Hello everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast. My name is Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group. I'll tell you what, I did not have on my bingo card with the Department of Defense getting into critical mining and also chip manufacturing. But I'll tell you what's even more important right now that's on the headlines is coupling AI and nuclear energy. And I happen to have the CEO of NANO Nuclear Energy. I've got James Walker stopping by the podcast to address everything that was in the big beautiful bill and all that and more. Welcome, James. How are you today?
Oh, Stu, I'm great. Thank you very much for having me on the show.
I'll tell you, we were just starting before the show and we were kind of chitchatting. I said, 'Hey, do you got any great plans?' and he goes, 'Well, other than wrestling with my three kids, you know, it's pretty sad when you go and look forward to getting mauled by your kids instead of going to work.' That's kind of crazy.
Yeah, it's a mixed blessing because obviously the kids are wonderful, but like they never give you any downtime. So, weekends are never a time to recover. I probably get more recovery time on Monday than I do at the weekend.
But I thought Jay was a little bit of a demanding kind of a boss, though.
Oh god, like he works me relentlessly. I mean, hopefully he doesn't get that feedback, but like 80, 90 hour weeks. I mean, that's pretty typical for me.
Well, I'll tell you, I am so excited because NANO Nuclear is a publicly traded company now. And tell us what's new at NANO Nuclear and tell us what your thoughts are on the big beautiful bill as they say.
Okay. I mean, I've got a lot to say on both of those things, but some exciting developments with us is that we're just about to go ahead with some drilling work at our site where we intend to build our prototype in the US. It's going to be built in partnership with the University of Illinois. It'll be, I think, the first commercial micro reactor that'll be built in the US. So that's going to be huge for us. Obviously, that puts us into the lead in that micro reactor race.
How's the timeline for that, James? I'm sorry. I get, I'm excited. I want more.
It is exciting. Hopefully you can hear it in my voice that I'm excited about this too. But drilling work will start in the next couple months, but we'll complete that this year. And the ambition here is to put in for a permit to construct with the NRC, the federal regulator, either later this year or early next year. And as soon as we get that approval back, we'll start pouring concrete and steel erection. And we're already working on our supply chains now to find the reactor vessels and all the components to build that prototype. And the interesting thing about this is we'll be building this prototype at exactly the same time we'll be doing a very similar project in Canada, because we want to have the first advanced micro reactor in Canada built at the same time.
Oh, that is way cool. Now once you get these micro reactors rolling, I know the first time is going to be an issue, but how fast can you start deploying these rascals after you get the business process down?
So, it's a really good question because the first two reactors, the one in the US and the one in Canada, we're going to be constructing those at the same time we're going through the licensing. But once those are constructed and we're licensed, at that point, effectively because of the NRC reforms, everything we make at a factory level will be licensed and then we can deploy to sites. So, the first one will be a bit more expensive and take a bit more time because of the licensing, but then we'll be building up our core manufacturing facilities while we're building those reactors. So when those reactors get licensed, the anticipation here is just roll them off the factory production line, keep them coming out because then we get the economies of scale and we want to do initially 30, 40 of these a year, but then scale up to eventually we want to get up to hundreds of these things on an annual basis.
That is the only way we're going to make it with AI and nuclear and everything else because the regulatory process in the United States is not like the UAE where they did, I believe, in five years. I have to fact check myself and we're at 20 years to get a nuclear reactor done.
Yes. Like it's very different. One of the big reasons for this, why the industry has shifted towards small modular reactors over big civil nuclear power plants, is kind of that reason. If you can get a small reactor licensed for certain environmental conditions, seismic, temperatures, flooding risks, and it can deploy to things that meet that criteria, the NRC doesn't need any further involvement once it's licensed that reactor. But if you have a big civil nuclear power plant, that is an individual licensing process that one reactor has to go through, and the nuclear industry going forward will look very different.
Well, this is so exciting from the standpoint that we have got to do it. Have you been able to work with the new administration on the regulatory processes and what are your thoughts? I just produced a podcast today with the chair of the regulatory process and she was excited about all the changes. So, I'm hoping you have some great changes instead of waiting for them.
Oh, look, I've got lots of comments about everything that's happening very recently, and the nice part about this is it's all very positive for the new industry, and ultimately that's positive for America, because the quality of our life is always, the base of it is built on our energy systems, and the power requirements that everyone are looking at now are crazy. Like we talk about the tech industry, but the power projections that they need, the energy projections they need, are insane, like gigawatts and gigawatts of power.
And you know, if you wanted to do that conventionally, even if you had all the gas and coal you wanted or wind and solar, you would still need to massively upscale your grid, and that would require huge infrastructure works, and those almost certainly happen. But nuclear can do those independently of the grid. So it is an exciting time, and all of these big developments are obviously geared towards ensuring the US can meet these energy challenges as it re-industrializes, as it electrifies, and as the tech industry massively upscales.
How many megawatts are each of your reactors that you're looking to target? You're going to have several models of reactors. How big and how fast once you get to the point of tomorrow, how fast can these things be deployed if they're the size of a semi-truck?
Well, so the reactor we're going to be pushing the most is our Kronos reactor, and that because it is the most advanced of all of our systems. And that reactor is actually slightly bigger. The reactors we'll be building at University of Illinois and Chalk River in Canada, those are actually 45 megawatt thermal reactors.
So, it's a bit bigger, but when we finally put out the commercial reactor, it might even be still bigger, like 55, 60 megawatt thermal. These will be bigger systems. But the important nuance here is that we're going to make a reactor as big as you can possibly make it before it stops becoming completely modular, because there's still a number of small modular reactor companies out there that are making 300 megawatt reactor systems. But when you do that, there are certain components like the reactor vessel that you'll have to fabricate and make on site because they're just too big to move by road. The reason why we want to make a reactor as big as possible and still be able to move everything by road is so that we can shorten that deployment time and that construction time, because they can roll off that production line and we can just move them to the sites, and then it's a Lego project. It's an assembly project at that point and we can piece it all together.
