Uncapped #11 | Jordan Bramble from Antares

[00:00] It's really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors between roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three cents in the U.S. on the grid. Wow. All right. Really excited to have this conversation with Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares. Jordan, thanks a ton for doing this conversation with me today. Thank you for having me. Yeah. We're going to talk all about nuclear today. Maybe before we get into it, could you give me a little overview of the nuclear market, [00:30] us, you know, what's happened over previous decades and kind of catch us up to speed on where we are today. Let's start from the beginning. So, um, yeah. [00:37] The first... [00:39] artificial human-made nuclear reactor ever was the Chicago Pile. So 1942, I think it was. They actually built it at the University of Chicago underneath of the football field, [00:50] So, you know, right in the city in the middle of Chicago. And the idea was you stacked something like 45,000 graphite blocks in order to moderate neutrons. I want to say it was like 50 tons of natural uranium. [01:03] in order to sustain a critical reaction. And they actually only produced like a half watt of power, but that was the first, you know, [01:10] first kind of academic research reactor ever built. Um, and the motivation behind it was, was really, um, [01:17] the Manhattan Project was going on, right? So we were exploring nuclear fission for the development of weapons, but then later, actually for the production of [01:25] plutonium because plutonium production is a byproduct of nuclear fission, uranium fission. So built a couple of reactors after that. And, you know, by 1945, 45, 47, so we're still in the 40s, we had plutonium producing reactors, both at Savannah River and at the Hannaford site in Washington, all to support the weapons program. And then in parallel, we had plutonium producing

[01:48] And a naval officer by the name of Hyman Rickover started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. And I also want to say 1945. So, you know, all these things are happening really fast at this point. He eventually became Admiral Rickover and is kind of the father of the nuclear navy. You know, 1952, we had the first nuclear submarine. So the Nautilus, which was a water-cooled reactor. And then in parallel to that, they built the Sea Wolf, which was a sodium-cooled reactor. [02:19] Certainly first naval application. We'll actually get into it. The first kind of power-producing, civilian power-producing reactor was actually a spinoff from a naval reactor core that they didn't end up using. It was the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania. They built it in like 18 months. It's just kind of a spinoff from the nuclear Navy programs. It's actually only a 60-megawatt reactor. Not long after that, we got the Yankee Row in Massachusetts, which I want to say is like 100 megawatts, 120 megawatts, something like that. [02:48] significantly smaller than what we... [02:51] What we build today, I imagine at some point, talk about small modular reactors. You know, one thing I would highlight is actually the kind of small concept is actually how we originally built reactors when we first started doing it. So the Sea Wolf and the Nautilus both ran for something like five years. The Navy eventually settled on the water-cooled reactor designs. And, you know, in part for just pragmatic reasons, they were easier to build. It was easier to conduct maintenance on. You know, also sodium, like, reacts violently with air and water. And submarines go underwater.

[03:21] So there's safety considerations as well. But maybe one of the things, kind of takeaways of all of this is the history of atomic energy actually came out of government-led technology. [03:32] sort of military focused programs. And that's where the commercial sector kind of originated from. So in parallel to all of this, you know, sort of mid 50s going into the 60s, the Air Force and NASA also had their own nuclear program. So at the Nevada test site, [03:50] which is where we test or historically tested our nuclear weapons. We had the NERVA program, which was a nuclear thermal rocket. So you circulate liquid hydrogen through a nuclear reactor and exhaust it out the back of a rocket engine. And it's like twice as propellant efficient as a chemical rocket. So you could get to Mars in half the time. We were actually building this stuff and testing it in the desert in the 50s, going through the 60s. [04:20] and Pluto, which were nuclear-powered jet engines. The Air Force actually looked at developing a nuclear-powered airplane, which could basically stay in the air indefinitely. [04:33] Did that area build? Uh, [04:35] Ground tested. And we also there are examples where we flew airplanes with operating nuclear reactors on them to like. [04:44] you know, shield the pilots and just kind of test all of that. So there's some history there, but I don't think an actual nuclear-powered airplane has ever flown, I'm pretty sure. Going into the early 60s, so we had the SNAP program, which produced a reactor called the SNAP-10A, which,

