Ep 191: The State of Nuclear Power Today with John Cash

From exposure to radiation. So that limit is one half of the known risk. And then our employees get a order of magnitude less than that. And so we run a really good, clean, safe ship. That's our concern with Radiologic, and it's manageable.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show, where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevel. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, we have John Cash. John is the president and CEO of UR Energy, a uranium mining company that has produced and packaged approximately 3 million pounds of uranium with the lowest uranium production costs in the United states. He joined UR Energy in 2007 and has led the permitting and licensure of the companies Lost Creek and Shirley Basin uranium mines, which can produce up to 2.2 million pounds of yellow cake annually. John was also a member of the team that managed UR Energy's 2008 New York Stock Exchange listing. He has nearly 30 years of experience in uranium exploration, radiation safety, regulatory and legislative affairs, uranium recovery operations, international trade, as well as extensive management experience. Before joining UR Energy, he worked for established uranium mining companies including bhp, Rio Alga Mining and Crowbute Resources subsidiary of Cameco. And we're going to have a great conversation today with John. If you are interested in learning about the state of nuclear power today, stay tuned. John, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Chris. It's good to be on.

Yeah, it's great to have you. And you know, we were chatting before the show. It's, you know, we booked you here a couple months back and it just seems like, you know, the timing has been fortuitous as, as things kind of evolve here in the, in the energy sector specifically. And we're going to get into, get into that, but I would love for you to share a little bit about your, your background with the audience, John, and specifically with your energy and, and the company background as well.

Yeah, no thanks, Chris. Appreciate the opportunity. You know, I'm just hillbilly from the Ozarks of Missouri, grew up down there on a farm and had a great opportunity to go to school then. It was called the University of Missouri at Rolla. It's an engineering and mining school. It was only about an hour from my home, so very fortunate to be Able to go to school there, got into geology, got my master's degree there as well. And even when I was in college, I had an opportunity to start working for some of the majors doing uranium exploration and just evolved from there. So worked for a number of big companies with uranium production, got into regulatory affairs, ran some mines and back. It's been a little over 17 years ago now. I came to UR Energy here in Wyoming. I've been with them ever since, and it's been about a year and a half, two years ago now. Was able to fill the CEO position. So I've worked my entire career in the uranium space. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's, it's treated me well, so I guess I can't complain. And it's, it's been a lot of fun.

Wonderful. No, and it seems like, seems like, you know, you've, you have a great varied background in the space, but, you know, looking back, you know, I talk to people about power. We do. You know, we've, we've had guests on the show talking about oil and gas, and I was just reading a report yesterday, as a matter of fact, US is number one in the world for oil and gas production, which I don't know a lot of people, I don't know if a lot of people realize that even with some of the restrictions that have, that have occurred here recently. But one of the things that I was reading about in the past year was that our current nuclear power plants on average are what, about 60 years old? Is that, is that about right?

Yeah, I mean, they're, they're getting pretty aged and for a while the plans were to slowly shut them down over time.

Yeah.

Because natural gas was so cheap and they were having trouble competing with natural gas. But that's changed for a while. And plus the utilities, nuclear utilities were really not getting much government support and that changed as well with the inflation reduction. So the economics have changed just from fundamentals, but also from government support. And now it looks like all of our 94 reactors in the US stay up and running. And in fact they're looking at bringing some that have been shut down back online. So, yeah, the story for nuclear power has changed dramatically over the last six to 12 months. It's an exciting time.

Yeah, it certainly is. And we were, we were talking just before the show was recorded. France changed direction too. They were talk, you know, there's, look, there's been. I'm, I'm going to, for listeners of the show they know I'm, I'm a huge fan of the environment. I love riding my bike. We live in Asheville, North Carolina. My, my boys and I are always out in the woods. You know, I'm usually taking calls on a walk through the woods in my backyard with my dog. But the reality is we need energy as a country, we need energy as a society, we need cheap energy. That's how people are able to improve their lot in life. And one of the statistics that I always love to point out is the richer a country is, the more concerned they are with the environment. And it's interesting that countries like France that have been so focused on renewables, which we would define as like wind, solar, those sorts of things have, have started to kind of lower in favor as some of the economics have, have come to show that those aren't quite as cheap as they were or maybe as the subsidies, you know, get pulled back. So France just announced not too long ago here that they're going to make a big push into I guess, would you call it refreshing their nuclear plant technology? Yeah, yeah, please, go ahead.

