Lightbridge (LTBR) CEO: Nuclear Key Player in A.I. Trade, OKLO Partnership "Very Good"

Yeah, it's great to be on with you again. And Lightbridge is developing advanced nuclear fuels that will increase the power output of the existing reactors and will improve the safety overall, improve the economics of both existing and new reactors. And we're working closely with Idaho National Laboratory, where we're producing samples of the fuel that will start testing we expect early next year in their large reactor.

On Friday, President Trump signed four executive orders that strongly support nuclear power and are designed to cut through regulation while maintaining safety and allow the United States to lead in not only powering industries of the future, like AI data centers that need constant power that nuclear can provide, but also compete and win internationally in a great power competition against Russia and China. And many of these executive orders align just very well with what Lightbridge is doing.

Well, we were very happy to hear it. And so what we're doing going forward that aligns very well with these executive orders is we're going to be, you know, in the very near term, producing new fuel samples with uranium enrichment in them, qualifying them with Idaho National Laboratory, having the whole plan approved there for putting them in the reactor. And by early next year, have them go in the reactor and start generating the data that will go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and will go to utilities. That will be the customers that they need to license and commercially use the product.

Nuclear? Right now it's about 19%, almost one fifth of US electricity. Countries with the highest percentage, like France, have about 72-73% as a year-round average. I think in the United States, we have a diversified energy base. Not any one source will dominate that much. But I think nuclear, if it quadruples, as President Trump is calling for it to do, that would say grow to 80% if we didn't have electricity use growth in the country. But we're going to have tremendous growth in power and needs for electricity. So I think nuclear can approach 50% of all the electricity produced in the country. So that's more than double than where we are now for its use.

Almost. Yeah. I mean, think of it this way. Sitting in New York right now, New York City for all five boroughs, averages what's called five gigawatts of nuclear power that uses every day. There's one data center complex that Microsoft intends to build with OpenAI. A little campus of connected supercomputer buildings that will use eight gigawatts in this one little data center area. New York City is five, and there's going to be many, many data centers like that. So when we say there's about what's called 100 gigawatts of nuclear power in the United States right now, provided by almost 100 large reactors, to double, triple, quadruple that, we're looking at adding, you know, if you want to think of it this way, each one of those reactors would only be about one fifth of what just that big data center would use. So it gives you the notion of 100 reactors in the US, it's about 100 reactors. A big power plant would just power about 20 of those kind of data centers. It gives you the sense of the immense growth we need that renewables just can't provide at the constant power that never goes off, that these companies will need.