Everyone's obsessed with AI right now, but nobody's asking the one question that actually matters. Where does all the power come from? Welcome back to Pain Points of Wealth, where we cut through the noise, get to what's really driving markets. I'm Ryan Payne. I'm here with Chris Payne today, and we've got a fascinating conversation that goes way beyond the headlines. Because while Wall Street is chasing the next AI winner, there's a massive under the radar opportunity brewing in the backbone of it all, and that's energy. And not just any energy. We're talking about the next generation of nuclear power. Joining us today is James Walker, CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy, one of the most talked about names in the space, sharing how small modular reactors could transform everything from AI data centers to emerging markets around the world. This isn't just an AI story. This is a global infrastructure story, an energy independent story, and potentially one of the biggest macro investment themes in the next decade. Let's dive in.
So you have a contract already with University of Illinois.
We do. It's actually in the middle of a university campus, surrounded by dorm rooms, which gives you an idea of what is an acceptable level of the safety profile of the reactor and what the NRC now believes is acceptable to do.
Yes. This is why nuclear is very different, a different prospect to what you've seen in the past, because you typically with a reactor like an AP-1000, you have a large emergency planning zone around the system as a security requirement just in case of a meltdown scenario where all civilian centers are very far removed from it. But that's not necessary with the new advanced technologies that are available, that are being developed now. They can be located and they can be put in the middle of a university campus.
So I guess what is the long term? Your market cap today is what, around a billion dollars.
Yeah, like 1.3, something like that I believe.
1.3. I don't want to miss a decimal point.
No, it's all right. Like a few hundred million is important, but it's around, you're right, it's kind of in that ballpark.
So let's talk economics of that. So first off, how does this become a viable business model from going on a university, with some of it being subsidized obviously, where's the inflection point, how does it become a profitable business? And if you give us more the broad strokes, because my brother Chris likes, he's a macro guy.
One of the ideas of the industry in general, which is why it moved towards much smaller systems, was that you would create an ability to mass produce reactor systems. And our reactor has been deliberately designed so we can produce them along a production line and we can just keep making them. The benefit of that is you get economies of scale through numbers of reactors. Whereas previously you wanted to make a nuclear reactor as big as you can possibly make it. Exactly. Like make it as big as you can make it because then you can get as much power as you can from that one system. But that model comes with its own risks because you put all your eggs in one basket.
It's one unique structure.
Now the downside of what the industry is trying to do now is that if you are deploying one reactor system, it's going to be expensive power because you've not achieved those economies of scale. You really start making a competitive product when you're producing many of the systems. So how the business looks in the future is that you want to have a manufacturing operation where you're continuously producing these systems and you're deploying them. And ideally you want to produce many of these systems and deploy many to the same site. And the reason why I say that is that the infrastructure that supports one reactor is the same infrastructure that supports 10 reactors. So the system that would convert the thermal output of the reactor into electricity does that for one, it can do it for 10. It would just be 10 reactors plugged into the one system. And you can see then how quickly the operation becomes more economic because you're not duplicating all the infrastructure per reactor system.
You're only putting in individual reactor cores and they are providing additional power into an existing system.
And to give you some perspective, say you produce one reactor system for one site. And all the infrastructure is not being shared amongst other reactor systems. It's going to be expensive power. You might be looking at 40, 50 cents per kilowatt hour, something like that. It's going to be expensive. But say for instance, you're deploying 50 to a site. I mean, you're starting to drive your costs down to like what, 12, 11, 10, 9 cents per kilowatt hour. Like you're really driving it right down and then you're becoming much more cost competitive with other forms of power that are already considered quite cost competitive. But it's that economies of scale through numbers of systems that is going to be the future model of nuclear.
Do you ever see, like in say in 20, 30 years, this model taking over, you know, more larger utilities like broad electrical systems, and do you think that this would replace that or do you think this would always be more of a supplement?
At the moment I think that the demand is being driven by having off-grid base load power available to industries, heavy industry, tech industry, things like that. But for instance, we're in discussions with Poland at the moment. And to give you an example, they have all these small substations, they're all coal now. They are looking to change all those out and they're looking to go green. And so they're looking to take all those small subsections, which are things like 30, 45 megawatt electric, small, they're tiny, and replace them all with nuclear. That could be an example of what countries might like to do to have a more dispersed energy system because at the moment you have big generations of power that are centralized and grids that arise around those things and you feed into mainline grids.
The interesting thing about nuclear which no other power can provide is that you can provide a much more dispersed energy system. So you can have a much more dispersed population and you could have independent towns that do not need to be near grid systems or have pipelines or transmission lines linked to them. So you could create environments just by virtue of this technology that are just not possible at the moment. You want to have an independent Canadian northern wilderness town that's completely supports itself and there's only a community of a few thousand people, that's completely possible now with the new nuclear systems that are being developed. So it could be very transformative in that respect.
Who would be that ideal client do you think for what your technology is being built for?
