Relentless
00:47:21 · Scott Nolan
But now we're still only at half what The US needs. And then you look at US' allies. Our closest allies consume about as much nuclear fuel as The US does. And so we're at a quarter today, but we're really only at an eighth of what us and our allies need if we wanted to provide them with it. So now we're talking 8x. And then the Biden administration wanted to triple nuclear. A lot of countries signed up to do that by 2050. The Trump administration has said we wanna 4x by then. So now you're talking over 30x. And then you say, okay. Just to kinda meet US and its allies by 2,050, if we're gonna 4x, you have to 30x enrichment production in the country, which is the sort of thing we're trying to think through, how do we plan for that and how do we do that? But maybe forex isn't the real number. Maybe it's like... Maybe with with the energy consumption numbers we're looking at, maybe it's really like nuclear either works and the cost comes down and it's one of the cheapest sources of baseload or it's not. And if it is, is 4x the right number or is 10x or is 50x or is 100x? So you start thinking in these orders of magnitude and you realize, Wow, there's so much opportunity to just produce much, much more. Even in this niche piece of the nuclear supply chain that a lot of people don't think about, we have room for 10, 100x growth on U. S. Soil by European countries is doing today. So back to the exponential numbers, it's just dramatic what the opportunity looks like and how many areas there are going to be for people to build new businesses and just contribute to really getting that curve from flat the last few decades to just almost vertical.
00:48:55 · Chris Wright, Scott Nolan
[00:48:55] S1: Scott, repeat that punchline again. A lot of people look at me and say, we can't even enrich uranium. How are we gonna grow our nuclear power thing? And, well, if you if you can, you can produce enough for today, but you can't meet the future. You just said, and you're right. We don't know the future. If the demand is just awesome, very real possibility, it's 100x, you can do that. Right? Right? This is America. [00:49:15] S2: Yeah. No... I mean, no reason you can't. It's an immense amount of hard work. So you look at, like, space lines. [00:49:19] S1: You could 100 times increase the capacity to enrich uranium in The United States.
00:49:25 · Scott Nolan
[00:49:25] S2: Yes. Fantastic. Yep. I mean, you won't do it at one facility. You'll do it at a number of facilities. That's what we're planning out, thinking far ahead of where we're going and identifying those sites that we can build that sort of capacity. But, just as an example, you had The U. S. Back in early 2000s, something like 20% of global launch capacity. And we were launching, let's see, probably tens of rockets per year maximum. Not even that. Single digits many years. And then SpaceX came and said, Well, the issue is it's not cheap enough. The U. S. Is not competitive. Not just that. Okay, there's a baseline goal of make The U. S. Competitive again, bring it back. That's a good goal. That's very strategic for The US. But on top of that, the goal of SpaceX was let's make space actually something that we go do. Like, you look back to the fifties, sixties, it was supposed to be two things, nuclear and space. Those were the areas where you're gonna get an immense amount of growth and these new possibilities that people couldn't even imagine. So on the space side, it was, how do we do that? We make it much cheaper. And so SpaceX has gone from something like, I believe it was like 10 launches in their first ten years, roughly one launch a year, to now over 100 Falcon nine launches per year. And with Starship, the launch count will get to that level. It will eventually get to more than that level, but more importantly, the capacity is just dramatically, dramatically larger. So The US went from sub 20% of launch capacity worldwide to now over 90% of mass to orbit. I think we can do that in a bunch of industries. And the thing is, it's gonna come down to private sector thinking through how do we drop these costs down, how do we do this in a really commercial way where we can outcompete every country even if they may have subsidies. But it's gonna require a ton of innovation. And for SpaceX, that's been almost a twenty five year story.
00:51:14 · Ty Morse
[00:51:14] S0: Especially with Space Launch and Elon, he's kind of thought out a few years about where do we need to take this. And even if maybe there's not necessarily demand to ship, you know, thousands of satellites to orbit, We're just gonna build the capacity and then just believe that the demand will, like, materialize in effect. How do you kind of do things in parallel? You're turning on your first plant in 2030. Are you gonna start building a second plant or start, you know, working on the second plant now so that you can basically turn on the second one in 2032?
00:51:46 · Scott Nolan
[00:51:46] S2: Yeah. I mean, for us, the sequence is you identify the sites, you prep the land, you build the buildings, you make sure your infrastructure is there, and then you fill the buildings with equipment for that capability to come online. You commission it. You bring it online. And so as we build facilities and then bring them fully online and scale production within the facility, by the time that core and shell is built, we'll be working on the next core and shell. So our approach is we want to take everything possible into our own hands. We don't want to just say, We give up responsibility for a major portion of costs like buildings. We're not going to do every last task in house. We'll be hiring thousands of welders, like construction workers through subcontractors. But the project itself, we'll manage ourselves. You know, we'll be our own GC. We'll be our own EPC, engineering procurement construction company. And this is something that Tesla really proved out in the Gigafactory constructions is own your project, you know, design, build, and operate, and you can get efficiencies across all three, and you can avoid giving up responsibility for something that can really drive the project over budget, over schedule. And that's the whole, like, extreme ownership, just take responsibility approach that we're trying to do. So we have an EPC in house, and that EPC will first do Kentucky. It's working on it now. Kentucky comes on be... Before end of decade. And then as that corn shell is built and Kentucky's ready for the next phase of construction, start building that second site.
00:53:14 · Ty Morse
[00:53:14] S0: The executive orders last year really basically, like, poured a bunch of gasoline on companies, like Valar is one of them, where Isaiah is just burning, you know, the three a. M. Oil and his team is burning the three a. M. Oil to make this happen. How do we kind of incentivize more founders to take on the charge of building ahead of demand?