Yeah, no, and that's right and you know, you take a look at Germany nearby there the made a hard push into renewables and now that they're incredibly expensive, they're not very reliable and don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to renewables at all. But we just have to be honest with the conversation. They're not the end all and they shut down their nuclear power plants and now their emissions are actually higher than they were before.

Yeah.

And it's expensive, more emissions. And so you know, I think they made the wrong decision. France has seen that and they're doing the opposite. They're going to keep those reactors up and running. And as you mentioned it looks like they may be building 14 more reactors here in the coming years. So that's a common story throughout Europe right now. A lot of countries moving more and more toward nuclear power.

That's awesome. And the reason I say that because and please, I'd love to get your opinion on this just with your background and your, and your grasp. But you know, we've had solar panels on our house. We actually just moved here into a new house. So we don't have, we don't have solar panels up on this one. But, but solar and wind can be very cyclical in nature and if we don't have the battery technology we can't store energy for those off cycle times. And you know from again my research and when People are heating their homes or cooling their homes or charging their EVs or doing laundry. Those typically tend to be times when there may not be a lot of sun or a lot of wind. So if we have something like whether it's natural gas powered plants or nuclear power to kind of provide that steady base and then have these other renewable options that can come in and support, you know, other times, that seems to me to be an ideal solution. Am I off base or is that, is that about.

No, I know. I think you're spot on. That's certainly one of the strengths of nuclear power is it can provide that base load and it's carbon free. It's not. We're sacrificing the carbon free attributes of it. It is carbon free. And when we talk about the cost, if you amateurize the, those expensive plant build out, they are very expensive. But if you amateurize that over 60, maybe 80 years, all of a sudden the costs are looking very, very good because the operational costs are relatively low when it comes to nuclear power plants. Baseload on 24 7, 365. And that's a great support for the rules.

So what is, what's the cost to build a new, like your average size plant today?

Yeah, you know, I don't have real fresh numbers. Company down in Georgia, they just finished up building Vogel 3. They're working on Vogel 4. They've had a number of cost overruns on that. That's really a reflection of we've not been building plants in the U.S. yeah. So we got to relearn and rebuild. That expertise here in the US Is a reflection of some of the regulatory regime. The industry, of course, needs to be heavily regulated and carefully regulated. But at the same time, we need to figure out how to do more efficiently and effectively. So a lot of room for improvement there. The industry is looking at moving more away from the conventional large actors to the small modular reactors. One of the reasons they want to do that is they want to be able to build nuclear reactors essentially like Ford build T's one right after the other. Every one of them is exactly the same. And try to drive the cost down by building them on a factory floor instead of building them out of sight. So that is in process. There are a number of big companies involved there, some big names. Bill Gates is a primary example. He's looking at building out a power plant here in Wyoming of all places.

Wow.

And so his company is called Terra Power. He's got poured from Buffett and his, his Pacific Core Utility and so if anybody can be successful at building that out, I think they've got the state, they've got the right backers, they've got the right technology. So we'll see how that comes along. But again, the whole objective there is to drive down the cost of, of the installation. Of course the first one is going to be expensive. It's no different than anything else. But I believe as they begin to ramp up production of those throughout the country, there are projections that there could be maybe as many as 300 small modular reactors in the US by 2050. And if they're able to do that, they should drive down the cost dramatically and compete with anything.

So let's, let's back up just a second here, John. So most, most of the power plants, nuclear power plants in the country today were built in like 60s, somewhere around there.

Yeah, 70s into the 80s. Yeah, they're older.

Okay. And you know, I find it interesting because when we, we look at statistics and different things, I ask people like, well, what if you were driving a car from, you know, 1970, you know, would you be as comfortable today with the safety aspect as you are driving like a Tesla, like, like a Model S? And you know, as I look through the technology, these, these small modular reactors, or smarts, as sometimes you see them referred to, this is like state of the art technology. And just to give listeners an idea, I think most of us know how large, you know, one of these, like mega plants is. And I know the cost to build these is in the billions of dollars. About how big, like what is a small modular reactor look like and how does the power output compare to a larger power plant?

