
[00:00:22] S1: Got to change the way we've been playing the game with electricity. In the last twenty years, we've tripled American oil production, more than doubled American natural gas production, and as you just pointed out, grown electricity production. Any fundamental reason for that? No fundamental at all. It's mostly a regulatory problem. There's many levels of complexity at FERC, at independent system operators, at state level, at federal level. We've politicized the electricity grid somehow thinking we're going to stop the planet from melting down by making electricity less reliable and more expensive. So we've done everything wrong. So with President Trump's election and taken office eighteen months ago, we are furiously at work to reverse all of these things, go from energy subtraction to energy addition. First thing on that, we stopped the closure this year of 17 gigawatts of coal power plants. Those were slated to close. During the Biden administration, they closed over 50 gigawatts of coal plants and they had planned when they left to close another 100 gigawatts more in the next five years. Last year was the first of those five years. And they had plans to build 22 of firm generation. So a net reduction of 88 gigawatts in our electricity grid. That was the Biden plan that was left behind. Would we lead in AI? Could we reshore manufacturing? Could we lower electricity bills? Could we do anything dynamic in The United States with those policies? Absolutely not. But can we, with some time and with some blood, sweat, and tears, and with the political courage of President Trump, can we reverse all those things and get absolutely into growth mode, energy addition mode, innovation mode, lead in AI, reshor manufacture, America win mode. We can and we are.
00:02:15 · Scott Nolan
[00:02:15] S2: Yeah, I think if you look back ten years, twenty years, the consensus view was that we were transitioning from economy, a physical world, like physical goods economy, to a digital services economy. You look at the data across countries, and it's highly correlated. Per capita GDP is just tightly, tightly linked to per capita energy consumption, per capita energy grid production. Now, the caveat that's usually put on that is, Hey, that's true up until you become a really high income country. And then it flattens out or reverses because of efficiency, because of the transition of what industries you want to do. And maybe that was true for some period of time, but now with AI, with EVs, we see that we need much, much more electricity than we've been generating. And you could debate, was that plan a reasonable plan at the time? I think, clearly, it would reduce how dynamic we could be economically. But if that was the program, well, that was the program we were on. But I think now we know it's very different. We look back to 2010 when The U. S. And China were neck and neck on the grid, and now they're triple this year. And so clearly, that's something we need to change.
00:03:26 · Ty Morse
[00:03:26] S0: Yeah. There's this interesting dynamic where there's this executive order about basically turning on... A bunch of startups are going to turn on reactors by July 4 or aiming to, but I haven't heard a lot of discussion about what happens next. Like what are the biggest bottlenecks over the next five years after this thing happens? Like what does the scale up look like? So let's talk about that.
00:03:47 · Chris Wright
[00:03:47] S1: Yeah, so this Saturday will be the one year anniversary of those four presidential executive orders that basically said we're going to get the nuclear chain moving again. We're going to fix our regulatory regime. We're going to fix our supply chain. We're going to fix the Department of Energy and enable innovation, enable entrepreneurs like Scott and General Matter to get going, to re stand up the supply chain, make nuclear reality in The U. S. Again. But can we do it? Absolutely. And we have a lot of things going on. So you mentioned the test reactor program. Yeah, we have 11 test reactors that are in sort of a fast track program to stand up and go critical. We'll have reactors critical before July 4. These reactors, this will be the first time in forty years a non light water reactor is turned on in The United States. You weren't born the last time this happened, but that will happen in the next few weeks. And there are Nuclear Regulatory Commission individuals seconded to the Department of Energy team. So they're working next door to us as we're permitting and getting these reactors moving in a test mode. But all of those companies are getting their systems watched, observed by the NRC. They're starting their regulatory process to get approval for electric generation. So first we're going to run them in test reactor mode. Not going to sell electricity out of them, but that's a great first step. That's construction, that's testing the nuclear systems, That's seeing the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeing all of that. That's opening the pathway for them to rapidly commercialize.
00:05:22 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:05:22] S2: Yeah, think a lot of the tests are going to be criticality tests. Some will be full power. The point is these reactors will be able to prove how they operate and that the operations match the models. And I think that data, a lot of them are planning to use in their licenses, go into NRC licenses. You receive that in the next calendar year or two. And then I think from there, it's scale up. And a lot of them have contracted those deployments and who they'll be scaling up with, where they'll be scaling up. I think, to your question, we see that end of this decade. We see the first real commercial deployments, '28, '29, then we see it ramp from there. So I think when it's really, really moving the needle in a big way is the start of the next decade. [00:06:03] S0: I know that for you, it's gonna be basically 2030 when the first manufacturing plant comes online for HALEU. And before that, we don't really have, like, the necessary fuel to run a bunch of small modular reactors. So what is it gonna look like for the next five years as power demand just completely ramps, and yet we don't necessarily have the reactors to turn on in that time frame?