The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth - EP 26 Kurt Terrani

I transitioned to this company called Ultra Safe Nuclear in 2021.

Which is the best name. There's— I covered Ilya's startup, Super Safe Intelligence. This is— don't worry, guys. Yeah, this is really safe. Yes. So, so it was Ultra Safe Nuclear.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it was a company, you know, that was there. I thought at the time, you know, it had the I wanted the right level of control for doing what I wanted to do, and they had the right level of capital. It was primarily backed by one major investor. His name was Richard Hollis Helms. He was a patriot, ex-CIA.

Ex-CIA. I mean, this whole story is bananas. We got an ex-CIA, an Iranian nuclear scientist, a Green Beret. All right. Well, our guests today are Curt Tirani and Thomas Hendricks. Do you prefer Tommy or Tommy? Tommy. Tommy Hendricks. Okay. So Curt is the CEO of Standard Nuclear. You're a nuclear scientist by trade from, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Tommy, you are the chairman of Standard Nuclear, one of its main investors, and you're at Decisive Capital.

Decisive point.

Decisive point. And you're, you're a venture capitalist and a Green Beret.

In a former life.

In a former life. Okay. And so, you know, a couple of weeks ago I went out to Tennessee and went to visit Standard Nuclear, which is near Oak Ridge. Is it technically in Oak Ridge?

It's in the city of Oak Ridge.

Okay.

And it's in the Big Oak Ridge Reservation.

Okay. Okay. And you guys are— I just want to set a little context for people of what you guys are doing. First of all, the Company has an incredible story. You both have incredible personal stories. There's been, been quite a journey. The Wall Street Journal did this very interesting article. And then what the company is doing is fascinating, making a very safe type of fuel for nuclear reactors. In particular, there's a focus on these small modular nuclear reactors that I think people are going to start hearing a lot about. It's, it's in this era of AI data centers and just needing more energy in general. This idea that you can, you can do nuclear safely and a bit more portably, I guess, than we have done in the past. And so we're going to get into all of that. This podcast, as ever, is sponsored by E1 Ventures. Thank you for your support. And, and all right, we'll dig in. I did— I do a fair description of Standard on point. Yeah, on point. All right, Curt, I mean, I thought let's, let's go back.

Let's go back to maybe like, how was your visit? What did you think of it? You walked into a nuclear fuel fabrication building.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was cool. So we're going to have an episode about all this where people will get to see it. I've never been to anything quite like that. I've been to Los Alamos Labs and things like that, but, but to see supercomputers and— yeah, and I never got to do the nuclear stuff. So yeah, I was taken away. Yeah. Why don't I— I'm going to describe to people what I saw. I'm sure I'm going to mess up some technical things so you can help me. But you guys have at the front, it's like kind of a standard office building, you know, an office, open, open office sort of plan. And then you go in and then there's, there's just manufacturing craziness on the, on the inside. And so we got to see this fuel, it's called TRISO, which is an acronym that you're gonna help me with later. But it makes these sort of like, I mean, they're not pellets or they are kind of, they're like little.

Yeah, they call 'em that, coated fuel particles.

Okay.

They're sort of the poppy seed size particles, right?

Yeah, they're, they're small. And then what I learned while I was there is that they, They have this coating of these different layers around them, which is what helps make them safer. And I'm sure we'll unpack that. But yeah, so I saw you guys manufacturing these, these, these tiny particles of, of what will be nuclear fuel. And, and so then, um, yeah, it was really fascinating. We got to create some pretty big fires in a furnace. And, and, uh, I saw like all the crazy additive manufacturing and deposition stuff. Actually, you guys brought, a little Core Memory logo that we, that we made while I was there.

So, so the one thing with that is that never let that touch your phone.

Okay.

Or your iPad. Gorilla Glass ain't got nothing against that. It'll scratch it.

Yeah. Yeah. What was this made out of?

It was— this is super pure silicon carbide.

Silicon carbide. Yeah.

Which is like, you cut everything with silicon carbide. The only thing that cuts this is diamond. All right.

I'm glad you told me that. 'Cause I could definitely chuck that in my pocket. Um, yeah. So we had just this great day. I mean, I spent, it was probably like 5 hours there, probably longer than you guys wanted in some ways. But you were very kind and, and, um, yeah, well, let's get into the story. I mean, um, I don't know where to begin 'cause you both have such interesting backgrounds and then the company's fascinating in and of itself. Why don't you, I mean, tell us a little bit about the journey of this company. Um, 'cause it's, it's, it sort of came outta stealth mode just in the last couple months. However, it has sort of like a 10-year-ish history, I think.

Yeah, there's, there's a little history there. So, uh, as you, kindly introduced. I'm a nuclear engineer by training. I graduated Fish grad school in 2010, went to Oak Ridge National Lab. I'm a nuclear fuels nerd, so I wanted to do nuclear fuels and they had a good group there. They were working on this specific fuel, TRISO. That's kind of the hub. There's different national labs, they're all great. They have different specialties. TRISO manufacturing was Oak Ridge. Now, 2011, something happened in the nuclear industry called Fukushima incident. So that kind of poured a—

I've heard of that.

Yeah.

Bucket of cold ice on the big, you know, gigawatt-class reactors, the large reactors. And after that, there's been a big push for microreactors, small modular reactors. Now, the key thing to know, okay, all these so-called advanced reactors, they're all 1950s, '60s, '70s, like designs, like the technology is not, they've all been built and demonstrated in the past. What's really distinct about them is that everybody, every reactor that's under development today is inherently safe. Inherently safe. What does that mean? It means you're not relying on Billy pressing the button at the right time or the pump coming on. You're relying on the laws of physics, gravity, natural phenomena, natural heat transfer. If that goes away, you're in trouble. But as long as you have that, you're okay. And a big enabler of these advanced reactors has to do with the constituents of the reactor, has to do with some of the design of the reactor. But when you have a fuel that has silicon carbide coating layers that kind of retains the fission products and doesn't melt, that is a key enabler of these passive designs. So we fast forward, you know, there's a few things happening. First, the big gigawatt class light water reactors, who wants to pay $20 billion? If you're a CFO of a utility, do you want to bet the entire balance sheet or half of it? You're going to get fired. You're not going to build any of those. That's why we only built know, the Vogtle plants in a regulated market, the ratepayer essentially backstopped it.

So these are the big things people are used to seeing in photos when they think of a nuclear—

that's right— cooling towers and big cooling towers, 5-mile, you know, emergency planning zone, you know, because there's so much there. Uh, the other thing that happened is, uh, you know, there is— there's the, the demand coming in from remote communities, but also, you know, defense is strongly in there. You know, Tommy should touch on You know, what happened to this country over the prior conflicts and getting energy to the forward operating bases. You've got space, which you do a lot in space.

Yeah.

