The Reactor Renaissance, with Jordan Bramble (CEO of Antares)

Jordan, great to be here.

That's right.

So, the event was really held to commemorate sort of the culmination of the DOE's reactor pilot program. So, there were four companies, us included, that turned on reactors by July 4th, America's 250th birthday. And the impetus of this program that the Department of Energy held was in response to an executive order signed by the president in May of last year. And so it called for at least three reactors to achieve criticality, which was essentially one year's time, right, by July 4th, 2026. It was, you know, I think there were four companies, right, not just three. I think it's viewed as a major win for the country, for this administration, because when the executive orders first came out, this was actually one of the things people most latched on to, and I think in many ways were the most skeptical or most negative about. People kind of scoffed at it. They said that it couldn't be done. You know, we were the first on June 4th, so 30 days ahead of the deadline, but, you know, you kind of had a cadence of other companies that followed after that. And that kind of shows that it's not a fluke, right? We can do these things in this country. So, you know, there was really an opportunity to commemorate that. And, you know, if I think back when the program first came out, I always sort of viewed the culmination of this as we would be in the Oval Office. And I joked about it a few times, and I think the DOE was very into this idea, especially it's a huge win for them, right? I mean, they've put a lot of their staffing and resourcing and prioritization into this, and they did it. So, you know, it's really an opportunity to celebrate.

Yeah, or you win the NBA championships.

Yeah, so the moment of criticality is the reactor has achieved a self-sustaining fission reaction, meaning the number of neutrons being generated by fission events is equal to the neutrons leaving the reactor, right? So you have a stable neutron population, and the ability to do that in a nuclear reactor is dependent on your control scheme, right? And our control system was developed entirely in-house, and this is really the first opportunity to test it in a nuclear setting. So it's almost like, you know, maybe to describe it in a non-technical way, it's like the birth of the reactor. Right. And, you know, from there you scale power up. That produces heat, or a rising neutron population results in heat inside of the core, right? You transport that heat out of the core and then turn it into electricity, right? And so that's really what comes next for us post-criticality is we'll be producing electricity, full-scale commercial product at Idaho National Lab, same facility with the same lot of fuel. We'll be doing that in 2027. And what that means for our customers, right, our customers will receive their first units in 2028. Those will be on military installations. There's going to be operational heritage behind this technology, right? They're not receiving first-of-a-kind or developmental systems because we're using the venture capital that we raised to go test that hardware, right?

Yep.

I've heard people say somewhere between 40 and 50 years. I've heard both. The press release said 40 years, right? We wanted to be conservative on it. It might really be 50 years.

You know, I think in many ways, so, you know, advanced nuclear and nuclear generally stagnated in the US in the 1970s, and in the 90s, at the end of the Cold War, in the Clinton administration, we actually decommissioned many nuclear facilities, wound down a lot of the workforce, and so we've atrophied, right? And it's been exceptionally hard even to get to criticality, right, for decades with new reactor designs. And, you know, that was the thing I think above all else that we've just proven out, that you can go through a regulatory process, you can qualify hardware under a quality program, you can prove both through test qualification but also through analysis that there's a fundamental safety basis that ensures safety of these systems. We were able to fabricate our fuel in less than a year, right, with a new supply chain to do that, right? This trico fuel spec that we've used was really something that was just stood up the same time we were starting in earnest, right? And this was the first fuel that that fuel line's produced that's actually been fissioned. So, you know, all of those things are hard. I mean, excruciatingly hard, right? Especially to do it on this timeline. I think we tripled in headcount as a company in this time period. We have learned so much and grown so much as an organization, right? Like a DOE operational readiness review, we did that for the first time, and I think there's something really powerful and important about doing this in an incremental and iterative way, where you start with, you know, a low power system like this, take all the learning from that, and then go use that to move even faster on the next iteration, and then move even faster to customer deployments. That's I think what's really benefited us. There's an opportunity to really exercise and debug our entire supply chain. So for our suppliers, we know what their lead times really are versus the lead times that we were quoted, right? We know what they're doing to improve those. These are all things that, you know, in other industries I think in many ways we take for granted. But, you know, before now we really never had the opportunity to go do this in the advanced nuclear sector. So it gives us immense confidence in what we're going to do for the next iteration after this. At the same time, what I would say is, you know, a commercially viable power conversion system is in many ways more complicated than the reactor itself. So two things can be true at the same time, right? This is an incredibly hard task, an insanely impactful achievement that deserved celebration in the Oval Office, especially given how long it's been since we've done it. But we still have plenty of hard work ahead of us, too.

