Actinide becomes the first startup to enrich uranium, producing HALEU for next-gen nuclear reactors out of Dallas

Speaker 2: Our next guests are from Actonide. They are the first startup to produce Haylou, the high

Speaker 3: enriched Finally.

Speaker 1: High. What is it? What does HALEU stand for? I know

Speaker 2: it's enriched uranium, but break it down for us. Introduce yourselves. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 5: Hey, guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. So nice to you to have us. Huge fans of the show. Have me tell you a little bit about HALO and what we're Yeah. Doing here at So you hit the nail right on the head. We were indeed the first startup in history to enrich uranium and In produce terms of what HALO is, it's not something that you need to really worry too much about. Stands for high ass HALO in the Now

Speaker 3: I'm worried

Speaker 1: about it.

Speaker 2: Now I'm I'm worried about worried it. About it.

Speaker 1: It's the it's the next gen fuel for next gen reactors. Okay.

Speaker 5: And it's something that the primary energy says that you cannot get presently in The United States. There's no supply. Yeah. Right now

Speaker 2: It's mostly coming from, like, decommissioned nuclear, like, nuclear submarines or something like that. Like, they sort of refine it down, like reuse what we have, basically.

Speaker 8: You're exactly right. Or they get

Speaker 2: it from Russia. Yeah. Russia. Not good. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5: And that's something that we're aiming to change here in Dallas, Texas. Okay.

Speaker 1: There's a huge feed by our team. Yeah. Small team. Playing that nation states have struggled with and failed at and we're

Speaker 5: doing it here in Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So take us through the process. Is it big centrifuge? What what what's the equipment that's involved in the process?

Speaker 8: So we have a machine called the Calutron, which was originally invented by Nobel laureates for the Manhattan Project. So they've already delivered to our country once before. But they were sort of decommissioned because they're not very energy efficient. Very large magnets. Now magnets don't consume power if they're superconducting for instance. And so it's very rare in the engineering fields that you'll find the major problem can actually go to zero. So yeah, we stand on the shoulders of giants in that way.

Speaker 2: So you can like use the same machine but just redesign a piece of it to be more efficient? Is that what's going on?

Speaker 8: More or less. It's the exact same principle though. I mean it's besides the centrifuge, the only thing that's been proven at scale.

Speaker 2: Cool. Take us through like the history. How did you get here? Why nuclear? What's the what's the lineage of the company?

Speaker 8: It's it's been a long time coming. It's been an interest of mine for a long time. When I first heard about the problem of how do you atomically separate things, I I couldn't believe that it hadn't been solved. And initially, I thought this would be an easy problem to work on. And so, I've been humbled since then many times. As you can imagine

Speaker 3: What's what's the phrase we don't do things because they're hard? We do them because we thought they would be easy? Yeah.

Speaker 8: I couldn't agree more with that. So time and time again, go, okay. Finally understand it. And then no. Right? Yeah. So it's been a long time coming. You know, there's a lot of research that has to go into this. This is not a very approachable field. A lot of things are classified, and you have to derive it for yourself.

Speaker 1: Sure. There's been

Speaker 9: a lot of smart people who've had a

Speaker 8: lot of interesting ideas about this from the centrifuge to laser, Calytron, you name it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Where where is the the limit on classification? Because a lot of the you mentioned, like, rederiving it yourself. A lot of the AI models are able to rederive cybersecurity exploits, are now the talk of the town. But are AI models giving you refusals in your work, or are they being helpful because they know that the control point is actually separate and it's not a risk to educate someone about how to build a nuclear product because at a certain point they're going to have to go to reality and go and get a particular material that is controlled?

Speaker 8: You know, it's such a fascinating question. I I don't use a whole lot of AI. Mhmm. So I don't get a whole lot of refusals. I usually for finding vendors and and suppliers and things

Speaker 2: like that.

Speaker 8: But, you know, I AI probably wouldn't be super useful for a task like this because it it touches on some pretty obscure areas of, like, you're building a particle accelerator. So sort of questions of something called more. I'd be curious to see how far it gets along with it, but I I certainly don't think it it presents a proliferation concern.

Speaker 5: We're also pretty wary regarding kind of where sort of information within our business goes to. Sure. And so we have a lot of things that are still frankly analog or air gapped regarding any sort of things that are proprietary or trade secret.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, it's not like the company's nuclear launch codes and and and cybersecurity is more about intellectual property. Correct?

Speaker 8: Yes. Okay. Because that's related. Right. Right. And we look forward to working with the appropriate regulators for us to scale up HALO production. You know, it's a smidge under highly enriched, and so you have to be in a category two facility. And but the separation technology itself is, you know, 80 years old. And so there's definitely some a lot of know how. Yeah. But the principle's overt.

Speaker 2: What's the biz dev go to market side of the business? Are you already inking contracts with the I mean, there's so many new nuclear reactor startups that

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Would probably sign up to buy HALEU if you were able to produce at a certain scale. What what's the status there?

Speaker 5: Absolutely. So we actually are kind of agnostic with the materials that we make. Generally, we refine atoms, and some of the first refined atoms that we made were for the medical industry. Mhmm. They go for about $30,000 per gram, which is like a paper clip sort of material for you patriots out there. And we delivered that to Oclo Isotopes. We've had a few commercial deliveries to them. And, you know, in terms of the HALEU side of things, we are we've been in stealth for quite some time. And so we kind of blew up Twitter with our announcement of coming out of stealth and some of the, you know, recent developments here, and we have a lot of those biz dev talks ongoing this week and beyond to go ahead and ink some deals. Obviously, there's a big sort of gap between doing it once and being able to scale it up on both the technological and regulatory fronts, and we look forward to working with the right partners and regulatory bodies to make sure that that gives an methodical and expedient fashion.

Speaker 2: You self funded this company at some point. Can you tell us about the journey to set yourself up for there? What that was like? What the motivation was?

Speaker 5: Yeah. That's true. I did put in over a million dollars of my own money. You know, when Robert and I first met, I had a background in finance and software. And he really kind of gave me a gut punch because he told me that he was

Speaker 1: pretty upset with so many

Speaker 5: brilliant engineers to go into finance and software. Sure. Hey, I turned a buck from it. Yeah. And that they weren't doing hard engineering problems.

Speaker 1: So I asked him, well, are you doing?

Speaker 5: And he said, I'm working on what I think is the hardest, you know, sort of unsolved problem in humanity. Was like, alright, like what's that about? And he told me he was doing sort of isotope separation. He showed me what he was working on. I got super infatuated with the problem. I truly agree that this is indeed humanity's largest unsolved problem. If you look at history, you got the stone age, bronze age, iron age, the silicon age. We were promised the atomic age, and it's something that we we we deserve. We're not playing with a full deck of materials. And so I began investing my own money and got to a spot where it was beyond r and d. We brought on a seed round and, you know, here we are doing commercial deliveries and scaling into different markets.

Speaker 2: That's fantastic. Well, congratulations and Yeah. Really impressive. For coming on show.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Great to meet you guys. Come back

Speaker 2: on soon. Goodbye.

Speaker 3: And be safe.

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating because it's workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Billy Thalheimer returning to the show with Regent. Billy, how are you doing?