You know, it turns out when you get to space, you need energy. So people are thinking about that too. And then for propulsion. And then in the last like 3, 4 years, this AI comes in. It's just the hyperscalers are trying to take all this energy to the mat. So that's why there's an incredible advanced reactor industry out there. Incredible with a lot of private capital, very serious people doing development. And if you look at the advanced reactors, you know, I would say if there's like a rotating dartboard and you're just going to list the names, you throw a dart at it, there's 70-80% chance that they're using TRISO fuel, this type of fuel. Why are they using it? This fuel has been around for a very long time. It's— the technology goes really back. It was really kind of codified and understood under a big Department of Energy program. And that led to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the regulator in the United States, NRC, essentially designating it as functional containment. That has a very specific meaning. And that basically says instead of big concrete rebar dome in the pictures that you talk about, or a big pressure vessel that blew up in Fukushima, you've got billions of these small ceramic pressure vessels. So you discretize all this. And this is why a lot of these advanced reactor developers are using this fuel. So great, cool story, Curt, that sounds really good. But it turns out these reactors, this is like a very modern, very advanced mathematics. Somebody figured out that these reactors don't turn on without fuel. I'm being facetious here. So it's, Triso, even though it's been around or whatnot, and the facility that you saw, It's the largest production facility anywhere outside of China, but it's still really small, right? So it needs to come out of PowerPoint land and workshop land, actually be industrial manufacturer. So that was my mission and that was my passion. Seeing kind of this big wave of advanced reactors come in, I wanted to come in and actually deliver this fuel in industrial scale. I transitioned to this company called Ultra Safe Nuclear in 2021. Which?

Is the best name. There's— I covered Ilya's startup, Super Safe Intelligence. It's just, don't worry guys. Yeah, this is really safe. So, so it was Ultra Safe Nuclear.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was a company, you know, that was there. I, I thought at the time, you know, it had the— I wanted the right level of control for doing what I wanted to do and they had the right level of capital. It was primarily backed by, you know, one major investor. His name was Richard Hollis Helms. He was a patriot, ex-CIA.

Ex-CIA. I mean, this whole story is bananas, man. We got an ex-CIA, an Iranian nuclear scientist, a Green Beret. We've got all the different, you know, cast of characters that you want. No, but Richard— Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. Richard was a believer. You know, he First of all, he was a patriot. I really believe that. He had invested in other companies. He had good resources and he poured a lot of resources. He put about $140 million of his money into that company. And that company was making fuel, which I was making fuel there, but it was also making a reactor. But wait, it was making another reactor. But wait, it was also making a space reactor. But come on, let's do some engineering, procurement, construction. So it was really spread thin. It sounds cool to be vertically integrated everywhere, but you get a lot of resources.

No, I saw the list of things. Yeah, I mean, so he wanted to make a reactor for craft in space, like a rocket engine.

Propulsion, nuclear propulsion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, sorry, and then there was the fuel, the reactors, that thing. And then the, I remember, yeah, the third one was—

They wanted to do like, they wanted to operate their own reactors. They wanted to do engineering, procurement, construction. So there's the whole value chain, right? Which is, which is a lot. Richard unfortunately passed away in May of 2024. A new board came about, which I went on that board and, you know, we looked at the situation. I think the decision was to let's go through a supervised structured Chapter 11 restructuring and sale process. And then, and then I get a call, you know, this is, this is summer of 2024. Very tough time. It's, it's, we can kind of get into a little bit, you know, I didn't get paid. No, a lot of people, nobody got paid for 8 months. And, you know, everybody's still driving to work, which is in hindsight, it's, it takes some brain computation.

Can I, can I hit on that for one second? I mean, the, this is, you know, I'm definitely not making light of it. It's a crazy story. I mean, the Wall Street Journal piece when you guys came out of stealth mode got into this. But yeah, so like you said, for 8 months these employees are coming to this company on faith and not knowing what's, what's going to transpire. And I mean, and then when I came and met some of the employees, yeah, I mean, what a— it was an interesting group of people. You could tell it is— it had this like sort of family almost, um, feel to it for the people who had stuck through this. But I mean, that is a— that's a, you know, there's high-risk technology and then there's nuclear falls into this, I feel like, into this like quantum computing, like some of these aerospace anything where it's It's like, you know, this is not a SaaS software product where you're like, this is a product that has a good chance it could work out. This is a pretty high-risk bet for these people to make.

It is. And a lot of these folks, you know, we worked together like 10, 11 years before, you know, I used to manage the nuclear fuels group at the lab and I worked with a lot of these guys, you know, whether you call them smart or otherwise, they followed me to this new venture. And then there was a lot of other new folks that came in. You know, Ashlee Vance, like every day we would come in, look at each other and say exactly what I told you. The wave is coming. These reactors don't run without fuel. We should make fuel. And so we kept thinking like, this is a valuable asset, what we've built and what you saw. And it's like, you know, but a month goes by, the pressure builds up. I was single, I didn't have kids, but you know, you've got families, you've got kids. It's really, really incredible. And I'm so incredibly grateful to my team. And that's why there's, you know, incredible trust there.

And the team is mostly a lot of Oak Ridge National Lab scientists, employees.

There is a good deal of that. You know, the science of making nuclear fuel is esoteric, and then definitely making triso is even more esoteric. And you remember I said kind of Oak Ridge has been the hub for that. They've been making triso fuel since 1960s in small laboratory batches and then understanding how to do it better, codify it, improve it, all that stuff.. So can you bring engineers fresh out of school and then they do research and figure it out?

100%.

It's going to take them 5, 6, 7 years and it's going to take a lot more money. Whereas you bring folks that have been doing it for 20 years, they're very familiar with it. So there was a good group out of Oak Ridge National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab, ORNL, has been great. Their mission is to facilitate industry. So great partnership, great support from them. And lots of just fresh early career folks, highly driven. And those folks like, you know, stuck around too. So it's, yeah, it was really incredible. So anyways, this is like, we're in this absolute, like, it's a very tough position to be in. You can't just go through Chapter 11, you know, to secure financing to do that. Going bankrupt is very expensive, by the way. It's, you have to get to secure a lot of financing and whatnot. And when you have a technology like this, it's not like, oh, you have an inventory of potatoes that I can put a value on. It's a lot of IP and infrastructure. So, you have to have essentially a buyer. And, you know, Tommy can get into it. It's called a stock and horse buyer. So I was out there trying to secure somebody who's interested on a, you know, a Wednesday night in July, essentially a year ago. I got a call from this guy. His name is Tommy. He's like, I've researched you, I know everything about you, and I'm gonna buy the field business. You wanna take it from here?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was definitely a non-standard transaction for a VC to undertake. Because the background was, you know, we had been investing in national security, defense, energy infrastructure, anything that touched the government, highly regulated markets for about the last 7.5 years. About 4 years ago, we made our first nuclear investment and it is in one of the advanced reactor companies.

Which one?

Radiant.

Radiant. Yeah, sure.

And Along the way, you know, we had made that bet when it was just a couple folks sitting at desks saying they're going to build a nuclear reactor. And there was always an expectation that the fuel was going to be there. And then as it went on and on and on, it became, I think, more and more clear that maybe that wasn't a good assumption.

Assumption.

Yeah.

And then I think as we got closer and closer to the point where they would start to demonstrate the reactor. They've made incredible progress and we saw that they could be put in a position where they would have to get fuel from a competitor. And of course, why would any competitor have any incentive to move them along in their own demonstration licensing process? So like, this is an industry-wide problem. It wasn't a Radiant problem, it was everyone.

So there are some people making small modular reactors who are trying to make their own fuel in very small batches. Okay.

In very small batches. And it's, and it's for vertical, you know, vertical integration. I would say in some cases it's a necessity because they also see there's no fuel. But this isn't how, you know, commodity markets function. You know, a healthy commodity market.

Yeah.