[05:00] which in 1965 was actually launched into space and is still up there to this day. So we as Americans publicly only ever launched one space reactor. The Soviets did something like 37, 38, 39, even going all the way into the late 80s, early 90s, where they would put... [05:18] fission reactors in orbit [05:21] in very low earth orbit because they have lower drag than solar panels. Um, and they would do, I believe it was, it was, it was radar either for, um, [05:30] detecting missiles or tracking ships. [05:34] the Rorsat satellites. You know, going back to what I was saying earlier, really the, you know, the pressurized water reactor designs that, that, [05:42] ultimately ended up being commercialized, originated out of the naval programs. It's kind of generally what we have on the grid today, the light water reactors and the PWRs. It was really around the 1970s that... [05:54] things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors between roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three cents in the US on the grid. Wow. BWXT, the company that produced, I guess, all or the majority of those nuclear reactors for the Navy, when did that get going? Was that around the same time? So BWXT primarily fabricates the fuel and other components of the reactors. And the reactors [06:24] to vary either between [06:26] Westinghouse and General Electric that makes those.

[06:32] But, you know, I want to say by the 50s or 60s, those – [06:37] Those vendors were kind of baked in into those programs, and they've always sort of [06:40] split back and forth who's making the reactors. And those companies are obviously much older. Yeah. Like 100 years old. General Electric may even be like 120 years old or something like that. Yeah. And so we had this period where we're building a ton. Since then, we've slowed down wildly, obviously. What was the climate? Why in your telling of the history, why did that happen? There's a lot of different reasons that people will cite. And I almost think it's [07:10] at the same time. So one, we had, we had a lot of people [07:16] A couple of safety incidents. So we didn't have a Department of Energy. We actually had the Atomic Energy Commission. So what is now the DOE, all they did was nuclear energy. Mm-hmm. [07:29] And they were, you know, for most of their existence, actually, all of these programs that I cited, they were involved. Right. So they were both. [07:37] the regulator and the builder at the same time. Eventually, Congress decided that's probably not the best from a safety perspective. And then the AEC became the Department of Energy. And then they created a congressionally, an independent agency, the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to have regulatory oversight over nuclear energy development. At the same time, [07:56] that we were getting a new regulator, we were also losing demand for nuclear. So historically, you know, nuclear had kind of been catalyzed by the government, by government funding,

[08:07] And if you go back in time, [08:09] to the 1960s, 1950s, like... [08:13] R&D spend [08:15] as like an overlay of the entire federal budget was something like, you know, it would fluctuate between 12 and 15 percent or something like that. [08:22] Today, it's probably around 3%. And those cuts really came in the early 1970s. And it was, in some ways, it's like 1971, we went off the gold standard, [08:33] Not long after that, we had the, or really at the same time, we had the Iran energy crisis, the hostage crisis. Interest rates were skyrocketing. Service payments on the federal debt went up. And so this was like just budget austerity, right? So we sometimes talk about how did we do all these things in the 50s and 60s? Well, if you adjust what we spent on nuclear thermal rockets back then to today's dollars, it would have been like $10 billion in today's dollars. We just, we're not... [09:00] doing large government-led programs of that scale anymore. In fact, the naval nuclear program as it exists today, I would almost view as [09:09] a little bit of a remnant of that era where it's tens of billions of dollars earmarked for those programs. They have dedicated nuclear energy labs where we have National Lab employees that are solely focused on serving the Navy. Oak Ridge and Idaho National Lab both also have a dedicated workforce focused on naval reactors. They come up with the designs in-house, then they bring in their vendors. And it's like billions of dollars to make these. It's kind of unlike the broader

