The Nuclear Company CEO: we're the only Western firm focused on deploying reactors — and eyeing a $20B recovery project

million. Everyone is all in on companies that start with the today. There we go. But uh give us the intro on the nuclear company. What's the plan and where are you in that plan? Uh what's the plan? So to my understanding, we're the only company in the Western world focused on the deployment of new nuclear.

What does that mean? Um I assume some of your communities probably followed the nuclear industry a little bit. I mean there's no AI without power. I just talked in that talk earlier about you know China is about to pass the US as the largest nuclear power in the world. Yeah.

Um our thesis is the reactor is not the problem. There's a lot of legacy reactors that are operating in the US. There's some of the best performing reactors on planet Earth. Uh there's a lot of startups, dozens, designing new reactors that are all going to be great reactors.

Uh the problem is being able to deploy those reactors on time on budget. We have the safest operating nuclear fleet, the highest performing operating nuclear fleet. You're talking about the Navy or I'm talking about the US. We have about a 100 operating plants. I mean today 20% of the power in the US comes from nuclear.

That's nuclear that was built in the 60s and 70s. We've built two reactors in 30 years. So what are we? We're the deployment arm. And why what does that mean? So think of if you're American Airlines or Delta, you don't call GE or Rolls-Royce. You you don't you don't just call to buy a jet engine. Yep.

You call Boeing or Airbus. what if I handed you a jet engine or a Ferrari engine or a Bugatti engine, no matter how great that engine is, you're going to be like, "What are we doing?

" So, we want to be the full solution to deliver that power plant uh to either a hyperscaler, to a utility, to a foreign government, uh or potentially to operate those on our own. Uh and the good thing is we're not competing with any of those reactor companies in the market. We're a partner them.

So once they go from R&D to you know manufacturing to design to implementation uh there's a big difference between white lab coats designing projects in an R&D lab to living in a construction site where you know I've done much of our team's done I mean I built 8 million square feet of stuff at the last thing you know got a team of builders that worked for Elon building gigafactories built the last nuclear power plants here we want to be that team that when you're ready to go deploy your reactor you know we can partner with you get that reactor in the field and get it up and operating.

Your partners on the reactor side, how much of what they're doing is just remembering how we used to build reactors as a country versus doing net new innovation.

So there's really only two incumbents in the US and that's Westinghouse and GE and you know obviously we're talking to them and then there's a lot and they built Vodal the most recent uh nuclear power plants to come online that were successful but over budget and over time correct.

Oh man, it was Yeah, I hired everybody off that team. So, Georgia uh Vogle three and four first of nuclear. Yeah. What we wanted? No, no, no. We wanted to hire like if people look at that and go abject failure. I go, no, no, no. These are lessons learned. This is like what in the what went wrong, guys? It's nuts, man.

Like, it took 10,000 people at the peak of construction uh on that construction site. Um guys, go to a rock concert. Look at 10,000 people and think they're showing up to work every day. Yeah. You don't want an amphitheater just to meet your team. 10,000 people managing the project with paper. No way.

Not the last decade of construction. We're not talking 40 years ago. I'm talking in the last This thing finished last year with wheelbarls and wagons of paper. So you're looking at 10 to 20% efficiency for the people working. And you know the audience and the larger viewership might go, "Ah, lazy Americans.

" No, I'm not buying it. Yeah, we are not giving our teams and people the the advantages to win the American spirit and fight alone. God, I'm believing it as much as anyone. It's not enough. We got to bring technology, tools, capability. That's where we're partnering with Palunteer.

So, I'm taking hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, which is what it takes to build one of these power plants, putting it into a data lake, segmenting that data out. So, if certain parties want to secure their data, they can. Then having LLMs and AI on top of that, giving predictive analytics.

So, when the supply chain's delayed the night before, a construction man or woman's waking up in an RV in a trailer at 3:00 a. m. , okay, I'm going to be redirected at 3:15, I go there. At 3:45, I go there. Giving our frontline teams all the tools, technology, and information. We can do it. We're not splitting an atom.

We're not going to Mars. We're just building the most dominant AI enabled platform on planet Earth. And we're going to slash that 10,000 down to 5,000. We're going to go to seven years instead of 12 years. China's building these 1 gigawatt reactors for five billion in five years.

There's no reason we can't do it in five or four years. I'm not going to name the number. My team will get really upset with me on the price side. But um there's no reason these two reactors took 12 years and 36.

Let's talk about timelines in the industry broadly because there's some recent I guess I don't I don't know if I can't remember if it was an EO or just a broad directive from the White House saying like we want new nuclear breaking ground in the US in the next 12 months. Is that is that brother? It could be us.