Rely on high volume, low cost competition. And so, you know, the challenge with these reactors, when you, when you take that approach and you're going to make these small batch, you know, fuels and you're going to vertically integrate, well, I mean, the fuel is an input cost that drives the price on the output for the actual energy going out of the reactor. And so very high cost fuel is going to result in very high cost electricity. And it's the reality today that if we don't get the cost down, this technology will never get commercialized, even if they work, which they all will, but they have to reach a customer at some point that's going to be willing to pay.

The math gets skewed.

So, you know, we made a decision in about January of last year that we were going to incubate a fuel company. And our logic was we understood the regulatory process and we said, well, even if it takes a couple of years to get through the licensing process, we'll be there when these reactors are hitting commercial viability, like post-demonstration, post-licensing. And so we could slow roll, you know, that process and build over time. Interestingly, as we got— went down that path, I had been told at some point, you know, if you can only poach this guy, Kurt Tirani from Ultra Safe Nuclear, he's the guy that knows how to build one of these facilities. So I knew all about Kurt and Ultra Safe and what their facility was like. We were literally looking at plots of land on the same campus down there with them. And one day I got a phone call from someone at one of the larger nuclear companies and said, you know, this is a bit outside of our wheelhouse, but we've heard about what you're doing. It seems credible. You know, we've gotten word that Ultra Safe Nuclear is going to go into bankruptcy. Would you be interested in talking to them about buying their fuel assets? And so we, of course, said yes. And that's where we got involved here.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we, we spent a lot of time at Oak Ridge and with the team. And I think what we saw instantly was, you know, the exquisite asset here wasn't the building or the equipment or really even the IP. It was that if we let this team disperse and go elsewhere and go on their way, we'd never be able to reassemble the depth of talent and the experience in this very, very niche field. And at some level, I mean, we did view this as a critical national security asset that we couldn't let go away.

Yeah. Okay. There's so much to get into. It's amazing. Why don't we— let's explain. TRISO. Let's explain why. Something you said when I was visiting really struck me. You're like— and you've talked about it already— but you're like, look, we've known how to do this, you know, since the '60s, and then we sort of forgot everything. And, and, um, and you mentioned China in this, that they're making TRISO. I mean, so this is like a technology, it sounds like, the Americans pioneered. Is my— is that—

is that the whole nuclear era?

Right.

The dawn of it was in that— in fact, was in K-25, you know, in the place that you were. So, you know, the country, this country started all this. And honestly, you know, that place that you visited, that's where the first uranium was enriched for, you know, purpose of defense back in '43 to '45.

So Oak Ridge was making fuel back then for the Manhattan Project that was being shepherded in New Mexico.

Yeah, so you watch Oppenheimer, the movie, you've got Groves, General Groves, he goes and gets 60,000 acres over there, okay? And you've heard of these things, K-25, Y-12, X-10, these are, it's a grid system and this is locational places. So Fermi does an experiment, I think '41 or so, where they show that you can have a chain reaction and you try a chain reaction.

In Chicago.

In Chicago, under the universities, like, you know, racketball field or whatever. That reactor operates for like a very short amount of time, like a second or so, and it has like a watt or some very small power. Then they're like, all right, let's build a nuclear reactor that runs continuously. So where do they build that? X-10, which is now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Next to it, they, they have a facility called Y-12, which they had calutrons. What's a calutron? It's California cyclotron. So there was a guy named Ernest Lawrence who's got multiple national labs in the Bay Area named after him. And it's essentially a mass spectrometer and you can separate different isotopes of uranium. And then that wasn't efficient at low enrichments. So then they built a gaseous diffusion plant, which is in the K-25. When they built it, it was the largest man-made building. You're trying to pick pictures of that.

I love those pictures.

But the craziest thing—

Can we hit— Please. Oh, maybe I'm fast forwarding. Not only the largest building, but then it ends up consuming something like 1.5 of America's electricity, higher, more electricity than New York City.

14%.

14% of New York City's electricity.

You tell this to people and they're like, no, no, you're wrong. That doesn't, doesn't make sense. So like it, it was consuming a very large amount of electricity. Like in the peak it was 1.5, 1.5% like the US, but it was running all the time. So it really, from 1943 to '45, 1/7 of the United States electrical power went into the effort of enriching uranium to make the fuel for the bombs.

And it was the largest building for a long time until the Tesla Gigafactory came on.

I think, yeah. I mean, you saw how massive it was. It's been remediated. So that's actually one of the success stories of Department of Energy. They have different offices. One of the offices is called Environmental Management. They remediated that site. It's a brownfield. They turned it to industrial use. Guess what? They were processing uranium, we're processing uranium. So it really makes sense for us to be out there. Triso Technology, you hear about sodium fast reactor, gas reactor, blah, blah, molten salt reactor. Again, they were all built and operated in '50s, '60s, '70s. So we know they all work. There's no debate on the technology. So it's execution and economics question. I will say that TRISO was a little bit of an art. There was US TRISO, then there was German TRISO, and there was Japanese TRISO, and this was better than this, and people didn't really quite understand why until really the early 2000s. There was a program under Department of Energy called the Advanced Gas Reactor Program, and it took it from this art into a science, and that really kind of unlocked the potential of TRISO. And so why TRISO? I'll say it one more time. It's that you got billions of discrete pressure vessels made out of silicon carbide that's very strong, doesn't melt, can go to extreme temperatures. And the issue is you don't want to release radioactivity. And if you can entrap radioactivity at the core of the fuel itself, then you don't have a radiological problem.

So when you talk about these billions of vessels, I'm not sure, I just want to make sure I'm understanding it right because I saw— So poppy seeds. Yeah, I saw the tiny poppy seeds. And so they have their own coating on them and then they're embedded in these pellets of silicon carbide. Is that the right? So it's kind of encased?

You can put them in a carbonaceous, they call it a graphite matrix, or you can put it in silicon carbide. You just don't want to pour loose pellets into a core. So you want it to have a shape. Sometimes it's a form of like a tennis ball, like a sphere. You call that a pebble. Sometimes they're like a cylinder, you call that a compact. And if you can have fancier shapes like that too. So that's just the fuel form. So it's not loose particle. So they've been around. We operated reactors in the United States built by General Atomics in the '70s, '80s. They built a lot of fuel in the US. The Germans had reactors for a number of decades. Japanese had a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. UK had them. And then the only reactors that are operating today are in China. Of the—

Triso, right?

Of Triso-based high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. They literally bought the German blueprints and they're making them. And You know, this is, it's one of these things that it's very interesting. You look at the history of this. I used to work for the National Lab System, Department of Energy. I used to go to China every year under Obama administration, every year as a, you know, cooperation and all that. And it was a lot of, I remember I used to sit in the van with Undersecretary of, Assistant Secretary of Energy, His name was Pete Lyons. He passed away. May he rest in peace. But Pete used to tell me, like, I used to tell Pete, like, why are we here? Why are we like keep giving them stuff? And Pete would say, well, you know, let me tell you, kid, it's all about being open. And, you know, it's like that thesis out of Francis Fukuyama's End of History. You know, we just need to teach them our liberal democracy and free market ways, and that's what they're going to adopt. That's, that's, that's not what happened.

Didn't work out.

That's not what happened. And, you know, really it didn't change until 2017. And, you know, but now there's this— now there's this need to do it and reinvent a lot of this here. In the '90s, your nuclear sector was really decimated.