So there are a number of companies involved here. All are looking at different technologies. Many of those technologies developed in the 1960s, 1970s. So a lot of the technology in and of itself is not new. The safety features are. But as far as the acreage or the footprint that they would cover is dramatically smaller, we're looking at maybe 10, 20, 30 acre that the plant would cover. The outputs vary as well. You have the micro reactors that may be 10 to 30 megawatts. You got the small modular reactors that may be 300 megawatts. So maybe one third the size of a large coal fired power plant or nuclear power plant. So a lot of spectrum there that can be covered, but it, but really the footprint will be dramatically smaller. On the safety side, a number of the companies are looking at things that are intrinsically safe. In other words, you can literally walk away, shut the power off, everybody walks away and there's not a melt. It just automatically shuts down due to the physics of the reaction. And so the number of companies are looking at that intrinsically safe. And so, yeah, the industry has come a long ways. The technology has come a long ways. Having said that, our large conventional reactors have an incredibly good safety record here in the US that technology that was developed back in the 50s, 60s, 70s and implemented. Yeah, it's older technology, but the companies have done a great job of upgrading the safety features through the years. They're regulated by the federal government, the nuclear regulatory commission. They've done a good job of saying, hey, we need to fix this, we need to fix that. The utilities work with each other very carefully. Even across companies. They work with each other and if something goes wrong, they put out a report to all of their competitors and said, hey, we see this issue, this is how we've addressed it, we recommend you do the same thing. And so the safety record of our U. S. Utilities, it's always been good, but it's better and better all the time.

Yeah, I was just reading a report around the world. Nuclear power for per watt produced is, is the safest. It is. And I forget the statistic. It was, it was way less than 1, 1 death per year. And I mean, even just to compare that, you have over a million deaths per year from indoor air pollution a year around the world. And I think a lot of people don't know this statistic, but that's, that comes from burning, you know, things like trash, dung, paper, wood inside. Now what, why? You know, I know. Look, we've, we've had, you know, we've heard of Chernobyl and three mile island and Fukushima, you know, is that what deters people from nuclear energy? I know there's some geopolitics that we're going to get into as well, but from a safety perspective, it seems like it's one of these things that, you know, it's like a plane crash. Planes are safer than cars. I think everybody knows that. But it's scarier to think about something like that. Is that what it comes from?

Yeah, I think it's pretty typical human nature that if you don't really intimately understand something.

Yeah.

You have a bit of a fear of it. And, you know, your analogy with cars and planes, I think is perfect. In a car, you understand that you, you believe you're in control because you've got your hands on the steering wheel, but in a plane, you're not controlling it. You don't know what the pilot's doing. You don't know what the mechanics did. So I think there tends to be more fear there. But the reality is planes are dramatically more safe than cars. And I think the same is true with nuclear power. People don't understand the physics behind it. They see the horror stories from Chernobyl, which by the way, the west does not build reactors like they did in Russia and Ukraine. Totally different. But yeah, they don't understand it. So there's a bit of fear and trepidation there of yeah, do we really want this? And I think the other issue too is the waste disposal issue, which is not an issue. It's been.

Tell us. Yeah, what do you mean it's not an issue? Because like we don't. For people that may not be familiar. Like you don't want nuclear waste like sitting in your trash can. Right. You don't want to be around it for different things. But what do you mean it's not an issue?

So if we used nuclear power to generate 100% of your energy that you need for your lifetime, my lifetime, the waste that would be generated from that would fit in one soda can. That's the quantity of waste each individual would generate.

Okay.

That waste can be stored safely. It could be stored safely at Yucca Mountain. The risks at Yucca Mountain have been way overblown by people who are anti nuclear, who don't understand groundwater, who don't understand the physics. And the general public doesn't understand that. And understandably so, yeah. So there's fear mongering really that has really slowed down the development of nuclear power. You know, I worked at a uranium mine, Wyoming for a number of years that had a coal fired power plant at our boundary. And we were required to measure radioactive emissions from the mine. But the funny thing is the emissions coming from the coal fired power plant next door were dramatically higher than from the mine. Because when you burn coal, yeah. You're putting a lot of metals and other things, CO2 radionuclides into the air. So we can see those emissions coming from coal fired power plant.

That's a radioactive emission, radioactive emissions. How about that?

Thorium, uranium, radon. All of that is generated when coal is burned. You know, in coal, when you burn coal, those emissions go into the air. They're not controlled.

Right.

I've done a great job, I'm not anti coal. But those emissions go into the air where there's a potential to do harm. The nuclear industry, we're totally different. We can tell where every bit of nuclear waste that has been generated throughout the history of the industry is located, it's all contained, it's not causing any harm, it's safe. But that's not the same with other industries, other coal fired fossil fuel industries. So a totally different discussion between those. And I don't think people understand that. And as an industry, we've got to do a better job of getting the story out there that nuclear power is safe. That's not just us as insiders saying that. Look at the numbers, they're compelling.

