Appreciate the invitation and thank you all for coming and feel free to raise your hands or ask any questions at any time during the presentation. So, Lightbridge is LTBR on the NASDAQ and I'll call your attention to our safe harbor statement.
At Lightbridge, we are really the only company in the world that is developing a truly new fuel for the existing reactors as well as for many new ones, including small modular reactors. And we started by speaking with utilities that were looking to increase the power output from the existing plants while increasing the safety. And so we've developed a new fuel, a new method of producing the fuel. This photo is from producing samples of the fuel in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory that as of November are now in testing some of the samples in the advanced test reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. I won't really present these slides so much as pick a couple of topics from each slide, move on and look forward to hearing any questions that you have. What the utilities have told us is that the current fuel is really at its limit of these uranium oxide pellets and a zirconia metal tube where if you try to increase the power much more the pellets can swell crack the tube. So we've developed a wholly new truly advanced fuel that we believe really would make the current reactors into advanced reactors. You could think of the advanced reactor companies as taking very old fuel designs and designing new reactors around them. We're taking the existing reactors and have come up with a new advanced fuel to improve them. And there are many key drivers for growth, including that everywhere we go in the world, the utilities are trying to figure out how to provide the power that will be needed 5 years from now, 10 years from now. That is just running away from them. The world needs reliable, preferably clean power. Data centers with AI and other modern industry is demanding massive amounts of power including electric arc furnaces for steel production and industry is going where the power is available.
So this fuel is something that is not just on the drawing board. These pictures are real. These are at Idaho National Lab producing samples. This is what one of our fuel assemblies can look like for some of the kinds of reactors. And what we're ultimately aiming for is this will be a global standard for the existing reactors as well as many of the new ones. Water cooled reactors, the pressurized water reactors, the boiling water reactors, the CANDU type reactors and significantly improve the economics by increasing the power output of the reactors. This is a cross-section of one of the variants of our fuel rods. This is an actual photo of an actual cross-section of something we've produced that shows an outer cladding made out of a zirconium alloy. Down the center line of the rod, a triangle like the graphite down the center line of a pencil is a displacer that can have chemicals in there that help keep the middle of this fuel rod 1,000 degrees cooler Celsius than the current fuel. About 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and that's part of the safety case while increasing the power output of the reactor which took a lot of innovation but we believe we're now proving in the advanced test reactor in Idaho. And in between was the metal with the uranium enrichment in it. And if you go to our investor deck and click on this symbol on slide eight for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it will go live to the NRC's website. You'll see that this fuel is actually featured on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website talking about the safety benefits of this fuel.
This fuel has a litany of reasons why it is dramatically safer than anything else out there that are on this slide, but it starts with running at such a cooler temperature. One of the issues with nuclear like you saw at Fukushima was if fuel heats up when it loses coolant, when it loses water to about 850 or 900 degrees Celsius, there's what's called steam zirconium interaction where the oxygen from the steam sticks to the edge of the fuel rods and you get free floating hydrogen and you turn your reactor into the Hindenburg and could have a hydrogen gas explosion. That's what happened at Fukushima. This fuel is so cool and stays cool in these design basis loss of coolant accidents where you won't get the hydrogen gas production, you won't get the explosions among other safety features. And from the fabrication to the operations, the materials, the shape we use, all of this feeds into some of the safety advantages. From this slide, you could also see some of the economic advantages. There's more surface area of the fuel than a cylindrical rod where the fuel touches the water putting the heat out into the water. There's a shorter path for the heat to escape from the rod and the heat escapes through the shortest path. We're using a higher enrichment of uranium for more power in there. High assay, low enriched uranium. And because it's made of metal, the thermal conductivity, the heat transfer is far superior. The heat just flies out of this rod into the water. And also this fuel doesn't need what's called spacer grids that right now are these grates that the rods go through holding them up in a reactor, blocking the water flow. And the water flows from the bottom of the rods to the top picking up heat, dumps it into a heat exchanger. So you're going to make power from the reactor and then cooler water comes back to pick up more water. Without spacer grids, the water flows much more unblocked, much more easily from the pressure from the pumps of the reactor. So we're moving much more volume of water around and around, picking up much more heat, dumping into the heat exchanger. And that's part of the advantage too on getting a power up rate from this fuel for existing or new reactors.