Well, that's what I was— I mean, it seems like there's kind of like two underlying problems, right? One is we— it sounds like the TRISO was— we knew how to make it, but it was still at that science, more sciencey level, and we hadn't figured out or we hadn't put effort into mass producing it like we on the scale. And then, you know, there's the bigger mega story, which is the world soured on nuclear power, at least. Well, a lot of the world and the United States. And so because, yeah, when I came to visit you guys, I'm like, well, why the hell have we not been making reactors out of this thing if we knew how to do this and it's safe? And so, so it seems like there was, there was such headwinds against nuclear. Is that it? But you and then you But you've been looking at the sector for a while. So, I mean, I guess you saw that the need was going to— you were betting that the world would maybe turn.

Well, I mean, it was not without pushback.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, we invest in some prickly things, you know, weapon systems. You know, we've never shied away from that, even from our earliest days before it was popular. And I remember I got a phone call from one of our LPs after we made the announcement that we had invested in Radiant. And, you know, it was questions like, what happens if it gets hijacked by terrorists? What, you know, what happens if, you know, one of these containers rolls over on the side of the highway? And so we had to really explain why these reactors were passively safe, how they were different than, you know, the reactors that, you know, captured the headlines decades ago. Um, and I, you know, I told that investor that if terrorists were to capture one of these reactors, they would have 5 to 7 years of clean energy for their terrorist camp, I guess. Yeah.

You know, meaning, just meaning they wouldn't be getting like enriched uranium or something.

This is, TRISO is probably the worst. You know, in form of nuclear fuel to try and do anything because, because of the coatings.

Okay.

And trying to break that down is, you know, no easy feat.

I mean, so if you want to, if you want to pry it open to get the uranium for a weapon, it's, it's sort of, it's such small amounts and you'd have to, you know, enrich that further.

And, and, you know, it's, it is a processed product. Um, and, you know, I mean, one of the amazing things that Curt and team had done and the value of all the work that had been put into this facility wasn't just that they could make Triso. It wasn't just that they can make it in big batches, is that they had optimized so that the yield of the process was very, very high. And when you think about, you know, unpacking all of the implications of something like that, right? You don't just take uranium that doesn't like meet the spec and toss it out, right? Like, it's very expensive. It's also, you know, a hazardous material. And so the ability to take those particles after they're made and then break them back down into their, you know, into their parts to be able to reprocess it is, you know, something that they spend a lot of time on. And it also drives down the price, it increases efficiency. And so those are all the same reasons, that difficulty is all the same reasons why, from like a counter-proliferation standpoint, there's not a lot of concern about tritium fuel.

Okay. What, like in the big picture, you know, from where I sit, I get bombarded these days, the last 5, 6 years with fusion, fission startups of all kinds, right? And so like you get You're like, okay, people are interested in this. Hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are being invested. And then I still think like if you're the general public, you're kind of like, oh, we're sort of nuclear is, you know, not, doesn't seem to be where we're going. There's not, but I'm always trying to square this. I mean, what happened in the last 10 years that all these startups started appearing all of a sudden?

I mean, I think one of the probably most impactful things that has happened is The government made a bet, you know, I think largely when we started getting interested in the space, we were following where we were seeing government programs go. And so, I mean, really, I think kind of a watershed moment, especially for the small modular reactors and the micro reactors, was the Army's Pele program coming out where the Army said, we want small modular reactors and we have all these different use cases across the Department of Defense. The Army has operated its own reactors in the past. And so once we saw programs like that starting to come online, then, you know, you follow the money, right? Congress is appropriating money for programs like that. That's where you started to see startups get more and more interested in the space. And then venture capitalists followed.

And the Army, I mean, Kurt hit on this, but you, so we talked about it a bit on my visit. I mean, when you have these long supply chains and they're very vulnerable and you're trying to get fuel to all the people in the vehicles. So the idea is that like when we talk about a small modular reactor, I know they can vary in size, right? But we're talking about something that could— well, tell me, I mean, what's the gamut of the size and then what would be the military?

Yeah, I mean, I think like— and even this seems to have been a bit of a moving target. SMR, small modular reactors, used to be like 1 big homogeneous bucket. And I think what we've seen is there's, there's been a little separation there in that we also have microreactors. Microreactors are things that are actually small, actually modular. You know, some of the larger SMRs, they're not actually that small and they're also not really that much.

Okay. It's like a building size.

Yeah. And it's still campus and albeit much smaller than what we've seen in the past. But these microreactors, which are going to fall anywhere from 1 megawatt to 10 megawatts, you know, can be the size of a shipping container, can go on a truck, can go in the back of a C-17. So it can be deployed forward. They require no external hookups to it. You know, the coolant, the, you know, the cooling is in there, the fuel is in there. And so really there's just an output from it. So when you start to think about that in terms of deployment for the military, you know, you're replacing diesel generators. The movement of diesel in Iraq, you know, during the Global War on Terror accounts for the majority of the casualties during that conflict.

Because you're just, you're kind of a sitting duck on this.

I mean, those, you know, the IEDs, you know, through the major, you know, routes in Iraq were, you know, treacherous. And at different points of the war,, you know, that was peaking up and down. I think in 2007, the first time I went to Iraq, I think that summer we were losing about 100 soldiers a month. The majority of those casualties were on the roads.

Yeah. And you were in Iraq and where did you serve?

Iraq. Yeah.

Okay.

And several times.

How long were you in the military?

I did 10 years in active service. I got out in 2015. Okay. So.

And became an investor.

I did.

Yeah. This happens a lot.

Well, with the Special Forces guys, you know, actually, when I got out, there weren't that many guys on Wall Street.

Why? Yeah, I mean, and I kind of went broader than I meant. Well, so I always got the impression that finance was, was like a tempting path.

I mean, I'm from New York. Yeah. And a lot of my friends, they were either cops or firefighters or they worked in finance. And I had already kind of played the carry heavy things and get tired game.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I tried my hand in finance. I was very fortunate to, you know, have people take a chance on me. Yeah. And, you know, made my entry point there.

So you like, I mean, and defense tech is so hot now. I mean, when Anduril first started, you know, I think that first year when they did the border surveillance stuff, Bloomberg, where I worked at the time, I think, I don't know if Bloomberg named them the most evil company, but that might have been Fast Company. But, you know, times, times were different. But I saw, I mean, it looked like you investing and stuff. Yeah, back then.

So yeah, I mean, you know, I had finished business school, I was working at Blackstone, you know, saw some of the traditional aerospace type transactions they were doing. I think I realized that, you know, a lot of the advice they were getting on these specific transactions were coming from consultants and generals. And I think in my own experience, you know, generals are pretty far from the fight. They have incredible historical perspective and see the big picture. But, you know, they're not the ones getting down in the weeds with, you know, the soldiers per se. And the same is true of those companies. And so as I thought about the startup landscape, you know, there was interest in startups getting into government, but I didn't think it was, you know, putting a couple of generals on the board that was going to solve that problem. It was going to be injecting people, you know, in the early days into the company. And so that was the genesis for our firm and our fund. But at the time in 2018, I mean, there are defense-focused VCs today who, when I was starting this up, told me what an awful, awful idea this was and that defense was a completely uninvestable space. Yeah. So the times have changed.