[09:39] venture capital into this so that private capital is sharing some of the cost of tech maturation with the taxpayer. That's happening for the first time in nuclear now. I would be hesitant to say that startup nuclear is going to look just like SpaceX, where you've got these companies building rockets. It's a very different technological development arc. But the starting point is very similar, right? Where we had the Apollo program [10:08] In space, just like we did with the Manhattan Project, largely government-led, right? Lots of taxpayer dollars that go into this. And then, you know, for various reasons, we just stopped doing it, right? And so we stagnated in our ability to send tonnage to orbit, to send people to space. And it took decades for SpaceX to come along and finally recatalyze that, right? Largely funded by private capital. I've seen... [10:30] a lot of people have talked about regulation and nuclear. They've talked about, um, [10:36] kind of public sentiment. [10:37] Right. Like environmentalists killed nuclear. But I've seen very few people really comment on the kind of financial changes that we went through in the 70s. Yeah. And how we went from being something that was government led to not really having a true private sector to to to kind of carry this. Right. Yeah. I want to get into the technological arc that we're kind of on, but maybe right before that. [10:57] Now fast forward to today. It does feel like there's now like a much... [11:01] bigger drive for nuclear. You hear it in the sentiment, the ether a lot. You see it in how venture is operating now. What's the lay of the land at the moment in terms of what the appetite is for investment from the public sector, both in terms of the demand for it and the willingness to fund these efforts and things? Yeah, I would say we're seeing

[11:25] maybe three different drivers of this. One is, [11:29] has kind of arisen more out of the like, what is going to be our solution to climate change? I think we've, as a society, we've gone far enough down that path that we've realized net zero is probably not possible without significantly more nuclear energy. [11:43] Right. Probably fusion. [11:45] or fission but well fission is here today right but do we need fusion to get there or even fission has a path to get us to that kind of environmental impact oh we can certainly do it with just fission right um i mean fission is carbon-free power can do it yeah the benefit of fusion is uh we'll set aside whether i agree with it or not but the claimed benefits of of fusion are um you can have a neutronic uh fusion reactions so um [12:12] You know, a lot of the problems that you get from nuclear fission, like how do you shield against radiation? [12:18] What do you do with the waste products? You don't have as much of that in fusion, right? The problem with fusion is that it's perpetually 30 years away and you're working with novel materials in order to withstand the temperatures. And those are kind of all unsolved technical problems that exist, right? [12:36] You know, the kind of answer to climate change is sort of the first part of that. The second one is... [12:42] You know, just growth. Right. So if you look if you look at like GDP per capita historically, it correlates directly with GDP. [12:52] many kilowatt hours of energy we're able to consume per capita. And we as Americans today actually consume less energy per capita than our grandparents did. So we've gotten more efficient, but we actually haven't really been able to drive new progress through unlocking new things with energy. And

[13:10] You know, some would say we've picked all of the low hanging fruit, but like I would disagree with that. [13:15] You know, like Peter Thiel has spoken a lot about this. We actually travel slower on airplanes than we did in the 1970s. Like we used to have supersonic travel. Now we don't. Right. So, you know, nuclear energy in many ways is another example of that. Like what we're seeing right now is an artificial intelligence. There's this new demand for infrastructure. We're going to need, you know, this large scale data center built out throughout the US. And the fundamental question is, how are we going to power it? Are we really going to build out all of this transmission? [13:45] to support that level of infrastructure. So people are looking at nuclear again, right? And now you're seeing companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, Google, [13:52] They all have internal programs focused on, you know, how are they going to partner with the advanced nuclear industry and buy and deploy these reactors? And then the third thing. [14:01] maybe driver, I would say is... [14:03] National security. So when the Cold War ended, we also went through this arc of, you know, cutting back federal programs. So when Clinton was president, you know, really cut back a lot of defense spending from where it was historically. And nuclear was actually particularly affected by that. And then we ended up in the war on terror where, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, [14:25] like energy resilience, uh, was just not really a focus, right? We'd like fly diesel, [14:31] around on helicopters and stuff and, you know, just kind of do whatever it would take. But now, you know, we've reshifted our orientation where China is kind of the pacing factor for the war in the future. And it's forcing us to think a lot about energy resilience here in the homeland.