Nuclear in the United States, you see on the bottom of the chart here, is about almost 93% capacity factor. That means if a reactor ran at 100% of its potential every second of the year, that would be a 100% capacity factor. So nuclear is already pretty good, much higher than anything else. And in fact, you could see that's why a lot of modern industry is gravitating toward nuclear that needs reliable power. It's almost shocking how unreliable coal and natural gas are for industries that need constant power. And that's because the fuel has to keep continuously being supplied to those plants or they lose power. Well heads freeze up, fuel stops being delivered, ice on tracks delivering coal. It's always getting interrupted. Nuclear only shuts down for about 3 weeks every 18 months to refuel. That's the difference between 92.7 and 100. And it's known and planned years in advance when those three weeks will be in the spring or fall when there's lower power demands for heat or air conditioning. And the utilities can plan to make up for that power with fossil fuel or other fuels during those periods, other energy sources. But the utilities want to increase above 92.7 to get even more power out of these reactors. And the Lightbridge fuel will help not only increase that percentage by refueling every two years instead of every 18 months, but significantly increase the power output of these plants every day, increasing the revenue to the reactors.
We have a robust patent platform protecting our fuel, patented around the world even in Russia and China. We have new innovating and inventing that we're doing and also have trade secrets in certain areas on both the design of the fuel as I mentioned as well as the method of producing the fuel that we also developed. And some of the recent milestones have really been amazing and very substantive. And so just in March of 2024, we did our initial demonstration of our method of producing these rods at Idaho National Lab. And in February of 25 we completed the co-extrusion which is really going to be the method using for producing the commercial fuel and demonstrated this with an 8 foot cylindrical rod. And the strategic significance of this is tremendous. And Idaho National Laboratory with support of the US Department of Energy brings us the facilities we've been using to do this work as well as the reactor, the advanced test reactor that we're testing it in. And through Department of Energy stockpiles we've received from Idaho National Laboratory, the highly enriched uranium we're using for testing now in that reactor which is higher enrichment than we'll use commercially but speeds up the testing of the fuel in the reactor and a lot has been done to really speed up the testing.
One of our other very good relationships in addition to the US Department of Energy and with Idaho National Laboratory is with the company Oaklo, a larger publicly traded company. They've also been developing their technology at Idaho National Laboratory. Our engineers have gotten to know each other. I've known Jake Dit for many years, the CEO of Oaklo. And you don't see cooperation between advanced nuclear technology companies, even though the Department of Energy would like to see companies they're supporting work together. And I think there's two main reasons you don't see it. One is that either the companies are competing with each other and don't want to help each other. Like they're all developing small reactors or micro reactors or something that's competitive. Or their technology is just too different from one another to really do much. And you'd think, well, Oaklo and Lightbridge were not competitors. The smallest reactor Lightbridge will ever fuel is probably bigger than the largest reactor Oaklo will ever make. And Oaklo is looking to produce high quality steam and heat for industry. Lightbridge is just looking to produce electric power primarily over the grid. But you'd also say, well, how can we collaborate? Our technologies are so different.
Well, it turns out although they're very different, they both use metallic zirconium. They both use metallic high assay low enriched uranium. And we're going to need to have some of the same licensing with the NRC, including for some of the same security. We might need some of the same equipment, some of the same personnel. And so we are looking at collocating our fuel fabrication facilities together. Even though our fuels will be very different and for different reactors, theirs will be for their advanced reactors, it turns out we both could save capital cost and operating cost on the facility if we collocate together. So that's something we're looking into as well as other sites where we might have our facility. We're also looking at using advanced recycling and reprocessing technologies we each have working together, including potentially using Oaklo technology for recycling used Lightbridge fuel and perhaps using recycled materials into fuel for Oaklo's reactors. And we're also looking at other ways we can cooperate. And we're finding that partly due to some of these commonalities in our technologies, even though they're going to end up for very different products, that we're probably going to have more ways to cooperate as companies. In Romania at the Ratan ICN Institute, we've been doing feasibility studies on our fuel for CANDU type reactors, which are something of a niche, about 45 of them in the world. But a good niche and maybe growing. All of the nuclear power in Canada is CANDU reactors for example. And these are water cooled reactors that we believe will benefit from Lightbridge fuel and these studies are going very well.
