Standard Nuclear raises $140M Series A to manufacture TRISO fuel for advanced reactors turning on this year

next guest uh wasn't on the lineup, but he's in the reream waiting room. We got Kurt from Standard Nuclear with some fantastic news. We'll bring him in from the Reream waiting room in to the TVP Ultra. Kurt, how are you doing?

What's going on?

Hey, doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.

Of course. Good to meet you. Uh first time of the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

Absolutely. Hey, I'm Kurt Ronnie. I'm the CEO of Standard Nuclear. Um we are a a nuclear fuels company. Uh we we are the enabler of all these advanced reactors that are coming. I mean I think it's pretty crisp. Uh there's you know huge demand for this energy. Uh you've got defense, you've got space exploration, you got industrial, you got the AI demand and nuclear is here to shine. Turns out these reactors don't turn on without fuel. This is a relatively you know it's a good discovery. So so we we need to make sure the fuel supply is there. Um we are purely on the fuel fabrication part. You know most of the fuel is uranium these days. In the future there'll be plutonium and other fuels. But you got to dig it out of the ground mine it.

You got to enrich it. You got you got like you know folks that are quite active there like our our friends in general matter and other companies. And then once that enriched uranium is available you can't just shove it into a reactor. It needs to be processed into a final fuel form. quite sophisticated has a lot of requirements on it. We provide that service that fuel fabrication service and that fuel ultimately goes to the reactors for a variety of applications. It's kind of like thinking of you know turning sand into a silicon chip.

Mhm. So so uh in terms of the supply chain it are is it possible that you're a layer above general matter and they're actually a supplier of you? Is that right?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. So, so the enrichment is where you're going in there and you're concentrating that you know uranium 235. Okay, that's a heat stock. It's uranium pixel fluoride. You know, we you know, we're chemical processors. Okay. Those guys do really fancy, you know, electrochem electrical spinning and enrichment and we do a chemical process.

Got it. Okay. And then uh what is I mean we've had Scott Nolan on the show. We've talked to him pretty deeply about general matter. Uh what's different about your business? is the same level of uh you know security and and uh and rigor and building physical structures and you need a large plant you need a lot of capital like what's the shape of your business versus general matter which people might be familiar with from the Scott Nolan

yeah you know it it's it's exactly the you know very very similar requirements I'm sitting you know I'm not you know I'm sitting in Oakidge Tennessee I'm sitting in our facility okay uh there's there are a few things that are very non-standard about standard nuclear one of one of the things you know as far as advanced nuclear companies So you got like folks like like those guys that are building and rocking and rolling, but there's a lot of plans. You know, I'm sitting in an actual facility. We got guards, we got fence, we got guns, we got security, and yeah, we have uh you know, relatively large quantities of enriched uranium. Right now, our supply comes from Department of Energy stockpiles.

Those countries been enriching uranium for a very long time. Now, the commercial supply is going to come from folks like Scott and others. That's that's great to really help industry. But yeah, it takes a lot of physical infrastructure to do.

Yeah. So, who who are you uh who are you competing with? Who was doing what Standard Nuclear is doing now prior? It was it was it Yeah. Was it government uh or

Yeah. So, it was it was myself and a bunch of other nerds in the national laboratory system. You know, we were making small quantities of it. We worked with uh you know, like BWXT is a good example. They're kind of their prime contractor in nuclear. We worked with those guys for a long time. Very serious company, great guys. And but really, you know, what I saw a few years ago was it's going from this like little little government research activity to this wave of advanced reactors coming

for defense, for space. And man, the the AI demand really just transformed the the industry. And so people want to build these advanced reactors that are, you know, efficient to build to finance and build. They're not these concrete and steel, you know, behemoths that's going to cost $20 billion and it's going to take 20 years. You know, it's it's more akin to a gas plant where, you know, it's a few hundred million dollars you can you can put it in place. They're inherently safe.

So, that requires the type of fuel that we manufacture, the tricopuel particles.

And what I saw was this lack of supply. I mean, yeah, you could go and buy 100 grams of it from like a national lab, but where I used to work, but we need metric tons of it. So this is what we did. We I literally like you know I took a lot of people out of the national laboratory system and other parts and we we built a private infrastructure to start doing this.

Wow.

You got your PhD from Berkeley in nuclear engineering in 2006? What was sentiment like then among your classmates, professors? Uh in hindsight, was there ever a moment in the last you know almost two decades that you felt a little bit silly for studying that like just just because of lack of progress? You talk talk about the journey to get here.

No kidding. I mean you you already you already know what I'm going to say. Um I I I got my I started in 2006. I got my PhD in 2010 and uh you know I wanted to do advanced nuclear and so there was no advanced nuclear. I mean again we we we know fision reactors work. We know these advanced reactors work because we built them all in the 60s,7s, 80s and then we just stopped and we went through the valley of death in the 90s. So, you know, the only place for me to go was the national laboratory. Now, again, I got, you know, my my friends and Cal doing computer science and everything else. They were doing really cool stuff. And, you know, I was going into this very pigeonhold kind of research area. In 2011, what happened? Fukushima. So, now, you know, there's even there there's even more slowdown. And if you told me like in 2025 there's going to be, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of u private dollars going into deploying advanced nuclear, uh I would have been like, man, like I'm I'm very interested in in the type of mushrooms that you're eating.