I'm not going to answer that question. I think, look, I've got a lot to learn. I mean, I think we as a company have a lot to learn. There's a lot of growth ahead of us. Same thing, right? I mean, the achievements of the last 60 days that we at Antaris have made, and others have made too, by the way, and by the way, outside of the government, the national lab, or outside of industry, right, the national labs, the DOE, extraordinary accomplishments, but we still have a long ways to go. And I think our humility in that, you know, we try to always maintain a beginner's mindset in everything that we do. That's how you maintain the highest rate of learning possible.

You know, I think that's going to propel us forward.

It's a lot of money.

More than 600 million.

So, something that makes us really special is in addition to the private capital that we're raising, we generate revenue, right? And so we've been very kind of focused, laser focused on our first market is defense and space. And so we have defense contracts. You know, if all goes well and continues to go as planned, by the end of this year, we'll have more than a billion dollars in defense contracts. And, you know, I think that's exceptionally rare for a nuclear company. It's rare for defense companies, period, that are three years old, right? And so when you put together the revenue that we're generating, right, we have customers that are sharing in the risk and development of this technology because it's so important to their mission. So when you put that together with the private capital, which by the way aligns incentives with our customers, we're investing at exceeding a one-to-one rate with the taxpayer. When you put those two things together, we're going to put well over a billion dollars to work to get this technology into commercial scale.

I think there were a lot of decisions that we made that I think it's hard to just point to one. I think it's overdetermined in a sense, but culture is a big part of it. So one, we focused on being first. That was really important to us. We chose a fuel spec that is being produced right now. So the trico that we use was originally developed for Project Pele, which is a DOE-funded program out of the Strategic Capabilities Office. And so we were able to get our fuel done well before we needed it. When the pilot program was announced, we already had a $40 million strategic partnership with Idaho National Lab where we were developing our own test facility. And so we invested several million dollars of our own money into a DOE facility to turn it into the Antaris test bed. What that meant for us was we didn't have to spend a bunch of time on these kind of civil works projects, which by the way, these are things we do every day in this country. That's not like the first-order bit. We got to just stay focused on the reactor, on the safety basis, the regulatory case the safety basis would support. And that, by the way, was the next thing that I think we took very seriously. For us, all regulation is downstream of safety. Safety can be thought of as an engineering discipline, and so we integrated that tightly into the design process itself. All of our requirements sort of flow down in a simple way from, you know, what does it mean to be safe. And once we had that in place, it made it really easy for us to just get the regulator bought into the design process itself. So we included them in our design reviews before we ever submitted anything formal to them. And I think that kind of working cadence, that rapport that we built, also just simplified the process a lot. And also using trico as a fuel form, the safety is concentrated in the fuel itself at the particle level, right? If you can prove through physics that you can keep the fuel below 1600 C, it's already proven that this fuel is safe as long as it's met the manufacturing spec. And so that means you can delete these, like, redundant active safety systems. You don't need a large containment. You know, that plus some of the other decisions we made really drove down the number of unique parts in the design. And that just really simplified the process. We, you know, maybe the less special stuff that counts for a lot of nights and weekends, a lot of 80-hour weeks. I actually, I'm going to take my first days off in a couple weeks from now.

In like years.

So, my wife has another baby on the way. We're going to do a baby moon. So, we're going to go to Cabo for a couple days.

But yeah, there's no substitute for hard work.

