Coming up, we're talking nuclear energy. The CEO of Lightbridge joins me here at the desk to talk about how the company is helping to meet the growing demand for energy. Morning Trade Live. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to Morning Trade Live, and it's time to focus on energy and in particular nuclear energy. I'm so happy to have with me Seth Grae, president and CEO of Lightbridge Corporation, and LTBR is the ticker symbol here at the New York Stock Exchange. We are going to need more and more and more energy. Nuclear used to be—I'm sorry, that used to be a little bit of a taboo word, and now I mean it could be really what we need for the future. Even today, we've been reporting on Spain and Portugal facing extreme outages when it comes to electricity and power. Good morning to you, and what do you anticipate going forward for demand?
Well, good morning Nicole, and we're actually on the NASDAQ. You know, everywhere I go in the world, they are projecting much greater electric power needs than they had just a couple years ago because of data centers with AI, because of industries that are decarbonizing, and they really don't know how they're going to get it. And most of it needs to be constant, reliable power—so not renewable, not something that goes on and off. For data centers, they want this constant power all the time. So nuclear is just perfect, and even more perfect if you want clean energy. So what we're seeing in Europe where they're facing blackouts today is grids having greater demands than the current supply can reliably accommodate. We don't know yet if that's the reason for what happened today, but it's what we can look forward to if we don't start getting a lot more power on the electric grid.
I didn't realize that renewables are just not 100% reliable. I mean, how is that?
You know, Florida's called the sunshine state. It's 20% less sunny than Phoenix, Arizona overall because it rains, you know, every day during the summer and the sun goes in. And of course, everywhere that relies on solar has night, and the wind doesn't blow a lot of the time. I heard a kid kind of make a joke in Germany looking at these big windmills that weren't turning and say, 'Well, why doesn't someone turn them on?' And so batteries are also just extremely expensive to try to back them up. And all of that relies on critical minerals from China. So nuclear really checks all the boxes, including American energy independence and getting our allies off relying on fossil fuels from Russia.
Yeah. Oh, I want to hear more about the huge amount of potential for nuclear. I mean, if you gave me the, you know, one, two, three of why this is the wave of the future and should be.
Well, number one, this has already been done in the United States, in Sweden. We've seen massive builds out of nuclear before. France after Three Mile Island in 1979 built out the nuclear reactors that give it the greatest percentage of nuclear electricity in the world. Without that, Europe would not have gotten through the winters with the cut off of the Russian energy supplies. The French nuclear fleet kind of saved the West, right? We can do this. We've done it before. We have 94 large reactors in the United States. We can build hundreds more. We don't have to rely on China for critical minerals, for solar, for wind, for batteries. And it turns out China made the wrong bet. What the right thing is is the industries of the future like data centers with AI need constant massive power that those renewables can't provide but nuclear can.
And so when you talk about what we have here in the states and American energy, independent energy, you talked about you have 94 units or whatever it is and hundreds more could come. Hundreds more. I mean that's more than double what you have now. I mean triple, thousands. I mean what is the agenda? I mean you have 94 today. What's on the plan for the next year, five?
So two years ago at the COP meeting in Dubai, the big UN climate meeting, the United States joined many other countries in pledging to triple nuclear power globally by 2050. And then this past November in Baku—and I was at both of these meetings, this one in Azerbaijan—the United States pledged to triple nuclear power by 2050, which would be to add about 200 large reactors by 2050 in the US as part of tripling in the world. And that's something that the Trump administration has kept up as an effort and is even stepping up support for nuclear, which has very bipartisan support in the Congress.
Do you speak with the Trump administration and some of your fellow nuclear CEOs? Because I mean this is a group. It's like when we had all the pharma CEOs came in when Trump administration came in, he wanted a lot of investment in tech. He brought in many tech CEOs. Are you finding that you have conversations with the administration and/or other CEOs in your business?
Yeah, I was one of 10 CEOs of nuclear companies that met with President Trump in the White House during his first term. The administration has been in touch with people in the nuclear industry since he started the new one, including the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, who's a big supporter of nuclear energy. And so, yes, there's a lot of contact between the industry and the administration.
So, that's good. You find that to be useful and helpful.
Yeah, absolutely. It's helpful for the administration to know the needs of industry.
What projects are grabbing your attention right now that you're working on?