Our long-term partnership with Idaho National Laboratory is our most important partnership. But to some degree, the kids are growing up and have to move out of the house. We're outgrowing Idaho National Laboratory's facilities for producing nuclear fuel. They don't produce commercial quantities of nuclear fuel. We're going to advance beyond just the advanced test reactor, which is the world's largest test reactor, into demonstrating in commercial reactors that utilities have. I think it's very similar with Oaklo, sort of the kids are going to have to move out of the house and beyond just the national lab and some of that we'll be able to do together but truly what the Department of Energy and Idaho National Lab have done as part of I think of a great power competition with Russia and China and we're very much on Team USA, is they've made these multi-billion dollar facilities available to us without which we could not be doing what we're doing. And this is really remarkable to have given us the enriched uranium, the facilities that we're using to make the demonstrations of our fuel, the use of this reactor, the facilities we're going to use this year for the examination of fuel samples as they start to come out of the reactor. And it's really a fantastic partnership at Idaho National Laboratory.
So virtually all of the nuclear power in the world is from water cooled reactors and different variants of Lightbridge fuel can work in all of them. Most are pressurized water reactors and those include Russian VVER type reactors. And then there's boiling water reactors and there will be small modular reactor versions of those that our fuel could be used in. So for example, New Scale and Rolls-Royce and Holtech are developing pressurized water reactor small modular reactors. GE Vernova with Hitachi is developing a boiling water small modular reactor. Those could all use Lightbridge fuel. And then there's pressurized heavy water reactors around the world including those CANDU reactors I mentioned earlier that also could use our fuel. And while our focus is on the large pressurized water reactors because the utilities that advise us mostly have those and because that's where most of the power generation in the world is and where most of the orders for reactors are now is large pressurized water reactors. We're also looking at these different opportunities going forward.
So this is one of them at MIT that's 100% funded by the US Department of Energy looking at Lightbridge fuel for New Scale small modular reactors and a lot of this work we believe could also be applicable for other small modular reactors and this is going very well. MIT in late 2024 published a paper and presented it at a major conference on the safety benefits of the Lightbridge fuel that came out of this work. Similarly, the Department of Energy is 100% funding work at Texas A&M University also looking at Lightbridge fuel for New Scale small modular reactors. And part of the reason the Department of Energy does this is to help train students, undergrads and a lot of grad students at these universities in what might be coming next in nuclear and what we want the workforce learning about as they're advancing into starting their careers in nuclear.
We first were dealing with these utilities coming up with the concept of this new fuel in 2010. We first just announced it as a concept and we've been moving forward ever since then. And there's sort of two overlays you could put on this which I'd say is a pretty good timeline for developing a nuclear fuel overall in the world. If you look at what's been done historically for these other fuels that were developed and now the advanced reactor developers are trying to figure out how to commercialize with new versions of reactors. But one thing you could look at is say, boy, there's other labels you could put on this of everything that could go wrong did go wrong in the world. This starts with the global financial crisis. Markets down, forecasts for energy use down. Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea and we lost access to the research reactor in Russia that the US Department of Energy was approving us to use. And we never wanted to go to Russia again after that. And just when things started looking, the Department of Energy was sort of saying, 'You might want to take another look at that.' They invaded Ukraine again. That's definitely out. Fukushima in 2014. And in the years following that, research reactors that we were going to test in Norway and Canada closed. And there was literally nowhere in the world we legally could test our fuel. We lost access to Russia and then Norway and Canada closed their reactors and China was developing a research reactor that would have been impossible in terms of Chinese and American approvals to access and also again we wouldn't want to in terms of trusting on the intellectual property of doing it there. But also opportunities along the way, the US government decided to make the advanced test reactor, the best reactor available to very small number of companies, very few companies. We're one of them. And our fuel is actually in that reactor. And I'd rather be in that reactor in Idaho than any of the other reactors we were talking about as a place to work. And by becoming very much a part of Team USA, we're getting other support that really is bringing about support for nuclear.