Yes, they have changed. And you know, when I look at, at, okay, so there's, we talked about this military, just defense application. On the AI front, clearly we're building these data centers all over the place. I just, I was telling you, I went to Stargate with Sam Altman, and they've got natural gas, you know, just being pumped directly in, in West Texas, straight into these, these turbines out there. So there's a world where people see these reactors being put right next to data centers to, to fuel them. There's one other big bucket. Oh, the space is, you know, we've for a long time, we've been I mean, same thing. The US government's been looking at nuclear in space for decades and decades. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay, so you have these big buckets. Then there's the mega story, which is like China seems to be building, you know, energy supply. China— if the world is heading towards this AI revolution where compute is the, you know, defining characteristic of your success in this field, which, which just on how this technology works is the more GPUs you throw at this stuff, the better it does. So, you know, some of this at the moment is just math. It looks like China has embraced the math more than, than the US has. And so, you know, would this— would TRISO, all these new reactors, would that be kind of like a sufficient response or is that our— is that our best bet?

It's definitely a part of the response. And, you know, all of this is that, you know, we ceded our leadership. You know, the muscles atrophy when you don't use them and you see kind of all that coming up. Again, a great analogy. As involved as you are in the space sector, you know, yeah, we sent people to the moon in the '60s. And so why did it take so long for, you know, all these other folks to come in and kind of reinvent this? So that's what's happening in nuclear too. I'm always like all the above kind of guy. I'm like picking again, this is the energy that we're gonna use and every other energy is bad is kind of absurd. You need all of it. You do get very limited once you go, once you leave the planet, your choices are a little bit, it's hard to find coal on Mars, I hear. So, you know, you do need to, nuclear's gonna be a part of the equation. So yeah, it is, in hindsight, it's kind of ridiculous that, you know, they called the valley of death in nuclear, the '90s in the Clinton era and kind of shutting everything down, all the infrastructure is going away. So we're paying a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a hangover from that. But I think the infrastructure is there. Like I said, we just want to make sure that all these advanced reactors that are developing, they're not going to be left without fuel. And this vertical integration, I mean, going back to the ultra-safe nuclear, it's a tricky thing to do. You look at a car industry, It's like Toyota is not making a Toyota petroleum that if you drive a Toyota, you go to a Toyota gas station. If you have a Ford, oh buddy, you gotta go to a Ford gas station. This is a key enabler of these systems. And we just wanna make sure that be it data center application, defense application, space application, or just clean energy application, this is not the issue and you don't have to go source it from our adversaries, which is a little embarrassing.

So but even when you guys explain how safe this is and that we've, we've done decades of studies and it's like impossible for this to go wrong, you know, because everyone— I mean, if you've seen Chernobyl on HBO, I mean, the image you're left with is some guys, you know, not paying enough attention. These rods are sinking through. And I think that's what sticks with the public. Right. And then now you're talking about, hey, we're going to put a nuclear reactor like all over the place, you know, because they're going to be right by these data centers. They're going to be in all these spots, I still don't. And then, and then I still just don't think the public—

Yeah, let me hit this directly. Yeah. So, so dawn of nuclear era, '40s, '50s and Atoms for Peace, they're like, okay, let's use this awesome source of energy. It's going to be too cheap to meter, by the way, you know, so let's build these reactors. So engineers come in and they're like, well, there's an awesome amount of power in there. Awesome. It's like a light water reactor, typical light water reactor, it's like multiple gigawatts of thermal energy in a volume less than this room. Okay? This is not a big room.

Yeah. And that's enough to power?

It's like 3 million homes.

Okay.

So it's a huge amount of power. The power density per unit volume, you have a huge amount of power. The thing is when you shut these, when you turn the reactor off, you still generate a lot of heat. And, you know, 6%, 5%, 1% of awesome amount of power is still a lot of power. You know, so they came in, they were like, okay, let's scale these things to make them really big. And they knew that there's a lot of power and there's danger associated with that. So then they said, hey man, what do you think is the worst thing that's gonna happen? And this guy said, you know, I think this is the worst thing. I'm not gonna get to the name of the accidents and all that. And then there's this other thing. So then they said, okay, this is gonna be our bounding accidents, okay? We designed the reactor so that if these extreme events occur, you know, it can be safe. And it has to do with a pump turning on or something happening. That's called an active safety system where something kicks in to control your system. But then if you ask, okay, well, what happens if something worse than this happens? The long tail, what Nassim Taleb calls the black swan event. They call that beyond design basis accident. So we don't worry about it. We don't design for that. So if you think about it, I guess it was a sound judgment in the '50s, '60s, '70s, they're like, that's what it is. So you look at an incident like Fukushima, a 9.1 scale earthquake, the reactors actually shut down and 52 minutes later the waves came in. I actually visited the Fukushima site. I was very involved with that. The highest amount of dose I've ever gotten was driving between Unit 2 and Unit 3 with the whole thing blown up years after. But you have an awesome amount of power. You got a 1960s design that's not designed for a reactor on the ring of fire. All that's been done, again, the analogy is like those big reactors with that huge power density. Imagine you take one of the dragons from Game of Thrones and you put it in a cage and you're like, hey man, if that thing gets out, it's really bad. So let's put another cage. So they call defense in depth. But occasionally this thing is going to get out., and it's going to be mayhem. So the new reactors have much lower power density. So it's a bunny that's running on a wheel. They've accounted for that long tail. And again, they're relying on natural phenomena to be safe, not an active safety system. So that's how they're safe. And it's just really truly a design choice that's been around since the '80s, '90s. We just haven't built these reactors. I will say, that Chernobyl is its own class. Complete disregard for any, like, actual— like, the reactor was designed so it's runaway unsafe. Like, no Western reactor is like that. They were using it to produce power. They were using it to produce weapons. They were using it to do experiments. Insane. Like, in the US, you get a different class of reactor. Chernobyl is its own class of disaster with very, very poor judgment and design or operational choices. And the reactors that are being developed today, literally by everyone, are inherently safe. And I think the proof is going to be in the pudding when these units come online. And they're safe based on certain design choices and based on having constituents that don't melt, that can withstand extreme temperatures and ride out these transients if you have a really improbable event.

And what still happens to the fuel? I mean, you still have to deal with that at the end, right?

Yeah, you have to deal with that. The reality is that the entire nuclear fuel, spent nuclear fuel discharged from reactors, there's about 100 light water reactors being operated today in the United States, 400 across the world. All that waste fits in a high school football field. I mean, this is kind of, again, ridiculous in my opinion, because you've got tons of other waste being thrown into an environment. These folks have actually been responsibly storing it There's also other double standards. You know, you see like this is a cup of water, right? And then let's say this thing has the cadmium in it or lead or something that we don't like. And then so I'm like, hey, what's the limit of EPA for lead in this water? And you're like, it's 15. I'm like, oh my God, it's like 20. So then I take a cup of water from his and pour clean water into it and it goes to 14 and the birds are singing, we're high-fiving, we're drinking the water, we're hydrated. In nuclear, for some reason, unlike any other thing, there is no limit. Anything above zero we consider bad. That's called LNT. That basically we say anything above zero is bad. Now, I got a lot of dose flying yesterday from Tennessee to San Francisco. And I'm going to get a lot more dose going back, way more than I'm getting in that facility. So we also have kind of this irrational view of any dose is bad. And all the doses that we're getting is well below what we're receiving natural background radiation. So it's all those factors. So to define Fuel is used and then it needs to be disposed of.

Yeah. And I get everything you're saying, but I mean, don't we dispose of it in Colorado today in some—

No, no. It's a political stalemate. So there was Yucca Mountain, Nevada, it's not happening. The defense nuclear waste was going to a facility called WIPP in New Mexico. The Finns know how to dispose of it without fuss. The Swiss know how to dispose of it, but we managed to make a big fuss out of it.