Yeah. So it's funny, you know, I'm in a role now, like the way my role as CEO has evolved, I probably now meet with OMB several times a month. I mean, before we were in the Oval Office, we were in the Eisenhower Building meeting with OMB to discuss space nuclear. And the way that I think of OMB is it's probably one of the least appreciated, most powerful organizations in Washington. So that's really the organization that is responsible for executing the president's agenda from within the White House. And that's both programmatically and budgetarily. And so it's typically staffed with people who are deeply technical but also have policy chops, right? And I think that's, by the way, something in our culture that I think we do really well here at Antaris is bridge both of those worlds exceptionally well. And I think working in OMB, you know, the organization that I was in, the team that I was on is effectively what is now DOGE, right? So DOGE is part of OMB. So you get a lot of breadth and technical depth at the same time, and you're sort of forced to build that in a very, very short amount of time. So, you know, what I see from OMB, I mean, we meet with the NASA examiners, we meet with the defense examiners. You know, they're taking their cues from what the National Security Council and what OSTP, Office of Science and Technology Policy, what they're illuminating as priorities. And so what's really changed in this administration, space nuclear power systems are a top R&D priority for the country as set by OSTP. In response to these executive orders, nuclear energy, both for resilience and for kind of winning this AI race, is also a priority. And so you see this showing up maybe much more substantially than you did in years prior in OMB's list of priorities and the things that they're working on.

So, correct, we're a microreactor developer. So think anywhere from kilowatts to low number of megawatts. I think the DOE will define this as kind of 20 megawatts and below is a microreactor. Now we would say there's a huge difference even between a 1 megawatt reactor and a 20 megawatt reactor, right? But, you know, the spirit of all of this technology at microreactor scale is really about being able to produce them in factories and being able to ensure passive safety features, right? And this focus on microreactors in the US is also what's led to the NRC creating Part 57, which is a licensing pathway for kind of low-consequence, low-source-term reactors where, you know, the safety or risk calculus is just entirely different than what you have from a grid-scale reactor. Therefore, we should be able to operate them autonomously or license them in fleets, do things that will drive down the OpEx in ways that you just can't do with the larger power plants. And what that really unlocks, and I think is very different about the microreactor segment and one of the reasons why we work on it, is before the term microreactor existed, they used to call them special-purpose reactors. So they typically had some special purpose other than just, you know, producing the cheapest electricity possible, right? In our case, what we're focused on at Antaris is what we call strategic energy. And, you know, that's really using the characteristics of nuclear power to enable mission effects for the country that would otherwise be impossible, right? So national security related. So what we're doing on Earth, terrestrially, that's where we'll deploy first. Our first use case for the Air Force is focused on powering a cyber warfare center, right? So these are assets that need to be 24/7, 365.

Yeah, we're looking at sites that are not always, right? Actually, most of the first use cases are here in the continental US.

And that's because those are the easiest to deploy to start, right? You want to prove out the technology in the places where it's easiest. And then certainly where you can get some of the most value is like the North Slope of Alaska to power our North Warning radar sites, or islands in the Pacific that perform a missile defense function. You know, this is the, I mean, we will have Golden Dome assets right along the coastal US, along the southern border, in the North Slope of Alaska that are going to be nuclear-powered by microreactors. I feel very confident saying that. Because, you know, if you just look at the mission calculus of, if you war game it all out, right, if you don't have 24/7, 365 power, if you have an adversary that's capable of disrupting your fossil fuel supply chains, that's capable of disrupting the civilian grid, you know, that's a huge vulnerability in the architecture, right? So you need to bake in resilience from the very beginning. But we're also going to focus on space power. And so through nuclear power in space, you know, we will be able to power high-powered assets, right? Whether those are, you know, directed energy systems or, you know, much more powerful EW systems, or even taking existing capabilities but moving them up to higher orbits where they're safer and the cost to take them out is much higher.

Great question. So NASA has the DRACO Freedom mission, which is a nuclear-powered and propelled spacecraft to Mars to perform a science mission. So solar efficiency declines, it's 1 over r squared, right? So there's an exponential relationship between distance and solar efficiency. In other words, solar panels would have to grow exponentially for every unit that you move distance-wise. And so this makes solar, like high-powered solar applications, increasingly less feasible as you get further from the sun. So imagine, you know, we wanted to send a mission to the icy moons of Jupiter to look for extraterrestrial life under the surface of Europa. You need nuclear power to do that, to generate enough power to do so. Most of our deep space missions, like New Horizons, those are flyby missions, right? Where we fly by once. We don't actually have the power or the delta-V to go into orbit around these celestial bodies and do long-term imaging, long-term mapping, things that would be incredibly valuable. NASA has also announced the desire to build a moon base and stay there permanently. If we're going to have human habitation on other celestial bodies, if we are going to have sustained and scaled industrial activity in space, whether that's propellant production or, you know, in-space manufacturing, other kinds of resource utilization, the combination of power density, low sustainment tail, and the ability to operate without view factor to the sun just tells you that, like, anything life-supporting, you need nuclear power to do it in space. So we think those applications will come a bit later. You know, it'll be military and science applications, and then eventually the commercial economy in space will really scale. And we want to be there for it.