Yeah. And that's the report that I read here. Just, just, you know, a few short weeks ago it said, it said exactly that. Can you turn the lights off? Do you glow in the dark, John? You know you're working.

Not yet, not yet.

Just, just mess around. You know, one of the things I read about the small modular reactors was that some of these can be built so small they, they produce output for a period of time and then they literally, they're, they're in, they're fully encased and then that's it. They're, they're basically inert at the end of that period. It seems like there's some really, really cool types of technology that are on the horizon, you know, over the next decade that we're going to see. Yeah.

Kind of a plug and play model.

Yeah.

And right now the Department of Defense is working on a reactor with a contractor. It's called Project.

And so repeat that one more time.

Project Pele.

Project Pele, yeah.

And so it's funded by the Department of Defense. Their objective is to build a small modular reactor. Actually it's a micro, it's even smaller, that will literally fit on the back of a truck and you deliver it to a military base, you set it in the ground, cover it up, plug and play, and it'll run for months or years. And when it's done, you dig it back up. Can be disposed of safely or refurbished and, but offers tremendous advantages. You've got power on site. You don't have to haul in jet oil or diesel fuel to run a forward operating base. It's all right there.

Wow.

Totally encapsulated. So it reduces the risk to our troops because they don't have to have that long fuel run to the port, which is a place where we often get attacked, our troops get attacked is those fuel lines. And so if we eliminate those, we can have an independent operating base. So I mean, that's a military application, but there are other applications. You look in the far north mine camps up in Alaska or Canada or remote villages that need power. Or say, for an example, an area gets hit by a hurricane. I was going to say electricity is wiped out. Simply bring in a micro reactor, set it down, plug it in, plug and play in. Your power system is back up.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's amazing. And you know, my, my cousin worked on a nuclear sub. I mean, it's, I think that's the other thing. You have these soldiers, I'm sorry, these military that are inside of a sub with a, with a nuclear reactor in the back. And I think that kind of highlights some of the, you know, some of the safety that is already out there. So we touched on this a little bit here from, from, from a geopolitical perspective, John. And this is, I'd like to kind of get into, you know, where your energy, you know, fits into this. You said the industry has to be highly regulated. You know, what are, what are some of the concerns? I know we've know people, when they heard, you know, yellow cake in the intro, they may say, oh, I remember when, when, when Colin Powell brought up yellow cake. Uranium. Is this the same type of uranium, same type of fuel that could be used for nuclear weapons and those sorts of things? Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth, and increasing stability for their investments. Now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link at next level income.com.

Yeah, it might be useful if I talk a little bit about the processing of uranium before we get to nuclear fuel. There really are three major steps. There are some other minor steps, but the three major steps are mining. Okay, in my company, you are energy. We are a mining company. We produce yellow cake. It's a yellow powder and it looks like yellow mix. That's why that's what it's called. But our product, then it needs to be converted. That's a chemical process. There is one conversion facility here in the US At Illinois. It's called Converdyne, and there's only one. And so it's been up and running for a little while. After they do a chemical conversion that it needs to be enriched because natural yellow cake, it has a very low ratio of the isotope that we want. So it has to be enriched in the isotope that's desirable. So that is done. Here in the US there's one commercial facility owned by Urenco down in New Mexico. Eurenco actually is foreign owned. It's a kind of a joint venture between England, the Netherlands and the Germans. So three European governments own Renco, but that's the only facility in the US right now that is commercially producing enriched product. So those are the three steps as far as the safety concern. The product we make yellow cake, it is uranium. And uranium is barely radioactive. People don't appreciate that. But we can literally take a meter and put it on fresh yellow cake. And it's barely discernible because the emissions off of or alpha, they're very weak. But what we do is to protect our employees and is we say you got to keep it outside your body. Your skin is literally thick enough to block the radiation, the out radiation. But if you get it in your body, that's where it can do harm to your body. So good hygiene is really what we teach our employees. Keep dust levels down, keep things wetted, nothing from hand to mouth. So the regulatory.

You don't want to inhale it or inject it.

