Antares CEO Jordan Bramble on securing the first DOE safety approval for a new US nuclear reactor design in decades

Speaker 1: to to the entire team. Congratulations.

Speaker 2: Story. Thanks, We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Jordan Bramble from Antares. He's the cofounder and CEO. Antares is becoming the first company to secure DOE safety approval for a new reactor, marking a breakthrough in US nuclear deployment. Jordan, how are you doing? Doing well. How about yourself? Thank you for having me. To the show. I'm glad to meet. We've heard a ton about the, about the company over the years. Please, but give us an introduction on yourself and the company.

Speaker 8: Yeah. So, Jordan Bramble, CEO here at Antares. Mhmm. Our focus at Antares is, nuclear power for what we call strategic energy. So that primarily means defense and space applications,

Speaker 2: but increasingly expanding into commercial markets as well. Does that mean, like, oil and gas extraction, you need a, you know, a diesel generator normally, but, you can put down a nuclear reactor as well?

Speaker 8: Absolutely. And the thing that, you know, I think is aligned across both of those markets is, you know, what we're seeing, and this is what strategic energy really means to us is you're using the unique characteristics of nuclear power to enable a resiliency, or other characteristics that you can't get from alternative energy sources. And that's really the crux of what we're trying to do on the defense side of things is provide modular power plants that have a much higher uptime with a much lower sustaining supply chain than the alternatives do so that we can power our operational assets that exist here in the homeland. So what are the what's the shape of the reactor that you wanna build? The size, the scale, the differentiators?

Speaker 2: Like, what goes into actually delivering a product here?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Absolutely. So, it's a graphite moderated design. We use a fuel form factor called TRISO. So Yeah. Think of tiny spheres, particles of uranium encapsulated in silicon carbide Sure. Pressed into graphite compacts, stacked into channels inside of graphite. Yeah. Our reactors are cooled with heat pipes. So we actually vaporize sodium that travels the length of the pipe then condenses into a wick structure, to return that working fluid. So it's a totally passive way to move heat inside of a nuclear reactor. Heat pipes copper water heat pipes are also in your iPhone. They were actually invented at Los Alamos National Lab for space space nuclear power applications in 1963. The reactor itself can fit on a truck bed Yeah. Alongside of the power conversion system,

Speaker 2: and then can be installed at the site. And then how far long are you in the actual development? I I know this stuff, it it it's not an overnight project. There's a lot that goes into Yeah. Being yeah. Going critical, basically.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, first thing I would say is North Star for us, North Star for any company is to have an electricity producing system at a customer site, customers paying for it. Yep. And all of our work with Idaho National Lab, you know, we view this as a sequence of multiple test reactors to get to that point. Mhmm. We've been at this for three years now. Mhmm. We actually started developing our test facility at Idaho National Lab back in 2024, so that we could be ready for this moment. Funnily enough, you know, just kind of brilliant rhyme of history here, the last time a nuclear reactor was tested in that building in Idaho was actually, this picture right behind me. Yeah. So Is that the job? The army's m l one reactor that was, built in 1967 here in Los Angeles. Wow. Now, you know, call it a half century or so later, we built a reactor here in Los Angeles that we're now gonna go test in that same building. Yeah. You asked about Dome. It's not actually Dome. So, it's it's very nearby. So our facility is called RACE, the reactors and critical experiments facility. Sure. Formerly known as MFC seven nine three. Yeah. We invested a couple million of our own dollars in that building starting in '24 and '25, so that we would have a facility ready to go by the time that we were ready to test a reactor. Yeah. But, you know, the broader kind of tech maturation strategy here is, we actually tested an electrically heated prototype at full thermal power, back in 2025. Mhmm. Now what we're trying to do with this, criticality test in 2026 is validate the performance of our control systems, as well as prove out all of the simulations that that govern the design, especially in the nuclear data side. Yeah. We're really getting a lot of ancillary benefits from this test, so it's been a great opportunity to debug the supply chain performance and lead times of our suppliers. Also then great opportunity for us just to learn this regulatory pathway. So we're obviously doing this for the first time, but, much bigger than that, this is actually the first time for the country that a reactor, a new reactor, has been authorized under DOE standards. The last time a new reactor was built at a DOE site of a new design, was before this regulatory pathway actually existed. So, it's a historic first in that way. Yeah. We've learned a lot from it. And now when we do subsequent reactors, you know, we know a lot more about how to get through this regulatory pathway efficiently. So Yeah. Maybe just to summarize that, you know, full thermal power in 2025, we're gonna be making neutrons this year in 2026,