Yeah, because this Yucca Mountain thing, sorry, I forgot it was in in Nevada, but I mean, it's just like sitting there. Nobody— the most expensive and most studied piece of rock, and nobody can make a decision ever to like actually use it, right? To— yeah, yeah. But I mean, so like, how do we get over— you can say what you said and then there's obviously there's this continued hangup about it.

It's because— it's because the US government said, hey, when you make fresh fuel and run reactors and all that, that's all private. When it comes out of reactor, it's my property. Okay? And they said, we're going to come up with a way to dispose of it. And it went into the government.

Yeah.

So they couldn't come up with a solution. There are a lot of commercial solutions. There's a lot of nations that have solutions. And it's just, it's one of these things. Maybe, again, there are private companies working in that space. Maybe we should let them run.

Yeah. I did a story a long time ago on deep isolation. They were trying to make boreholes.

Those guys are solid.

Yeah.

Deep boreholes. To bury it. Way underground. Okay.

The—

and when you're investing in this stuff, I mean, clearly you think we get over some of these psychological hurdles or it's just a necessity.

And I think the nuclear spent fuel problem just turned out to not be a problem. There's like the volume of it so small, most of it stored on site at reactor site and it's going to stay there and it's, you know, dry cask and it's not going to bother anyone.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day right now, the problem that we're staring down in terms of energy scarcity in the future outweighs, like I said, the effectively non-problem of what we're doing with this spent fuel. Yeah, the spent fuel, by the way, still has a tremendous amount of potential energy in it. So it's very likely that at some point in the future it is actually an asset, not a liability. You're taking, you know, take that spent fuel and you're going to do something else with it.

Well, I remember it wasn't a Terraform originally that wanted to like use the old fuel to—

There's a lot of companies working on recycling the fuel and it's really valuable, by the way. Like we also make radioisotope power units. That again, when you go to space, you need energy. Like Mars Rover has plutonium-238. We don't make that in this country anymore, but we can recycle it from used fuel or you can have other radioisotopes that can generate power. So there's a lot of value in the spent nuclear fuel that you can recycle to make fuel that you can burn again or to make radioisotope power systems. Jimmy Carter dismantled all that in the '70s and then afterwards Reagan tried to bring it back. But again, when you take that infrastructure away, you're going to pay a penalty having to bring it back up. But again, private capital is working on that too.

I mean, I think, I think what we're seeing right now though is that the current administration is in such lockstep, whether it's Department of Interior, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, that we need more energy. And so what we're seeing is probably a once in a generation opportunity to push and say, here's how we're gonna solve these problems and here's how we're gonna do 'em safely. And here's why it's better than what's done in the past. And they're receptive and they're listening.

Right. Except these are multi-year, you know, totally. If 4 years is enough to, to, to see, I mean, I misspoke. It's not, it wasn't Terraform. That's my friend Casey's company. It was TerraPower, which was a company Bill Gates backed. I'm just reminded, I mean, Bill Gates has been, you know, 20 years of, of politicking on this and, and trying to get the US to, to pay more attention. And then, And then I have reported on TerraPower in the past, but now I remember— I forget some of the particulars, but I remember going at it for a while and then just being like, well, China's going to do this and we're just never going to have the political will. So, so in this moment we had— there's a window to do this and— okay, Kurt, you know, to the— I think you're fine talking about some of this stuff. I mean, just your, your, your background. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a sort of extra politically sensitive moment, I guess. But you were, you were, you're born in Iran.

I'm fresh off the boat.

Iranian nuclear scientist. Yeah. But you, and it wasn't like you moved here when you were 1 or 2.

I mean, I was 16.

You were 16. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. I mean, I just have obvious questions. Like, what is that like trying to become a nuclear scientist in the US?

Moving when you're a 16-year-old boy from Iran to US, that's a little bit of a culture shock. So that, you know, it was great. I was like, well, I don't have any friends. I can't even speak English. So I was like, might as well like study math and all this stuff. But no, I was, my dad was a citizen. My dad actually worked in Shah's government, the previous government of Iran. And he was like the head of the consulate in San Francisco and all this other stuff. So anyways, he, He was a citizen. You know, I was born in the '80s, in the middle of the war that was going on over there. Took us 11 years to immigrate. But once we immigrated, I became a citizen. And, you know, if you're a citizen in this country, there is no discussion. There's no challenge. It's been really great.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, and obviously, I mean, that's what makes America great is to get the world's best and brightest to work on these important things. But, you know, there's no, never been Was it extra difficult as you were like starting to take over?

Honestly, no. I mean, I lived in Arizona first and then I, Bay Area, I went to grad school here and then, and then Tennessee. No, it's, it's, it's been incredibly solid. I mean, you see the people I work with, they're just mostly good old boys from East Tennessee. And, and, you know, and then, I mean, like, yeah, it's, it's all good. And now this guy, I was talking to him one time in the car and he starts speaking Farsi to me, which is like, so I guess it's good. We're all feeling at home.

So yeah, we bonded over our love of of Persian pop music. Yeah. Okay.

Now, why does he know Farsi is a separate question.

Well, we were talking to Tennessee. I mean, what have you made of— obviously we bombed and then it seemed like the next week it was a bunch of armchair analysis on whether it worked or not. When we were there, you were just explaining to me some of these— I think it's like turbines that have to spin. Like be fed with electricity, you know, at all costs to spin for decades. And I'm butchering this, but it sounded like you were like, well, you know, that part's gone for sure.

That part's gone. So what you were just talking about is called the centrifuge technology, which is—

Yeah, please correct me.

Yeah, just— Absolutely. All good. You remember we talked about K-25 and calutrons and gaseous diffusion plant? That's like, you know, The beginning of the nuclear era. Then they figured out that, hey, just like a dryer, you know, when you put your clothes in the washer and it just pushes all the water out, you can separate the heavier 238 isotope from 235. You want 235, okay? When you dig uranium out of the ground, 0.7% of it is the stuff you want and 99.3% of it is the stuff you don't want. So you have to get that light stuff out. So they figured out, hey, if I can put it in a tube and spin it, I can kind of separate these isotopes, and there's cascades of this. Turns out the modern technology today, those are the fastest spinning objects made by humankind. They spin at like 60,000 RPM. Incredible. So centrifuge technology has been around for a long time. A lot of work around proliferation was that, well, it's hard to make that material. That was definitely the case in the '40s, '50s, '60s, but it's 2025. Those technologies are not so inaccessible now. The key is that those are very susceptible to any variation. So if they lose electrical power or things like that, it's very damaging when you're going supersonic speed spinning. So they definitely took out the centrifuges. But one of the key things to say, and I'll say this just so everybody understands, nobody enriches to 60% for fun or research. You enrich into 60%, you can, first of all, you can make it a not very good weapon with 60%, but you can make it. And what people don't understand, they're like, well, they only went to 60%. Ideally, you need like 90-something for a weapon. So they still have a long way to go. The way you measure enrichment, like effort, it's this weird unit called SWU, Separative Work Unit. Okay. And so the amount of Cebu you need to go from natural 0.7%, remember, to 2.5% is the same amount of energy you need to go from 60 to bulb. So the point is, like, I think what they were doing, they were like, you know, like, we've done 99% of the work and we took out the centrifuges. But listen, the material is still there. I mean, the material doesn't disappear. I don't know, you can gather it and I don't know if they moved it, nobody knows. So this game is going to continue until you have a regime there that doesn't want to do this.