No, it's it's it's been really remarkable uh what's happened and uh you know, we always knew I mean nuclear is a part of there's no way you can avoid nuclear and and you need all the above. you definitely need nuclear. It was always going to be this kind of this niche application maybe some some defense applications. Uh I think you know with everything that that happened the the the need for it became more and more clear and you know again the demand side is real. Uh it's not the government funding that's getting it done. There's actual demand pull for that energy that's really real and this administration has done wonders. I mean those executive orders in May were incredible. the our ability today to process hundreds of kilograms of high assay lowenrich uranium aka halo

cooked that enriched uranium process into fuel for our customers are going to turn reactors on this year. This wouldn't have been possible without those executive orders.

So what are your timelines like for serious new nuclear capacity actually getting deployed into the grid? We've seen a number of partnerships. Meta is trying to bring new like old capacity online. And I think Microsoft and Google have similar deals, but most of those dates they they'll throw out 2030, 2032. It feels really far off. At the same time, there's the small modular reactor community that's moving really quickly. Feels like it could get approved a little bit faster, but we're still four, five years out. Does that feel right to you or do you have more nuance on timelines here?

I mean, the key thing is that their demand, the hyperscalers demand for nuclear is insatiable. So yeah, right now if if they can go ahead and take a a nuclear plant that's, you know, couldn't compete in in a deregulated market against gas, we're going to bring that on and, you know, meet their goals. They're doing that right now for sure. And the other thing they're doing is is bringing, you know, these projects online. A lot of times they're behind the meter

and uh, you know, you can see, you know, micro reactors in my you know, if you look at if I look at my notes, your micro reactor is like anything less than like a you know, 50 megawatt. Then you got SMRs that are a little bit bigger, you know, few hundred megawatt. Some of those SMR projects are looking at the end of this decade.

Some of those micro reactors, they're turning on this year. It's incredible. Like we're literally making a core load right now for Arab and those those guys are, you know, up to turn on right now. We've got a lot of other folks that we're looking to supply. They're looking to turn on right now. Uh so it's it's it's all the above. It's it's going to start. I mean, I think the the watershed moment was 2025, 2026, and we're just going to see these deployments in a lot of different ways. Sometimes they're bigger, sometimes they're smaller. Don't forget defense. Don't forget space. You know, it's hard to, you know, uh create energy from coal when you're on the moon or or wind power or so, you know. So, all those things are coming into play.

Don't want to be a windmill on the moon. Um maybe a solar panel, but uh what is the last question for me, what uh what does recruiting look like? I imagine at some point you'll run out of people to poach from national labs. Are you working on retraining folks from other areas, bringing on new talent? Are you giving college tours trying to get young people to study nuclear engineering so that they then they can go work for you in five, six, seven years? What's the long-term solution to the talent problem?

No, I've already stolen enough people from the national labs. I've got my hand smacked from Oakidge after Idaho. But no, they're great colleagues and the leadership of those labs are super supportive and those guys are the most excited because I mean those folks like I said they had to live through the valley of death in the ' 90s and they can see this work that moment but really uh you don't need a lot of like people you don't need a lot of PhDs this you know once you have a process this is where we are we are we actually have commercial scale manufacturing module operating today it's literally like in this building that I'm sitting in.

Yeah. So what we're doing right now we're simply copy pasting these these modules to increase their capacity. So who do I need? I need chemical operators. You know I've got mechanical operators. It's a lot of those types of operators that I need. Now there is a lot of esoteric functions around you know operating a nuclear fuel plant. Uh and this is why we're in a place like Oakidge Tennessee. I mean, you've got this ecosystem between the government complex, Tennessee Valley Authority, just the whole, you know, it's hard to find nuclear welders, nuclear quality people, radiation protection people in a lot of other places in this country, but this is like, you know, there's half half of the region does this. So, uh, this is why we're located here. Uh, we've got, you know, the universities are doing a great job. University of Tennessee, Knoxville down here is cranking on a lot of good engineers for us. And we, you know, workforce has been been relatively straightforward so far. There's a lot of competition coming with a lot of other companies, but you usually bring them in, you bring good people, and then you introduce them into your system, and we train them, and you know, so far so good.

Yeah.

Talk about the news today.

Fundra. What you got? What'd you raise?

We raised 140 million series A.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you, sir. It's awesome. It's uh and and you know really really incredible uh investors uh uh you know it's the list is really awesome. So these folks are believers too. Uh you know we're we're not a reactor company but I think these are a lot of folks highly sophisticated investors that that you know are very very familiar with the industry and they know all these reactors are going to need fuel. So it's been been awesome.

Well congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your week.

Goodbye. Cheers, Kurt.

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