Speaker 2: and then electrons in 2027 with a electricity producing reactor. What's the what what's your background? I feel like nuclear does not have a very clear pipeline of, oh, you worked at these you're part of the SpaceX mafia that went into nuclear. Some people in nuclear came from SpaceX, but it it there isn't a there isn't a clear lineage for everyone. What was your path into the nuclear industry?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So engineer by background, studied systems engineering and physics, like lifelong interest in nuclear power. I like to joke that the first, like, real job I had where, you know, I wasn't working on, you know, working at fast food, working on the family farm. First thing I ever did was work at the Newport News shipyard where we build because build and construct nuclear submarines. Yeah. Spent some time at at at at different startups. You know, I've worked on everything from artificial intelligence, machine learning, embedded systems Mhmm. You know, product companies. The other unique thing in my background is I was actually in the White House in OMB in 2017, 2018. Got it. Yeah. Talk more about the the regulatory approval.

Speaker 2: May maybe map out exactly the path because there's clearly, like, a series of steps here. Like, what happened most recently?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So this final regulatory approval that we received is called the DSA, documented safety analysis. Okay. And, you know, really what that is doing, the the the the approach to licensing a reactor with the Department of Energy is you establish a safety basis. Right? These are the fundamentals, design characteristics, but also subsystems that perform some fundamental safety function to ensure the public is safe. Mhmm. And you prove that through analysis. You prove that through testing, and your documentation outlines that. What the DSA does that's different than the preliminary approvals is it's actually based on what is as built. So at time of final design review, they consider that 90% design complete. The other 10% is what you actually deliver and build, and that's what goes into approving the DSA. So you can think of it simply as the final regulatory approval. From here on out, what comes next is, we're gonna get into what's called, readiness, operational readiness, where we start working with our operators on the documentation and procedures, do final test check checkouts. And then once we get approval from from the Department of Energy on that, then we can actually start putting fuel in the reactor and then eventually start it up and go critical.

Speaker 2: Talk to me about the the opportunity for nuclear in space. I know that there's some trade offs around, like, Mars might be less suitable for solar, but that seems very far away. Is there a more near term vision for nuclear in space?

Speaker 8: So just as of two weeks ago, administrator Jared Isaacman at NASA, actually announced that NASA's ignition day, that they wanna fly a nuclear powered spacecraft to the moon, in December 2028.

Speaker 7: Okay. Because,

Speaker 8: you know, they recognize, the immense value of this technology to expand humanity's presence, both, you know, in Earth orbit but but beyond as well. You're absolutely right. So the further you get from from Earth beyond one one AU, solar efficiency actually declines exponentially with with respect to distance. So, you know, you can imagine your solar panels just ballooning in size as you get further and further to make an equivalent amount of power. Yeah. But even beyond that, you know, we believe the market for nuclear power in space will be much larger and and move a lot faster than I think a lot of people think. The overwhelming thing that will drive that is, space is now a war fighting domain. Right? And, you know, as we seek to employ higher powered assets, in Earth orbit, in cislunar space, there's pretty clear physics there that a nuclear power system scales more favorably on a size and weight basis, compared to solar panels. Right? So, you know, you wanna do a 100 kilowatt spacecraft, those solar panels would be, you know, like the size of a football field. Mhmm. You could do a similarly sized nuclear powered spacecraft and actually fit it on a Falcon nine. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, nuclear powered spacecraft, you're fitting on a Falcon nine. That means that the primary stage is still traditional, but then once you get to

Speaker 2: low Earth orbit, the nuclear power is kicking in? Like, how what is what is actually creating thrust with a nuclear powered spacecraft?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So so great question. So there's really two paradigms here. So there's nuclear thermal propulsion. Okay. You can think of that as imagine it like a traditional rocket Yeah. Where, you're circulating your propellant through a nuclear reactor to heat it up and then exhaust it and create thrust. We're not focused on that, so we don't work on that, but there's there's a great history in that technology. What we're more so focused on is nuclear power nuclear electric power and propulsion. And so in NEP, essentially, what that is is you're using a nuclear reactor to create electricity, and then you're powering electric propulsion thrusters. Right? So it's an alternative to solar electric propulsion, but, you know, really, it's about power density. Right? You can have a much larger onboard power source than what you could get from the equivalent