So, okay. And I mean, you obviously just went into it, but so like net-net, okay, it comes down to the regime. But did you— so what we did was effective on some level, perhaps.

It definitely a nice, you know, kick in their behind. Yeah, it's highly disruptive, but I don't know, what do you think? You have to keep go doing this again?

You know, I think that, um, we have some choices to make. There's always trade-offs with these decisions, specifically the use of force, the projection of military power. We have to choose between, do we want to, at some cadence over a period of time, continue to have to do these sorts of actions with our partners in the region Or do we want to, in one action, go and deal with the problem, you know, to its natural conclusion? And I just think there's not a lot of appetite on either side of the aisle, and certainly by the American people, to put troops on the ground in Iran.

I don't—

yeah, I don't approve of that.

I think what we're seeing though is, and why parts of this feel different, is certainly the support that Israel has received from, um, other countries in the region. I think very clearly the Saudis want to reach a normalization, and that is inherently bad for the Iranians. Um, so it leaves them with very few friends in the region, and if your goal is to be the regional hegemony, it gets hard when everyone else is against you?

Yeah. I mean, and this, this is a giant broad question. Okay. You know, I see all the, a lot of the defense tech companies pointing to like SpaceX as their model, which makes, you know, I think I've covered SpaceX about as much as anyone. So I feel like I've got a good handle on that. And, you know, it's like a, there's a chance this is like a once in a lifetime sort of company. I mean, they just, you know, knocked it out of out of the park on every possible metric. And, but it took them about 12 or 14 years really to like sort of achieve their goals and then hit this, this point where they were starting to lap the rest of the world really. And, you know, I've covered Anduril a bunch and I, I'm, I'm impressed by what they do. I feel like they're, of all these military defense startups, the biggest, the most ambitious., it's clear to me that they have, they have a lot to prove. I mean, they have not yet hit that, that SpaceX level at all where, you know, they're making hundreds of things when they need to be making tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, which I know they're starting to do. But yeah, so, you know, part of me, I see so many, it's like, is SpaceX a one-off? Are, are, are these defense tech companies kind of chasing the money and the appetite now? Yeah, it's hard for me to like gauge how this actually plays out. Because hard tech is hard and it might be the case that Elon and Gwynne Shotwell were uniquely suited to marshal this team.

I mean, I think—

Like, yeah, especially on like a new Prime, you know, that really fixes a lot.

I mean, there's so much value in being early and having that white space. And it's not just being early, it's being early and well-capitalized and having the right strategy.. And I think when you look at the defense tech space, I mean, Anduril's done it, you know, I mean, they were early and being early isn't just time to develop the market and the product and the customers, but in the government sector, it's the time to be in front of decision makers, congressional members, permanent staff, you know, the program offices. And so when you have that space and you capitalize in a way that that allows you to move really quickly, it's very hard to compete with that. And so especially in a, in a time where the barrier for people to get involved, um, wasn't actually one of resources, it was one of will, right? Uh, it wasn't until the Russian invasion of Ukraine that all of a sudden I think socially, politically, it was okay to want to support these industries. You know, I, especially in the early days of, you know, Decisive Point when we were investing in the space, a lot of it was trying to pull companies in. And now there's, of course, companies that from day one, this is what they want to do. And I remember, you know, I definitely personally had some heartburn about the wave of people who overnight, you know, went from being, you know, experts in building dating apps and now they're experts in defense. Um, and, and the, and the feeling that, well, it would have been nice if while we were in war, there was some of this interest.

Yeah.

Um, you know, I definitely vividly remember like taping diesel glow plugs to the end of a pole out in front of our Humvees to try and set IEDs off ahead of us. Um, you know, but as this has evolved, I think that there has probably been more of a national recognition than I had expected there would be that this is important. And so we're thrilled that people have come around to it and it's not too late. I mean, I think you wouldn't be investing in the space if you thought it was too late.

Yeah, I have so many thoughts on it. I just— it's like it seems, you know, I mean, 'cause it can't fully do apples to apples, but it's like SpaceX has, you've always got commercial satellites that want to go up. You've got, you've got sort of government missions that are not totally defense dependent. You've got Starlink, which is like, this is the real moneymaker, you know, and is, is like a global consumer telco basically that's kind of funding all this. And then Anduril feels to make all the math really check out, you're like dependent on like wars happening to some extent, or, or at least like people taking China seriously as a threat and preparing for that, or just being like, hey, we are modernizing our military. When I'm hanging out with the, to go see some of these weapons tests and you see what our military, software has been the, this is like America's great advantage. Nowhere does software better than us for 40 years. And the stuff is like Windows 95 era It's like they just missed the last, you know, since like Google was invented. And it's like really, it's like shocking actually. Yeah. And so, so I feel like there has to— I just always wonder about where that will— how sustainable that will is. I think—

I mean, there's structural challenges, right? And I think like one of the biggest misnomers in, let's say, defense tech or really any technology that is going after one of these regulated markets, whether it's nuclear, whether it's defense, whether it's space, is that the people who have been serving in government either are not talented enough to solve the problem, they're not smart enough to solve the problem, they don't have the will to solve the problem. I promise you, every single soldier in the 75th Ranger Regiment wishes they had better tech and would do anything if it were in their power to get it.

Yeah.

Um, and so are all their leaders and so are the program officers and program managers, there's a willingness, but there is a very, very difficult bureaucracy to navigate that has just been built over time and has become durable and entrenched in a way that no one company was going to parachute in and solve all those problems. And so I think it has been, like I said, a bit of a movement that has started to make this progress and then Like I said, I think there's also been a recognition and willingness on the government side. I've said it before, you know, in our discussion, but the same is true for defenses and nuclear. There's a moment in time right now where the government is willing to listen and they want you to show them the pain. Yeah. You know, show us how you would do it better. And it's the most open, I think, that we've seen to folks making changes and accepting that.

I was looking at the Trump parade and there was like two soldiers carrying two Skydio Drones in their head, and then I just scrolled through my X feed and China was doing like a drone show with like 100,000 drones, this very intricate dance. Yeah, I just was like, okay, we got some work to do.

Um, yeah, uh, one, you know, one of the things that I think is, um, you know, you talked a little bit about are we gonna be able to focus enough on China. The reality is, and I think we just saw it with what happened with Iran. Um, we can be very focused on, on China, on those sorts of big type of conflicts, but the, the, the type of military that's built, purpose-built for those types of problems is not the same that's built for small wars, low-intensity conflict. Um, and, you know, a great example is when we left Afghanistan, that was basically us saying we're done, we're done with the Middle East, we're done with fighting terrorism. Well, terrorism was not done fighting us. Um, and so there's, from, you know, in my opinion, there are some forever type of conflicts out there, and we have to be able to do it all. Yeah. And in that way, we are in a completely different position than China, who has to focus on their strategic objectives in the long term. You know, we always get, I I mean, we always beat ourselves up about being short-sighted and being on these 4-year cycles, but the reality is the demands on the United States and on our Department of Defense and on our government are changing every couple of months.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right, Curt, tell me, let's say everything goes as well as possible. I mean, what does the world look like for nuclear over the next— I mean, you pick your, pick your time horizon, but something like 5, 10, 15 years between you guys commercializing this fuel, all these startups.

Yeah.

What is— what does it look like in the US right now?