[14:47] So like the way we would conduct operations or the way we would defend this country, most of the assets for that are here inside of the U.S. And so, you know, an example I'll give is like our nuclear weapons, right? The ICBM silos were built in the 70s. [15:02] We didn't have the internet back then. So like planning for a cyber attack on the civilian grid wasn't really a thing that you had to plan for. Now you do, you know. [15:09] Oliver. [15:10] Targeting and command and control, those run on, you know, compute facilities that also have to be able to operate even if there is no commercial power. Yeah. You know, Vandenberg, Air Force Base. [15:20] We host our ground-based interceptors there, which is how we would defend against incoming missile attacks. Same thing. [15:26] That's also where national security space launch takes place. We launch things to space there. We need to be able to do that. Even in times of whether it's a natural disaster or a cyber attack or something, you need that mission assurance. [15:41] You know, broadly, the DOD has started to think a lot more about energy resilience. You know, one of the things I would highlight about that as it pertains to nuclear is like the DOD is spending dollars, dollars, dollars. [15:52] on supporting tech maturation in this industry today. [15:55] right? Which you aren't really seeing yet from some of these other markets. So there's a lot of hype about the data center nuclear opportunity. I think it's a great opportunity, but they're not really spending real money yet, right? Whereas the DoD is. So yeah, I would say that's, you know, broadly what's driving. And actually I would add a fourth to that, which is, so I mentioned space nuclear earlier and how we did some of it in the 60s. We are seeing a lot of activity in

[16:25] is the weaponization of space. So we started the Space Force in 2018. It's now 2025. We went from... [16:32] Like the kind of first... [16:34] iteration of the Space Force was we're going to send a lot of mass to orbit so that like, [16:40] If our adversaries... [16:43] take out our critical assets on orbit. We can reconstitute. We've got redundancy. We've got survivability in numbers. And now it's very much moved to like, you can publicly talk about putting weapons systems in space. It's funny because when Space Force was announced, I remember like a lot of people kind of, I feel at least my memory of it is people kind of made fun of it. Now it seems obviously important, not that many years later. Yeah. There were all sorts of memes and stuff. Yeah. If you go back to 2018 to 2020, what was one of the best like federal government decisions [17:13] Space Force was probably one of them, if not the best one. Space is absolutely going to become... [17:19] a war fighting domain, right? Like if we went to war with another great power, the first thing they would do to us and one of the things we would try to do to them is... [17:27] you know, we do targeting from space, right? We detect incoming missiles from space, communications, GPS, everything that you rely on to fight a war is in space now, right? And so you would want to be able to take that out. Doing that by launching missiles from the ground is bad, creates debris fields, which can disrupt the commercial sector in space. It's also really expensive. You want to be able to drive down the cost of that and do it in maybe a way that has less long-term lasting impacts, right? And so that means increasingly being able to generate those

[17:57] Thanks. [17:58] from orbit in orbit. You're now seeing General Whiting and General Saltzman stand up publicly and speak at conferences and say, you know, [18:06] we need offensive capabilities in space. We need space fires, you know, weapons in space. And they even specifically say non-kinetic effects. So things like lasers, high powered microwaves, particle beams. Just zapping each other in space, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, physics will tell us that once we are doing that, the way that, [18:27] you gain a competitive edge, [18:30] is to have more powerful beams, right? And the way you do that is you generate more power. Do they need to be more powerful than the ability? Like once you can fry a satellite, like why do you need to get more powerful at some point? You can engage over longer distances. Got it. Right. How far can these things go? [18:44] In space, like thousands of miles kind of thing. [18:48] yeah, about a thousand kilometers. Um, so, you know, depending on how much power you're generating and the size of the spacecraft and, um, [18:56] 10 kilometers up to 1,000 kilometers. [18:58] So, and actually the president signed an executive order on – [19:03] At the time, it was called Iron Dome for America. Now it's called Golden Dome. So it's sort of this return to space. Yeah. Well, I think it's probably land, space, all the love, right? And we should actually get some guidance on what that architecture is going to look like in the coming months or so. But one of the things that calls out in that executive order is space-based intercept.

