Lightbridge CEO Seth Grae Interview on the Schwab Network

Thank you, Marley. Great to be here.

Yes. And today I'm in Nashville at a nuclear fuel conference where several of our engineers are presenting many of these updates. So it's been a little over four months since the president signed the nuclear executive orders. And in those four months we have actually received highly enriched uranium from the US Department of Energy, which very few companies in the history of the world have received. Working with Idaho National Laboratory, we used that material to produce nuclear fuel samples of the Lightbridge fuel material. We had those qualified with Idaho National Laboratory. We had the experiment approved to put those samples into the advanced test reactor, which is I believe the world's largest test reactor at Idaho National Lab, under something called FAST, which the national lab invented — Fission Accelerated Steady-State Testing — which uses the highly enriched uranium to test nuclear fuel faster. And the samples are supposed to go into the reactor and start the testing in the spring outage of the reactor.

But it looks almost assured that that has been expedited to very early November. In fact, I understand the samples are actually at the reactor building now, waiting to go in. And this is not usual in nuclear — that things move so fast, so quickly, with the government through the Department of Energy and its national lab moving so fast to expedite nuclear technology development and deployment. But that's what's happened since the executive orders. Lightbridge is a great example of it. And this fuel will bring more power to be produced at the existing reactors — that's our goal — as well as new reactors, while enhancing safety. So in a world that's looking for more power, clean power, reliable power for data centers with AI, for electrification of transportation, for so many reasons, I think we're really testing this at the right time.

I think it's tremendously related. I've always thought of the utilities that operate the reactors as being the dominant players in nuclear, and they pull things through supply chains, and that's why it's so important for Lightbridge to communicate with utilities, get their advice, stay close to people at utilities. But now, in many ways, pulling on the utilities are the giant hyperscaler companies with the need for AI data centers causing utilities to do things that they didn't imagine doing. For example, Microsoft has a power purchase agreement with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island Unit One as the Crane Clean Energy Center. Constellation would not have done that on its own. It's only because of the Microsoft power purchase agreement for data centers that that's happening. So I think the government is being responsive to the need for power. I think a lot of what they're responding to is that need for power for data centers with AI, and I think technologies that look very promising to help, like Lightbridge's fuel, to produce so much more power, are beneficiaries of that.