Speaker 2: size and weight of solar panels. How how do you convert electricity to thrust in space? I feel like with a plane, I understand you spin a propeller. Like, that seems pretty intuitive to me. With car, you spin the wheels, so there's traction. But if there's no friction in a vacuum, how are you creating thrust from electricity?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So you're ionizing a propellant and then Okay. Shooting it out of thrusters. And so it's it's typically, electric propulsion is very small amounts of thrust. Right? So, you know, imagine a Starlink satellite, how it would reorient itself. Yeah. Sure. So there's still propellant on board that is

Speaker 2: transferring the mass that's creating the thrust. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Generally, xenon or krypton is what you see. Xenon or krypton. Interesting. Very cool. Zooming out, what what is underpinning just the broader nuclear boom? We've talked to a lot of different nuclear companies. It feels like we were in the real doldrums of nuclear startups and nuclear opportunities. There were a couple sort of false starts a few decades ago and a decade ago, but it really feels like there's a number of companies that are working really well. Like, what is the critical unlock? Is it technology or regulatory or both? What's going on?

Speaker 8: I I think it's really all of the above. I mean, I think it's a confluence of things. So, you know, the president signed a series of executive orders in May that really created this streamlined regulatory path that we're utilizing. Mhmm. One thing I would say is, you know, in the history of our company, regulation has actually never been a key bottleneck for us. It's always been about engineering rigor, getting our safety basis in order, creating the deliverables such that we could argue our safety case empirically, and whenever we've done a great job of that, we've been able to move really swiftly through these approvals. Yeah. But I think what you're also seeing now is there's just a new need for this capability. Right? You know, we had this period in the sixties and seventies where, you know, if you go back in the nineteen sixties, like, r and d funding as a percentage of federal overlays was, like, double digit percentages. Mhmm. You know, we had, like, the central banking era of Paul Volcker where federal funds rates was, like, 20% or higher. We had this, like, austerity period where, actually, what we did is we cut a lot of r and d funding. Nuclear particularly suffered from that. Right? And we never really I would I would make the argument that we did not have a true nuclear private sector at the time when those changes were made, Very different than the approach that the French took where they went all in on nuclear in the same time period because they saw it as a matter of energy sovereignty for them. Right? Then, you know, we had this kinda come back in the in the in the second Bush administration, so George w Bush. That's when the AP 1,000 was developed. And, you know, then what happened is you had fracking rates. So you just had really cheap natural gas that I think really competed with the need for new large scale nuclear. But, you know, now we're in this world where energy is the bottleneck to to to almost everything. Right? Right? We have this huge CapEx build out for artificial intelligence, need to win the AI race. Our ability to do that is limited by energy. Reindustrialization broadly, I would say energy is is is the bottleneck to that. Right? People are not talking enough about if we wanna bring all of these factories back to The US, we wanna start making all of these critical technologies here again. We're gonna need a lot more electricity to do that. So that's part of it. And then what we do, you know, really focused on national security, we wanna be a multiproduct company. Like, one day, we wanna put nuclear power on the grid. We wanna put it space. You know, we wanna do small reactors on military bases, but we're really starting there. And, you know, the national security matter that I think really motivates this new need for energy resilience is increasingly the assets that we rely on to project power on the other side of the world to generate war fighting effects. They're here on our on our installations in the homeland, and, they depend on the commercial grid or they depend on commercial civilian diesel supply chains. And we now have adversaries. I mean, this is relatively new in the last couple years. We now have adversaries that are totally capable of disrupting both of those. Yeah. And, you know, nuclear power, it's the highest capacity factor form of energy that we know of when it you know, that that we have today when it's mature. And our approach to this is you put multiple small reactors together in a modular bank of systems, a modular power plant, so that you can get really, really high uptime. Right? You can refuel offline. You have redundancies.

Speaker 1: That's by far the best way to do that. Yeah. What what can the American nuclear energy learn from, nuclear energy diffusion in China over the last, call it, thirty years?

Speaker 8: I think there's a lot of answers to that question. I think, you know, to to me, the particular one is, the benefit of sustained coordinated national willpower. Right? I think, you know, we're finally in an era where we're gonna have this in this country when it comes to nuclear power. Like, private capital is aligned on this, from everything from venture capital up to the banks. This is now a bipartisan issue. Right? So even if you go back in time three years ago, like, people thought we were crazy when we were trying to start this company because, you know, nuclear was very much out of the zeitgeist at the time. But from where we sit today, you know, I'm on the hill three to four days a month. If don't I do my homework ahead of time, it's hard for me to even tell you if I'm talking to a democrat or republican because they all want the same things. Right? Reindustrialization, clean energy, American jobs, high skilled labor force, national security, all of it aligns in that way.

Speaker 1: That's amazing to hear. Little white pill