So, we are imminently close to a recovery project that I'm not supposed to talk about, so I'm not going to name the state. And uh but it's a $20 billion recovery project. Bring bringing old capacity back online. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh $9 billion walk away. They spent $9 billion on this nuclear 2 gawatt nuclear power plant.

Didn't finish it. Walked away. So, we are getting brought in. We're we're imminently close. If we win that, you all should definitely come. this tiny little team that's 2 years old that partnered with Palunteer to go recover this animal and finish it. Uh would love to have you all. Yeah. Yeah.

When when you think about what they spent, what is the value that's just sitting there on the dirt? Certainly not 9 billion, but are you picking up a couple billion billion in legal fees, 100k? No, it's it's a lot infrastructure. Hopefully they pou some concrete that's still there.

It looks like I mean if you walk on it, we're on uh I'm not allowed to say where we're at, right? Yeah. Oh god, I almost did. Um so we're in America. We're in America. Play that American sound effect. We are in America. We're not afraid to say it. We're in America.

But uh the when you walk this site and you look at it, it looks like, you know, aliens landed and just left because it's in rural America where this big infrastructure. So there's a lot of value there. there's been some value that's, you know, not not quite where it should be.

Uh, but we're going to go we're going to get that thing hopefully later this year, early next year, and be under construction. Uh, we had an author Dan Wang on the show maybe last week.

He wrote a book called Breakneck and he and he uh and he contra compares and contrasts China to the United States and he calls China the engineering empire driven by an engineering mindset. The solution to everything in China is just more engineering.

Uh, build a train to nowhere, build a bridge, just build housing, build everything.

build bill build and in the United States he calls us this the lawyerly society and and we are too everyone in politics is lawyerly or lawyer lineage and so one of the problems that I've heard in nuclear is that oftent times you go to build something you think okay I got a plan it's compliant with all the laws and then the laws change and all of a sudden you're back to square one you got to rip out all the pipes because they said no copper now you got to use lead pipes again or whatever um how much of that do you think is is real or how much do you think because That feels like something that you can speed up by analyzing all the legal code constantly and with the regulatory filing speeding that up.

But some of it also has to happen on the other side, right? Like like we it's not just enough for you to be using AI to to submit documents fast. You need review fast. So what's going to happen on the other side? Oh god, I have so many comments on this just rant. So uh how long do we have? Seriously, five minutes some.

Uh so yeah, I mean this is the hot button issue for me. We have the safest operating nuclear fleet in the world and the highest operating capacity.

This industry, don't get me wrong, the legal BS, yes, we we all agree, but the victim mentality of the industry, the victim mentality of of of entrepreneurs in San Francisco acting like high school kids, blaming the regulator. Brother, it ain't that hard. We hired the number two at at the NRC, Laura Dudes.

She's on our team. We're walking into the NRC going, "What do you need? " We're going to be fully transparent. We're going to be fully compliant. They should be incredibly critical. It's nuclear for God's sakes. If there is one and and here's the other one big misnomer and it's working, right? The fleet safe.

We have had in decades 100 operating nuclear power plants. Not one person in this country has died from radiation fallout. 0. 0. That is perfection. Uh, so the the the private sector needs to stop being a victim and just start doing what we're doing and and and figure out how to partner with the regulator.

We're seeing no problem. So the other kids that want to cry on Twitter, go for it. You want to sue the regulator, go for it. Uh we're just going to go on and partner with them and and figure out how to how to build uh bigger, faster, lower cost, safer, higher quality than ever before.

And I will say what we're doing with Palunteer. Well, here's the good news to the to the people designing reactors and you're ready to go deploy them. What you're doing and what I'm doing have nothing in common. I have a team again.

We lit me and my wife were living in an RV, got got engaged on the last construction site. I've got guys that were building Vogle 3 and four, had heart attacks on the construction site, had people living at the gigafactories. That is a totally different world.

let us take your drawings, your great R&D, drag it into reality. Uh, and we're going to build that trust with the regulator with you. Uh, but I do think we got to go pencils down, swords down on blaming the regulator. Now, the the legal, you know, that's a whole verse engineer thing.

That's a whole another topic we could we could take on. Uh, but we need the regulator to challenge us to be safe and we just as as as an industry have to figure out how to comply and get the job done. Yeah. What great rant. I would love to see you and Karp rant together. Yeah. Yeah.

What uh what did Palunteer show you that made you go with them? Was there was there a key case study that So we studied So we are a 2-year-old company that's about to be the f the only company in the US with commercial nuclear under our watch. I'm like what did we do right? What are others doing?

We're just building a team to go build and and kind of reactor tech an agnostic. Is the other is the other stuff managed by the government? Is that what you mean? like or is it just older companies that that that manage? There's no one that's actually focused on building. Everyone's designing new reactors.