Okay, Right, exactly. And if you keep it outside your body, you know, that's a big part of the safety and you've done a good job. And I don't want to get too far into the weeds here. But it's interesting. The regulatory limit for exposure is 5000 millirems per year. Don't worry about the units. It's just a unit of radiation.

I used to work on the OR. Yeah, it's 5,000 and all that. Yeah.

Our employees who have the highest exposure levels are typically around 500 millim. So an order of magnitude less than the limit. Yeah, that limit of 5,000 is actually one half of the limit that we see where we begin seeing cancer from exposure to radiation. So that limit is one half of the known risk. And then our employees get a order of magnitude less than that. And so we run a really good, clean, safe ship. That's our concern with radiologic. And it's manageable. It has to be respected. Absolutely. It needs to be regulated. But it does not need to be feared. It absolutely can and has been managed.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so where, where does ur energy fit in? You said you're a mining operation. You know, kind of walk us through a little bit of. Of where you fit into the whole spectrum. Because we've talked about a lot of different pieces of nuclear energy, those sorts of things. Yeah, yeah.

Here in the United States, the uranium mining activity is mostly in the mountain west, Wyoming, a little bit in Nebraska, Utah, Texas, kind of that mountain west region. But my company, you are Energy, is.

And is that because that's where the uranium is, that's where it's at.

There are some exceptions to that. There's a really nice deposit in Virginia that may get mined someday. There's some other examples, but most of the uranium is in the mountain west.

Gotcha.

Our project is called Lost Creek and it's here in Wyoming and not far over my shoulder over here. It's about a two hour drive away. But we've been producing there since 2013. As the market has improved, we've made a decision to ramp up production and we're in the process now of improving that. And ultimately we've got a second project that we're looking at bringing online called Shirley. We utilize a technique to recover uranium. It's called in situ. In situ is a Latin term. It means in place. So we don't actually have tunnels or open pits. What we do is we drill water wells into the ore body. We inject water, CO2 and oxygen into the ore body. That dissolves it, much like you would dissolve sugar in your coffee. Then we simply pump that solution to the surface, remove the uranium from it at a processing plant, then re inject the water back into the ground. It just keeps making the loop until that ore body is recovered. So the really cool thing about it is our surface footprint is really small.

Yeah.

If you would go out to our mine right now, today it's snow, but in the summertime it's covered in green grass. It's got antelope, deer, rabbits out there in the mine in the act mine. And when we get done mining, we will reclaim the surface, we will reclaim the groundwater, and you will never know we were there. When we walk away, it'll be pristine wildlife habitat. That's 100 returned back to nature.

Wow. And that's, that's something I didn't know and I think that may surprise a lot of listeners today because you know that that's, that's a, that's another piece of this puzzle. You know, if anybody's been to a coal mine, you know, as you know, a lot of people have seen here on the east coast or you know, oil and gas field and those sorts of things.

Yeah.

Or geez, even like, you know, some of the minerals that they're using now for like cobalt, lithium, those sorts of things. It's, it's, it's like out of a, out of a Mad Max movie with a lot of these, a lot of these things around, around the world. So what have you been seeing, John? I know you said it's been, we've seen a lot of progress here, you know, in the past few years with respect to uranium. A lot more demand. What are you doing as a country, I'm sorry, as a company to meet that demand. And you know, you mentioned, you said we have one conversion facility and we have, you know, one foreign owned facility in New Mexico to enrich, you know, what, what can we do as a country? You know, we've, we started out early in the show talking about we're the number one oil and gas producer. What can we do to improve our standing in terms of, you know, where we are in these areas?