[19:33] use things like particle beams or lasers in space to shoot down the reentry vehicles from ICBMs, right? So you disable them. You could make nuclear weapons obsolete. A lot of that same technology that was, you know, kind of, it was infeasible in the 80s because we didn't have the launch capability, the, the, the, um, [19:51] you know, directed energy itself was too immature back then. Um, um, [19:55] If you shrink some of that down, [19:59] You know, by like an order of magnitude by a factor of 10, you know, it could be viable in the near term as like an ASAT and anti-satellite capability. [20:06] Right. So you can talk about these things now. The military is starting to speak publicly about them. [20:12] it becomes a no-brainer that you would want a nuclear power source to scale this technology up. And actually, again, if you look back at the history of it in the eighties, the vision was always kind of space reactors would be used to power these systems because, um, [20:25] If you look at a solar-powered system, how does mass scale against kilowatts of power generated? It's like a linear relationship with a solar-powered system. It's sublinear with nuclear. So, you know, as you get to like around 100... [20:40] 75 to 100 kilowatts or so, you end up with a spacecraft that's much more mass inefficient, or much more mass efficient than doing it with solar. We just start to get huge solar panels, basically. Yeah, the International Space Station is about 100 kilowatts, and it's like the size of a football field. Wow. Yeah, and we had to construct it on orbit, right? Can you talk a little bit about the technology of small modular reactors? Just like, you know, this is obviously what you're building, but can you give us a little

[21:10] size of power delivery is? What's the technology going into them? What needs to happen from here to make this sort of feasible repeatedly? Yeah, maybe I'll take it back to the history again. So one thing I mentioned in the beginning is, so you'll hear different definitions from different people on what is a small modular reactor. Maybe we'll just kind of say, [21:30] Sub 100 megawatts and below is an SMR. 100 megawatts and below? Yeah. And, you know, what we're doing, we like to refer to it as a microreactor, which, again, there's different definitions from different people. Some people will say, like, below 20 megawatts is a microreactor. Some people will say below 10 megawatts is a microreactor. You know, you're seeing people develop it, you know, single digit megawatts now. We're actually a kilowatt scale system. So targeting between 200 and 300 kilowatts. Which is the equivalent of that, you know, 100. [22:00] kilowatts. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nuclear energy is one of the most power dense forms of energy that, you know, known to man, right, that we have available to us. And this thing's how big, just to put it in contrast to the football field? You could fit it on a truck bed, an 18-wheeler truck bed. Yeah. So about the size of a sedan. So it's a truck bed versus... [22:19] Two to three football fields of solar. Yeah. For space, we would actually be developing something even smaller than that. Solar is something like 60 acres of land... [22:28] Per... [22:29] per megawatt, if I recall correctly, it's a micro reactor. You could do something similar in like an acre to a half an acre. You know, going back to the original question on like SMRs. So, you [22:39] You know, the basic idea is...