I just want to go build stuff. So, I could build a Westinghouse, a GE reactor, you know, any one of the new advanced reactors. We just want to build. So, then the last year what we did is we looked at everything. I hired somebody over here a lot smarter than me. Was it Tesla? Was it Microsoft?

Um looked at all the different AI platforms. What can we do? We knew what we wanted. Nuclear OS.

So nuclear OS is the you know again all all aspects of data related to the project into a data lake predictive analytics our frontline teams no one's even close man yeah this is it I'm not trying to be like a sales job I would like to get like a commission I was going to guess that there's not another great alternative that it would have been nice to at least look at a couple options and decide well here's the good thing I mean it's just the most secure platform the way the way it it is configured you know we're going to go build the most dominant AI enabled nuclear platform and we're doing it with Palunteer.

So it took us about a year of study. It took us a couple months of planning and now we're just racing right now to go kind of build those solutions and it's it's working. Yeah. What's the uh what's the structure of the financial milestones for you?

Because I imagine that a lot of this doesn't look just like fund everything with venture capital. There's probably some project finance, right? And then there's actually a customer who might be not you that's paying paying you just to advance the construction.

So for our business model so topco you know the nuclear company you're investing your VC dollars into technology and team which this town knows that big you know buckets of capital project capital. I hired a big boy CFO that's raised 10 billion in his life. He was CFO with JB at Redwood.

learn how like the NeoClouds will go and build new data centers, but then there's there's project finance debt equity on the project. You know, we're the ones getting it to completion. We could get an equity earn out in the project. We could get a fee during construction.

And then there's multiple either we could build own transfer to a large utility. We could build own operate for a hyperscaler. We could build own transfer to a foreign government. Uh or we could we could operate it ourselves.

So, you know, our there's a few ways we get there, but uh the debt and equity is going on the project. not through us now. I mean, our valuation's not to a point to where I could put 20 billion on our balance sheet. Yeah. Uh but I don't know, maybe maybe in a couple years. Let's talk. Let's see how this goes. Fantastic.

Um so, you know, we're, you know, again, I very just bullish on on Palunteer. And I don't know whoever listened to that talk earlier, it's I mean, the binary outcome is it's us versus China. And to all the tech bros and the badass CEOs and the badass five Fortune 500 tech executive, here's what I would say.

We got to leave our ego at the door. China is [ __ ] kicking our ass. That I hope was not recorded. Everything recorded. We're live. So the look, it is look, the reality is it's not even a competition. We're losing so bad and we've got to work together.

So I would say to the community watching, you know, push me, be hard on me, critical on me, that's fine. But let's figure out how to challenge each other and work together because it's a binary outcome right now. It's us versus China. It's not even close.

They're winning at so many categories and we've got to figure out how to work together and that's what I think Palanteer and a unique framework they're bringing uh not only the technology but the mentality of how do we work together and win and you know now it's all going to be about performance on that construction site on time on budget high safety and I love your position in the in the nuclear kind of market broadly and that if somebody can build great reactors you can help them actually become a real business based on it and not have to worry about every single point in the stack.

We got a partner, man. That's the thing, right? This is where China is going into the Middle East fully vertically integrated going NBS. We will do it all. One shop stop. They don't want to work with three constructors and uh somebody selling a reactor. No. So, like how do we partner together? Go as a coalition.

We're going to deliver power globally. We're going to deliver power in the in here in the US. But I do think figuring out how we, you know, bring down this ego of like there's so many silos and we need to challenge each other.

But that's what I would say to you all because there's a lot more people on this listen to you than listen to me. Um, how do we bring our tech community together, our big CEOs who are important and great, but if you compare them to China, we're not winning. So it's like how do we do that and go win collectively?

Fantastic. Well, I think we have our next guest here. We're going to take a look at some rocket motor. So thank you for Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for uh doing this work. Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Nancy Cable from Ursa Major. Uh we will bring her in.

And do you want us to try and bring that in here? What are you thinking? I'm happy to bring it in. Bring in the engine. Bring in the engine. Bring in the engine. It's engine, right? Okay. It's device. We got an engine coming. It's It's shocking that it was clear through security.

We we we when we do these remote shows, we sometimes have to bring uh very very suspicious looking Wi-Fi hotspots. Uh Ben and the boys brought a Wi-Fi hotspot through the Actually, I think I had to walk it into the capital through a very odd place here. Maybe pick up the microphone and we'll throw it on the table.

Set it gently. Yep, we can throw it on the table. I think we'll be okay. Yeah, just set your own gently down. Okay. Incredible. This is a wild demo. We've