And frankly, although support for nuclear ranges from micro reactors to advanced reactors, small modular reactors, fusion, most of the support really and most of what's getting done is large pressurized water reactors. Be it finishing the Vogal Westinghouse AP-1000s in Georgia. Now it looks like finishing building two unfinished AP-1000s in South Carolina. Extending licenses of essentially every large reactor in the United States to keep operating for what looks like will be a hundred years now that they'll go to as many dams are in the United States. 100 years old and you just replace equipment as you go in those systems. And we very much feel that power over the grid from large pressurized water reactors has been where most nuclear power has come from. If you look at the orders for new nuclear power in the world, that is where the orders are for the most part and we think will be for some time. Although we could fuel small reactors as well.
There'll be some very important milestones coming up on our fuel development and we'll also in the next few months put out a model of the timing and a lot more detail on this that we're honing with utilities we're talking to and others before we finalize it and put it out. And our role in the global nuclear energy resurgence. So, we do have these significant upcoming milestones that we believe will physically be demonstrating the benefits of our fuel from what we're doing in the advanced test reactor in particular, but also other testing we're doing for the power up rates for producing fuel that will run longer in the reactor between refuelings. Significant safety advantages as well as further enhancing nonproliferation.
Now in terms of the small modular reactors and there are many use cases for many of them. We think we will be just as good if not better for them as for the large reactors. That the lack of spacer grids, this better flow of the water is even better for improving the economics of a reactor that uses natural circulation instead of pumps. And some of the small modular reactors like the New Scale reactor fall into that category. So there are different kinds of reactors that are going to be coming out including commercialization eventually of some of these small modular reactors and that will be part of our commercial case. One of the advantages is the ramp rate and load following. Right now, these pellets in tubes and current nuclear fuel will swell and crack the tube and release radioactive fission products and that's not a good thing. It won't be a big accident, but radiation alarms will go off. Utilities have to deal with that. It's a problem. There's an economic cost to that. We believe our fuel will solve all of that and allow reactors very quickly to go up or down in power without worrying about that. So that means much more quickly coming out of an outage and getting to full power which is better economics than a very slow ramp taking a long time coming out of an outage. But also for load following, some of that could be during the course of the day on just when there's more power needs and then drop off and some of that could be fairly quickly as renewables come online and offline. And with Lightbridge fuel, you really could surge up and down in the power.
We believe the coal to nuclear transition is a very interesting opportunity where the US Department of Energy has looked at sites that have closed coal plants on them and determined that 190 of them are usable to put reactors on for these SMRs. Just about 200 gigawatts electric new power of SMRs could be put on those sites. To put that in perspective, the US right now has 100 gigawatts of power from large reactors. So this would be twice as much power from small reactors on coal sites as we currently have from all the big reactors in the US, tripling nuclear in the US. That doesn't mean all of these will happen, but a lot are very seriously being looked at now in communities that really need the jobs, a grid that really needs the power. And this transition from coal to nuclear is a very real opportunity. Analogous, I'd say, to putting more large reactors on sites that already have large reactors in communities that welcome it, that have the trained workforce. And I think is also a good opportunity.
And globally as you know energy demand is just surging and industry is looking for where they can get the power and why would utilities provide more power from an upgrade using Lightbridge fuel. Well, again, we'll put out some revised numbers soon. But these are some of our past numbers that I think these numbers are improving as people are paying more for power. But a typical reactor just on a 10% upgrade from Lightbridge fuel and we think we go north of 30% up rates. But from a 10% up rate, which would require almost no modification to many of the existing reactors, it's about $60 million per year of economic benefit to the reactor, to one typical reactor from increasing the power by 10% and lengthening the fuel cycle from 18 to 24 months. The savings from maintaining the fuel cycle come from avoiding one outage every six years. It costs millions of dollars to have an outage. But the economics mostly come from just selling more power every day. The enhanced reactor margins are very important here. And these reasons why electric power is disproportionately growing within our energy needs include for example the shift we're seeing globally to some extent from petroleum fueled vehicles to electrified vehicles. We're seeing industry like I mentioned steel production moving from coal to electricity for electric arc furnaces for steel production. And we're seeing a global shift toward electrification more and more. So energy is growing disproportionately, nuclear is growing disproportionately within energy. But I'd also say nuclear is disproportionately needed by modern industries like data centers for AI that want that constant reliable power that you just really can't get without growth of nuclear within that diversified energy base.
