Hey everyone, welcome to the show today. We are joined for a one-on-one conversation with James Walker. James is the CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy. James, I appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.
No worries, thanks for having me, JD.
So first, let's start with a base definition for any of our listeners who might be a bit unfamiliar. James, what is micro reactor technology and how does it differ from traditional nuclear reactors?
Okay, so within the industry there's really the two big things people talk about at the moment, which are small modular reactors and micro reactors. So if you think of a micro reactor, it's classified as really anything beneath about 20 megawatts of power being outputted, whereas a small modular reactor is 20 megawatt and above. And I think the largest small modular reactor I've seen is 480. So let's just say small modular reactors run from 20 megawatt all the way up to almost 500 megawatts. And the traditional big power plants that you're talking of, the enormous things, those things sort of border on about a 1 GW output.
So it sounds as if, as far as you're situated, the smaller the better. Is that a good way to read the situation?
Look, you're not wrong. When we started in this, obviously there was a lot of development in small modular reactors. They're the ones you read about mostly in the news. But we saw that actually with a micro reactor, you could target a potentially much larger market, and there was less competition. And it was also targeting areas where there was no other fuel competition from other sources. So say, for instance, if you make a small modular reactor that powers a town, you still might have to compete with the price at the grid for gas, for coal, for wind, for solar, for geothermal. But for micro reactors, if you're putting it in mining sites, remote industry, for oil and gas, for military bases, island communities, all these different areas where micro reactors would go where an SMR is unsuitable, then you're only competing with the costs of remote diesel. And that's usually quite expensive because say you're running a diesel generator in just the middle of nowhere, the importation costs add significantly to that. So all we've got to do then is compete with the costs of remote diesel. And in the micro reactor market, there were fewer big competitors who had developed systems for that. So we saw that with the right financing structure and the right technical teams, this was an area we could pull ahead in and, you know, hope to get a commercial product out first and dominate that market.
To that commercial product—what are some of the potential markets that you see for your micro reactors? Are there particular industries or regions that you see as being most promising for your deployment?
Well, certainly when we started, we knew that mining would be a big one because there's actually probably thousands of sites that are very mineral rich or resource rich, but they're not economic to exploit. And that's because the fuel costs alone make the deposit uneconomic. Now, if you were to have a constant fuel supply in this kind of area, then you could unlock a lot of economic potential. But a lot of existing mines also could really benefit from this—so process heat for concentrating or for accommodations. But that basically leads from mining into remote oil and gas, remote industry in general. And then as we were building into this industry, we saw that actually there's a huge potential market in island communities. So when we spoke to governments in Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, there were hundreds of millions of people dotted across hundreds of islands, and these communities all basically subsisted off diesel generators. And this meant intermittent power, it was polluting, and it meant very high costs. And this is another massive area where micro reactors can move into. And you could make that similar argument in the continent of Africa as an example, where they've got large population centers that have no power, and it's just not feasible to run power transmission lines to these areas. But if you do put a micro reactor into these locations, you can have vertical farms, you can have mining communities, and power for industry and desalination plants. So as I say, you could make a hundred thousand of these things a year and you still probably wouldn't hit the potential of the market.
James, I hope you don't mind the next question. I always ask a CEO in your situation how closely you follow the stock price. Anyone who by now in our interview has bothered to look up ticker symbol NN at the NASDAQ sees that Nano Nuclear Energy is up some 262 percent year to date. Talk to me about what you attribute the overall market cap of the company rising so significantly to, and then to my main question: how often do you track stock price for your company day to day?
You know, it's a funny thing because I try and not look. The problem is that there's so much action in the stock that if you could just watch it, you could just watch it go up and down, and then you're going to lose a lot of time. And I've got so much to do that I just don't want to get distracted by it. And sometimes I do fall for the habit of looking in the morning and it's obviously doing something exciting, and it makes you want to come back every 15 minutes and have a look. So the habit is to try and not look, and maybe at the end of the day I might clock in and just see what it's done. But sometimes, you know, there's days where it's jumped like $5, and then people are calling you and telling you, and so you get roped into the whole looking thing. So I do try and avoid it, but sometimes you just can't help yourself.