Nuclear provides about 20% of the electricity in the US. It's— these are aging plants. You know, they were built to operate 40 years. They got extensions to 60, now 80, but they need to be replaced. We want to go up as a fraction of electricity. You understand all the demands on the grid with the renewables. I mean, this is, I've had like discussions over drinks where people are a little more honest, you know, with like senior VPs and utilities. I'm like, so like when the hyperscaler comes and says, I want zero carbon and what do you sell? I mean, it's like solar, but I got a gas plant in the back. There is no like true carbon-free. So, We got to replace some of the fossil fuels, in my opinion. We got to, but they're going to be a part of the mix. I love how much natural gas we're producing in this country. We got to keep doing that, but they're going to be a part of the mix. We got to fill this 20% back up. I want US to be between 40% to 60% getting its power from nuclear. And we want to be the ones who are exporting this technology, exporting these energy sources. Again, like, you know, maybe similar to space, EU is not leading.

Okay.

Yeah. So like, you know, so what, who's active out there? The Chinese are selling reactors, the Russians selling reactors. Fortunately, there's Korean selling reactors too. But, you know, we want to be out there. We want to bring this, this, this energy to provide, you know, power to the world. I think everybody's familiar with the scale of, of energy and prosperity, right? So I mean, look at like Africa, like that is a big continent. It doesn't get enough attention 'cause the world map, it's like right at the center.

It's huge.

There's a lot of population there. That's where population is growing. So again, whose technology is gonna be powering that continent? So yeah, let's take care of our own house first and then let's go ahead and provide it into the world. And you know, it's, The way we look at it is, you know, that's why we're really laser-focused on the fuel business because, you know, we really want to be a very large-scale, very low-cost supplier enabling all these things. And TRISO is a motif, it's a building block, right? We talked about you can launch space reactors, you can have small reactors, you know, you can have bigger reactors. And maybe, Tommy, how did you select the name of the company? Where'd that come from?

I mean, we're following the footsteps of Standard Oil.

Yeah.

You know, and how did they win? It wasn't just that they were producing, it's that they won on distribution. How were they getting it out to the places that needed it?

Yeah. But now I'm really disappointed in myself that I didn't put that together until you said that. That's terrible. Uh, my dad, my dad worked for, he's, he's, my dad's quite old. He worked for Humble and that was like a descendant. Of Standard Oil. That's terrible. Okay, okay, you guys answered most of my big questions. I think, thank you for your time. How much, like, how much do you buy into, we see Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, everybody buying these nuclear reactor deals. I mean, obviously you're a believer that they're going to buy these little plants for their data centers.

Yeah. I mean, again, like what's really different now compared to 10, 15 years ago, it's they're not just talking, they are, they are, they're investing, they're signing power purchase agreements. They are. And I think really what's different, you know, like government's a part of it, you know, this administration saying we want to get out of the way, you guys go ahead and, you know, do the work. That's great. But it's the demand. The demand. I'm selling fuel. To the government, yes, but I'm selling it to actual reactor developers that are selling it to the hyperscalers. I'm selling it to space companies. Commercial space companies are buying it. So the demand, that's how an industry happens. You were talking about SpaceX that, well, you got the government customer, you got Starlink. I think, and energy is just ubiquitous. You need it everywhere. So I think that demand is what's really different today. And Yeah.

Do you have a take on Commonwealth fusion?

I'm truly not a fusion expert. I went to grad school in nuclear. I have good friends in Lawrence Livermore. You remember Lawrence Livermore NIF? They did a shot that went above. That was one of my classmates. I'm so proud of my classmates. Her name is Andrea Kreitzer. I mean, you should talk to her. But there's different forms of fusion. There's inertial confinement, magnetic confinement. That I'm not the Fusion guy. One of my other housemates, he's the president of Pacific Fusion. They just raised $900 million. Yeah. So get some really informed people. I don't want to, I don't want to butcher it.

Okay. Okay. I, it's very hard for me to tell. Yeah. What's real and what's not among all those guys.

And, and I'm just busy making, making triceratops.

Making triceratops. Okay. Just to put a couple dates on things and then I'll let you guys go. I mean, the, what the factory that I saw, I think vaguely I can say it's like a prototyping factory to bear all this out. Pilot line. Pilot. And then the goal, I think I did in my, I saw in my reading was by 2027, you've got like $100 million in contracts to supply this fuel. So the goal is to, what I saw in Oak Ridge, you want to make bigger versions of that. And then is that?

Yeah, so there's a fine point there in that. We are done scaling. So what you saw in Oak Ridge, and you know, people look at it, they're like, that's industrial scale? Well, yeah, 'cause you can't put a lot of uranium next to itself, then you get this thing called the critical nuclear reaction.

Yeah.

That has really bad consequences. Yeah. So that is the scale, like, you know, one of those like white furnaces that you saw, that's the scale.

Okay. And to describe it to people, yeah, not—

Not that big. Not huge, right?

I mean, the factory was, Much like any of many factories. I've— or yeah, I mean, just not a building size.

So the only thing we're doing, we just copy paste those systems. So the modules are done. So imagine like, again, a car industry analogy. We have one assembly line, you have 10 assembly lines. That's all we're doing.

Okay. And will that be in Tennessee? Do we know?

We are— we're expanding in a few different locations. They're all locations that have a lot nuclear background. But yeah, we're not going anywhere from Tennessee. We're expanding in Tennessee and a couple other places.

And from that building I saw, would you be able to hit the 2027 contracts or you need more facilities for that?

I'm putting more facilities for that. For that. Yeah. To bring a few metric ton capacity. It's not going to be much bigger than that, but it's going to be bigger than that. And you saw there was construction going on.

So we're—

Yeah, we're expanding.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah, but I think what we saw in these executive orders that came out, you know, a little over a month ago, it solved two core questions for the entire, you know, advanced nuclear industry. One is the source of the feedstock, that Hailu fuel, which is going to come from government stockpiles, at least at first, as they stand up domestic enrichment capabilities. And then the other is the licensing timelines. Probably the most impactful thing is planting a flag and saying, this is how long it's going to take to get a reactor licensed.

Yeah.

And so now that those are largely answered questions, um, you know, our timelines around our capacity, how we're scaling, there's a lot more fidelity around that. And I think what you'll see is us moving a lot faster and bringing more capacity online than we had even expected And it's because the demand is there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a great point because you don't wanna spend 10 years just like finding your spot to—

I don't want, I don't, I wouldn't call it demand anymore. It's another word that starts with a D. Desperation.

Uh, well, thank you guys so much for trekking out here. I appreciate it. And thank you for, thanks to all your, um, staff and engineers who, they were super kind to us when we were filming. They kind of went out of their way. We got got cool things made along the way. It was— it was— I had read about you guys and I really wanted to come visit. And then it was— it was like unlike anything I've really ever seen. And I get to go to lots of weird stuff. So it was really cool.

Worked out perfect. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. And it's weird when you're in there. I mean, yeah, like in my head, you know, you're just like, oh, uranium, nuclear. All that. We're just kind of— we were walking around.

I was a little disappointed. Yeah. The first time I thought I was going to be in full.

Yeah.

Detective.

We did go through this like machine at the end. She counted you, right?

Yeah, I was clean.

I was clean. Like you said, I was probably— my flight was probably the worst. I'm sure the worst thing I did. Um, well, thank you guys so much. It was a pleasure talking to you. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. The show is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. As mentioned, the show is sponsored by Yuan Ventures.

Thanks.