NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ:NNE)'s CEO James Walker Featured on Washington Times 'Bold and Blunt'

Great. Very pleased to be on. Thank you.

Sure. So I mean nuclear energy began, you know, from the government. I mean, the US was the first nuclear power in the world and that began obviously World War II. It began with Oppenheimer and then it obviously moved into the civil program but it was obviously buoyed by that sort of military pushing it into its own purposes and then it had that civil application that came off it was like the offshoot. What's being examined now is that the technology has advanced to a certain point where you can create these advanced smaller reactor systems that can deploy a lot faster that utilize much more safe fuels and it can collocate. It can be deployed in ways it's never been deployed before. Island communities, military bases, mining projects, oil and gas. But the one very specific application for this technology is military bases because they have this mandate that they need to be self-sufficient with power for at least a two-year period and it's very difficult for them to meet this mandate if they lose grid power because it would mean a substantial stockpiling of things like diesel or coal or gas or whatever it would be. But the nuclear reactor gives them that energy sovereignty. So a lot of bases now are examining that nuclear option and the only way to do that is these advanced reactor systems. So for instance, we have a contract with the Air Force at the moment that's going to be looking at how we deploy one of our systems onto this Air Force base. But being able to work with someone like, you know, the Air Force or the Army or the US Marines or whoever it is, you know, it provides that push. Because it's not that money is not important or cost isn't important to them, but their priorities are very different. It's about energy independence, energy security, and that alone can be a driving force to push a tech into physical deployment, physical construction. And once you get to that point, you know, your lessons learned, your ability to actually make that device improves dramatically. And then your ability to make that commercial reactor becomes a lot easier.

Yep. So these micro reactor systems that are being considered, they contrast the large reactors quite dramatically. Now, the materials might be quite similar. You might still need the nuclear grade graphite, you need the enriched uranium, but there are some very fundamental differences. Like for instance, if you think of the big traditional light water reactor systems, the nuclear plants we're all familiar with the big systems. Now the deployment timelines for those things might be 15 years and they need huge emergency planning zones around them. So almost like a demarcation area of several miles around those reactor systems just to allow for worst accident case scenarios. The new advanced reactors contrast that quite dramatically because of the type of fuel that they're utilizing. There's no emergency planning zone around a lot of these reactor systems. So they can collocate on the base and they can be put in dense population centers. And to give an example, our micro reactor system, we're building one at the moment in the middle of the University of Illinois campus. And you know that's surrounded by dorm rooms and students and the NRC, the federal regulator has accepted construction permit application for consideration now in that setting. And it would only do that if it was very confident that there was no accident scenario that would pose a risk to any nearby bystander. So again, it's very different to the traditional big reactor systems and the deployment timelines are much faster whereas that 15 years might be shortened to 3 to 4 years. Now you're still going to need a lot of the same sort of components but they're essentially much smaller scale and you now have the ability to mass manufacture these components because they are standardized designs and you will be deploying standardized designs across multiple locations. You ship these parts to the location they're required and it's more of an assembly operation rather than construction. So you avoid things like big construction delays or the risk of construction delays and cost overruns and things like that.

I mean, you never have to rely on China for anything specific on a reactor system. Now, China is building nuclear reactors like crazy at the moment. They've been building 2 gigawatt scale factories every single year. And for that reason, they do have a very developed nuclear energy infrastructure. And so, there are things like nuclear grade graphite where there aren't many suppliers in the world, but China does supply. They are one of the suppliers of it. Now we do have an option to buy from China but for instance if for any reason there was an embargo on China or there was trade disputes with them there are alternatives for all of these different items. We wouldn't necessarily be dependent on them for anything specific but we probably will and I think the nuclear industry will buy things from them until the US has built back some of its infrastructure. And I think even a few years ago the Biden administration they realized that a lot of the US nuclear infrastructure had atrophied because of underinvestment into it and they were putting billions back into rebuilding efforts in the US and those rebuilding efforts are underway right now. The US has put billions of dollars back into big infrastructure projects and they are building nuclear infrastructure like crazy now to get back to a point of complete self-sufficiency and to be able to make all the components. So we do have the Chinese option. We can buy products from there. It's only temporary, it's not necessary and really the advantages of Chinese infrastructure and equipment, it's only optional temporarily before the US is completely self-sufficient again.