Well, we have the resources here in the US Company is a good example of that. We've got good resources, some great companies here in the US what we've run into in the years past is Russia, this geopolitical issue. Yeah, Russia has captured the global uranium market because they use the same facilities to produce nuclear weapons, government owned as they do to produce nuclear fuel for utilities. So utilities around the world, including here in the US have been happy to buy cheap material from Russia for years and they've become dependent upon that supply as a result of that Western enrichment, Western mining, all of that has been in a state of decay for many, many years. But what really happened that's changed here recently is the Russia invading Ukraine. And so when that happened, utilities around the world said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, they need to back away from this Russian supply. And so they are, utilities around the world, especially in Europe, especially here in the US Are backing away from that and the market prices have improved because of that. And we're able to sign up more and more long term contracts. But the funny thing is, or not so funny is we are still importing uranium from Russia despite all of the other sanctions, despite all of the atrocities in Ukraine and everything that's going on there. We are still buying nuclear fuel from Russia. So Congress is now looking at cutting that off. The House has passed legislation to do that, the Senate considering legislation. We have really good bipartisan support on this issue. You know, the Democrats and Republicans, they don't agree on hardly anything, but yeah, they do agree on this. And I think ultimately they will cut off that supply coming out of Russia, I think they're concerned that they want to make sure Western world has the capacity to backfill that once it's interrupted. So I think that's the concern right now. Companies like mine, we are working to sure that that happens as we ramp up production. And some of our competitors as well, the conversion facility, the enricher, they are all looking at ramping up their capacity to produce more to offset that gap. So I think it's going to happen, but it's a matter of time. But we could use the public support on that. Yeah, call your congressman. Hey, let's quit importing material from Russia. Let's stop funding their government because that's a government entity that's doing that. That's not a private company. That is the government that is building that material. So if, if we could get that out of the way, I think we would be on some really good firm standing in the Western world, in my company in particular, going forward. So that's the one thing we're looking forward to, to Chris, in 2024 is cutting off that Russian supply.

Yeah, no, I think like you said, I think there's still a lot of, a lot of people in the country now that can agree on that. Is it true that Nixon had a plan to, to fully power the United States with nuclear power by the year 2000? That was shut down, that whole plan. Was that true?

Yeah. So in the 70s, I mean the saying in the 60s and 70s was that nuclear power will ultimately be so cheap that we won't even put meters on houses. That's a bit of an absurd statement, but that's what they were saying in the 60s and 70s. But then Three Mile island happened and we talked about the fear factor there. Was it appropriate to take a step back and take breath and assess things? Absolutely. But I think fear kind of took over at that point. But yeah, we, we had great designs in the 60s and 70s to power a significant portion of the US with nuclear and it didn't come to pass. However, we'll see what happens here in the attitudes, hearts and minds are changing. We're getting more and more support for nuclear because mostly because of its carbon free attributes. And the world wants to move direction, but also for energy security. We're blessed in the US with a lot of coal, natural gas, so we're in great shape, comes to that. But there are a lot of countries around the world, they're not blessed with those fossil fuels. Japan's a great example of this. When they shut down their reactors, they had to start importing massive quantities of, of fossil fuels and burning those that was incredibly expensive, terrible hard on their economy. So they are looking at building out nuclear now going forward, bringing those reactors back online and building more. Why? Well, it's carbon free but just as importantly, economically they really don't have a choice. That's the direction they have to go to be able to support the energy needs of a, a first world society. And so that's not unique to Japan. It's also true with a number of European nations that don't have access to oil and gas on their own. But by going to nuclear they can have that in house, have the power generator there. They can store many, many years worth of fuel easily and it gives them national security. So yeah, the world's going to continue to move in that direction. There's a lot of uncertainty right now unfortunately and, and nuclear is able to take away some of that uncertainty.

Yeah, that's a great point. And we love to look at macro trends on, on this show, on this podcast and, and allow investors and listeners to take advantage of those trends. You know, from a financial perspective. If, if listeners want to learn more about your energy, John, what's the best way to, to check you guys out?

Yeah, our website, great website. It's the www.ur-energy.com. a lot of great information on our website.

Perfect. We'll have that in the show notes. Anything else that listeners should, you know, do or you would advise to keep up on the trends in the nuclear space or to look at, you know, technologies, some of the things that we've talked about if they're interested in following these trends going forward.

Yeah, just a couple of quick thoughts on that. My attorney would be happy to hear me say that there's always risk in investing. Do your homework. I make forward looking statements so do be aware of that. There is risk there with investing in any company. So do your homework. But if you learn more beyond just our website, if you want to do a deep dive into the global geopolitics and the technology, there's a really good website that the World Nuclear Association W and A just do a search on Google for that. They've got a wonderful website with a tremendous library. You could read for days everything that's on that site. And so yeah, if you want to do a deep dive, that's the first place I would recommend your listeners go to to take a look.

Wonderful. We will put that link in the show notes as well. I just pulled it up myself. I got it, got it here on my computer. John, I really enjoyed this conversation. You know, I'd love to, love to continue it here, but hopefully, you know, listeners, you've, you've been able to learn a little bit more about the nuclear space, about your energy. It certainly opened my eyes into some different things. And John, we certainly appreciate your time and taking the time to share it with our listeners today.

Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's been fun.

Thank you. Hey, Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.