And when you talk about the future of nuclear power, these charts just pop off the page of these various projections from very credible agencies. It almost seems like it's not realistic. I mean, how could we go from current capacity to these giant future capacities in 24 years, these projections for 2050. And the answer is you're going to have to get a lot more power from your existing plants. You have to build a lot more plants or you're not going to have the data centers with AI. You're not going to have the new modern industry that we want.
An analogy for the small modular reactors is military aircraft production in World War II where the United States in 1939 before we entered the war in 41 was producing fewer than 3,000 military aircraft per year. By the end of the war in 45, we had produced over 300,000 military aircraft. There was no strategic planner in Germany or Japan who saw that coming and without this it would have been very unlikely to have won the war along with other reasons we won the war. But what we did was we shifted including some of Henry Ford's old original assembly plants from the Ford Motor Company to assembly line production of aircraft instead of handbuilding them. And we did it very quickly. And you can see on this photo on the bottom, people at the time described it like a miracle that parts would go in one end of the plant and an airplane would fly off a landing strip from the other side and then another one and then another one. And you'd be in areas with a few of these plants and you just see these planes taking off going to the war effort. No one imagined you could do that just a few years earlier. Was like a miracle. And these are about the size of small modular reactors. And you could get to starting to build some of these small modular reactors in factories in shipyards. Now, they don't fly. They're harder to deliver. There's a cost there, but there can be benefits for mass production of either the small modular reactors or at least big modules of components that will then be shipped off to the sites for the reactor construction. There also can be large modular reactors and modules made and I think we'll see that in the coming years a much quicker deployment of large reactors through more modularity in their design.
There's fantastic bipartisan support in Washington. We are privileged to meet with a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who've been really agreeing with each other on nuclear, probably more than anything else. When one of the bills recently passed in the Senate on a voice vote of 100 to zero, someone from the Senate said to me, 'I've never gotten that kind of vote for my Mother's Day resolution.' So this is really a unique area of tremendous support. I was at COP 28 in Dubai when the original pledge was made by the US and many other countries to triple nuclear globally by 2050. And now the US says as part of that it will quadruple nuclear domestically by 2050. Again that's 24 years from now. And we're really starting to see things starting to gear up to get there. We don't need quite a World War II effort like with the airplanes to get there, but we need to start building more reactors, getting the crafts, the trades, the pipe fitters, the welders moving from one reactor to the other, holding down those costs, those prices as we deploy reactors.
This has been a real shift politically from viewing nuclear as part of national security to help take military bases and other critical infrastructure off the grid that could have a cyber attack or a physical attack on the grid by the enemy and we don't want to lose the military bases power to them. So reactors on base is part of national security. Climate, nuclear emits no CO2. Onshoring manufacturing, relying on domestic sources for our energy. All of these fit with nuclear and feed into it. I was one of 10 people from the industry President Trump had invited to meet with him at the White House during his first term. And it was out of this meeting that a lot of the ideas came that were executed on in his administration, then the Biden administration, now continuing in the new administration again for what was called the nuclear fuel working group with these ideas of support for high assay low enriched uranium for advanced fuels, for speeding up licensing at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, holding down licensing costs. A lot of it started with this meeting and then we had a lot of follow-up meetings at the White House and with people in Congress who have been supporting these efforts through legislation and it's really been driven from the top.
You've heard about many of these bills that include within them significant support for nuclear directly or indirectly, including support for clean energy. The strategic and the climate supporters overlap in these advanced nuclear technologies and getting more nuclear power on the grid. We'll be reporting soon our cash which will be a larger number than that but we have no debt. We are in a very strong position. It is much lower cost to develop a nuclear fuel than a nuclear reactor. We have an excellent and growing team and it's amazing how many people we don't poach but from other companies and other places are contacting us to work at Lightbridge where there's just a palpable excitement of the engineers at Lightbridge, the engineers at Idaho National Lab who are working with our engineers on the project about producing this fuel, about testing it, about the rapid progress. It's just an exciting thing for people to be working on. We have a world-class board of directors with experience from government to the private sector including Wall Street. And I'll stop there and you could contact us at any time at lightbridge.com. But I really look forward to your questions and your comments.