We think about it a lot. I'd separate it into two components. So one is the feedstock itself, so enriched U-235, typically in U3O8 form or uranium hexafluoride, so as a gas. That's historically where the bottleneck has, you know, sort of the first bottleneck in the supply chain. Now, what's changed in the last few months is the DOE has put $2.7 billion to work funding multiple enrichers to scale up. So Centrus, Urenco, General Matter, and I think Arano is the fourth. We've publicly announced an agreement with Urenco. Let's just say we've done multiple enrichment agreements that we think will start to come online, depending on the provider, between 2027 and 2031. So HALEU is like imminently here. Now, here's the other thing that I think is a unique advantage that we have. All of our first deployments, our first 20 reactors, are all going to be military-focused. The federal government has a stockpile of HALEU today that is enough for us to build hundreds of reactors, by the way, that they will allocate on an as-needed basis, right? And so as we're deploying in 2028, that means we're going to need material in '27 or end of this year. We're already working on those agreements with the federal government now. And so we'll have all of the HALEU that we need to bridge that gap. We view that as a competitive advantage, right? We're able to make more performant, more economical reactors with fuel that we have that's not yet commercially available. And then we'll be able to scale commercially as that fuel is commercially available.

Right. On the TRISO piece, so the BWXT line was stood up, was capitalized under Project PEI. I don't know if I can comment on the amount that they're making per year, but for let's call it the next few years, they're able to satisfy our needs. We also have made 9 kg as a test batch with standard nuclear. They have now scaled to their third facility that's DOE authorized. So excited to potentially work with them as a partner, and BWXT has publicly announced they're working towards a much more scaled footprint for TRISO fabrication in Wyoming. So we're tracking all of these things. We've got close relationships with all of these fabricators. They can definitely scale up to meet their needs. At the same time, we're partnering with National Labs and other companies to develop the Enriched TRISO spec and the manufacturing process for it, so that if we ever had to bring this in-house, we would be able to. And even if we're relying on a scaled supply chain for fuel, we still want to have our own R&D capabilities.

Well, that's assuming you're putting a microreactor to power a home, which I assume you're not.

No plans for that. But, you know, even small reactors for like data centers or other industrial power, right? That is something we would look at. And, you know, I believe these tiny microreactors can be way more economical than most people think. And, you know, the reason for that is in the early 2030s, like we'll have uranium nitride TRISO, right? It'll be 40% more cost effective and more uranium dense than the uranium oxycarbide TRISO that's available today. We can change some of the materials in our core, you know, as we master refractories and other things that are more transparent to neutrons, we also improve the neutron economy. These tiny reactors, with HALU, eventually you'll be able to get them to 12, 15, 16 plus years of operating without the need to refuel. And the economics look really incredible when you do that, especially, you know, even if you believe relatively conservative estimates for how cheap TRISO fabrication can get at scale. We think those economics can get quite attractive, not just for the military, but commercially as well.

You know, a year ago, two years ago, when we would try to raise capital, I think this is what most of capital markets saw as maybe one of Antaris' biggest risks, if not the biggest risk. And, you know, keep in mind that was a time where the DOE had this stockpile of HALU, but they were not allocating it.

You know, we're out of that era now.

Right. We have fuel, right? We have fuel to build multiple reactors.

So right now, what I'm focused on is just getting these reactors built and proving out the technology first and foremost.

Yes.

Well, I think about what do we have to do to make sure it doesn't slip. So to make electricity, you need a power conversion system. That's what we're focused on. So, you know, if you look over there, I know we're on camera, so maybe we won't. Let's just look.

That's our primary heat exchanger vessel.