And that's exactly what we need because we've got the US Department of Energy released a report and James, it was pretty frightening to me as to go through the report. In the entire US grid, they have 200 new gigawatts planned. Of the 200 gigawatts planned, only 20 are nuclear or natural gas. That's 180 of solar and wind that's actually going to cause more problems than actually the gigawatts that they're going to supply.
Yeah. Like it's very interesting, the whole energy market. And look, the US is a big country and it's got a lot of energy demands and I think a diversified solution will obviously be part of it. For things like data centers and AI, the amount of downtime that those things can sustain on an annual basis is effectively zero minutes, so you need high base load power that can ideally be co-located with these tech centers. And even if you want to opt for gas as a solution now, the waiting times on some of these gases takes you beyond when these nuclear reactors will be ready to deploy. And even with things like wind and solar, you've got to remember that these are locationally dependent technologies that need optimal conditions. And even in these optimal locations for wind and solar, they're still intermittent, which means you need big expensive storage systems, you very likely need to have huge footprints like five, six times the capacity generating ability of these wind and solar farms, so you can overproduce to store it for times when it's nighttime or the wind's not blowing or anything like that. So, it's a very nuanced picture. You hopefully these things can feed into the overall grid, but if you want high base load power that can be located anywhere, that's clean with zero carbon emissions and all of that kind of stuff, it pushes you into nuclear, which is why the tech industry is allying itself so closely now with the nuclear industry.
Well, I know you're limited as a publicly traded company into some of the things that you can say, but it would seem to me that the Googles, the Amazons of the world and the Facebooks won't be knocking down your door saying, 'Excuse us, how do we get on your waiting list and how fast can we order one of your products?'
Yes. Yes. I mean, as a publicly traded company, as you say, I can't reveal any sort of big industry names that we're currently in discussions with about powering their facilities, but all of the big tech names are currently in discussions with nuclear companies about providing power for their data centers and AI centers, and certainly we're having a number of those discussions currently. And some of the requirements of these things here in August, like I think as far as data centers at the moment and tech centers, there's one 600 megawatt project we're looking at. There's a 900 megawatt project. There's one that's going to be just a flat out gigawatt project. This is a huge amount of power.
Oh yes. I need to introduce you to John Bruton. He is the CEO of Data Squared. He just got his patents on AI for validating AI and keeping the hallucinogenics out of answers and it would be critical in the US military space. And so he, you might be very interested in some of his stuff because as you're going through these processes and talking about saying, hey, wait a minute, how is AI going to be done in a process, you don't want those AI just coming up with any answer that it can to help you grow as fast as you can. I noticed that Jay had put a thing, we need people. We're hiring people. We need people. We need more people. And that's a great thing, but you're going to need to make sure you use AI when you're designing your rapid growth that you're facing. You're going to need those kind of checks and balances.
You're 100% right. And obviously you mentioned the military there too. Like one of the customers we're actually looking to supply data center-wise, a lot of that data center is actually for military purposes. So it's, you know, we're coming into contact with the military in almost two different ways. It's one through this sort of tech angle, but the other way is that the military also wants power systems that can make their bases energy sovereign and energy independent. So they're not relying on the grid. They currently can't meet their own mandates to have independent power for two week periods and nuclear is a way of giving them that. So we keep bumping into them all the time. And even on the nuclear fuel supply chain, there is pressure on the DOE, who's putting obviously pressure on the government, to build back nuclear fuel supply chain so we can manufacture the fuel for submarines and aircraft carriers and all these different elements. So it's a very unique time in nuclear where everyone is converging on nuclear all at once to put this pressure to build back as fast as we can. It's great in the long term of the country because it derisks any impediment to the quality of life. We'll have as long as we can keep producing this power, we'll all live well.
You know, it's kind of amazing to me that we have, I believe, around 95 active nuclear reactors in the United States and with the big new beautiful bill and the additional funding for nuclear and great, and I'm going to say this, you don't have to say this, but great success stories like NANO Nuclear. I'm over here. I'm probably one of your biggest cheerleaders out here going, 'Yay, go NANO.' And it's because I'm excited to see the resurgence again.
Yes. And look, I'm also very happy to say yay NANO. Like I'm over the moon with how well things have gone. And obviously when Jay and I started the company a number of years ago, it was kind of sort of before this resurgent interest, we saw a potential market opening up in the future, but it really took off. And now market conditions are wonderful for us to just grow incredibly quickly at a rate we never foresaw. So it is a really wonderful time in nuclear. And as you say, even this big beautiful bill that came out, as I started reading through it, I was like, they had included a huge number of things that were beneficial for the industry: funding from the DOE, loans, progress, programs, infrastructure investment and jobs, R&D, fuel cycle development, export financing support. I mean, I could just go on about all the things that were deliberately included in there to assist the US nuclear industry build back quickly.
Isn't that great? I'll tell you, one of my goals is on my bucket list is to have Mike Rowe on the podcast because I absolutely love Mike Rowe and he's now sitting there going, 'You've got to get back into the trades. We are going to need skilled people for NANO Nuclear technology, for your plants, for your things.' That's some high-paying jobs.
Oh, look, Mike Rowe is 100% correct because like I think a lot of these jobs got sort of offshored, especially as China was industrializing as a country. There was a tendency to ship as much as you could offshore because it was cheaper, right? But you know, as it industrialized, a lot of that industry is now coming back, and what we're seeing actually is that those jobs that were offshored and they weren't renewed, we now need those people.