[22:42] in order to drive down the cost of electricity and make it competitive, um, [22:47] you know, what we did in sort of the first arc of [22:51] um like grid scale deployment of nuclear was we just made these plants bigger and bigger right so the ap1000 is a gigawatt scale plant what's kind of plagued the industry and so this sort of goes back to like what killed nuclear originally i would argue that you know we had like a multi-decade loss of demand which really killed a lot of the workforce and you know we lost the ability to to do these things and we've never had enough demand sense to do things in quick enough succession that like you can cultivate the workforce needed to do them efficiently so [23:21] construction takes two to three times as long as it's originally planned to be. If you look at grid-scale nuclear, like [23:27] Financing costs and the construction costs end up being like the vast majority of the total plant costs. Right. So as you're selling electricity, like really what you're doing is paying up, paying down that upfront CapEx. So. [23:40] How do you solve this problem? [23:42] One idea is you make these systems much smaller such that they can just be fabricated in a factory and then sent out to the site with minimal site prep and construction. So that's generally the idea around SMRs. I would say with the larger SMRs, it turns out that they're generally not all that different than SMRs. [24:01] like you're still end up doing a construction project. And so micro reactors are sort of a recognition, but no, let's make them even smaller such that they can be truly factory manufacturable, like the way we make cars, right? There are some people that, you know, would maybe make the claim that making reactors in that way is actually going to make them cost competitive against grid scale nuclear. It's really heavily dependent on the fuel cycle because in a grid scale reactor, the fuel cost is like a single digit percentage for

[24:26] of the total plant cost. In a microreactor, it's probably more like 40% to 50% of the total cost. So we're not really sold... [24:34] Us at Antares, we're not really sold on, you know, you can do micro reactors at like 10 cents a kilowatt hour anytime soon. But what we're convicted about is like there's actually a very, very large market for expensive power. Yeah. To do things that, you know, you can only do with nuclear. Right. And then there's all these factors where it's valuable that are not just about being cheap. Yep. [24:55] Exactly. And that's really what we've chosen to focus on as a business. Nuclear really struggles to compete in commodity markets. And also, I tend to think, this is just my philosophy, but spending a lot of capital to develop a product, then to turn around and sell it as a commodity is just not really an exciting business anyways. [25:15] right so what we've done is we've really tried to say you know what are the use cases what are the opportunities where [25:21] Um, [25:22] there's some mission effect, some outcome that's really valuable. [25:26] you know, to the end payer, and you can only do it with nuclear, right? And you will pay a premium to have that. And that's really been our focus. And, you know, commercial applications, you know, we're a dual use company, there's commercial applications, but in the near term, we're really excited about military and DOD nuclear, both earth and space. You know, what we found by and large, when we were getting started is a lot of the mission critical facilities or critical assets

[25:56] need megawatts of power, but it's distributed in some way. And so you would actually benefit from having multiple hundreds of kilowatt systems deployed on an installation, generating power close to the point of need. You know, it's very unlike what a lot of the other [26:09] sort of commercial or other developers that came before us are focused on, right? The use cases that we're most excited about, broadly what I'll say is a lot of it is missile defense related. So, you know, I think I mentioned earlier, like Vandenberg, you know, we have our ground-based intercept silos. Those need to be able to launch regardless of whether there's commercial power or not. Right. [26:31] our missile warning radars. So we have the long range radar sites that dot the Arctic. And Arctic, this way you don't have to bring diesel up and down all the time. Exactly. And you even look at civilian communities in those regions. Many of them rely on diesel and they pay like 60 to 80 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. You can definitely do micro reactors that are competitive with that. So it's like, even though it's premium power, it actually is competitive with the commercial markets and some of those environments. [27:01] different assets as we could find in the DoD, there's really an opportunity to build like thousands of these one day. That's the scale of what's out there. [27:11] And then, you know, you add in space and other opportunities as well where, you know, [27:14] We kind of hit on it earlier, right? If you want to power a 100-kilowatt laser or something like that on orbit, nuclear is really the best technology that you have to do it. In the word SMR, there's modular. I'm curious about what are the breakpoints of the technology? The company that makes something that does 100 kilowatts, you can do 200, 300. Where are the moments where you switch over and say a whole different architecture is best when you get to

[27:44] delivery? It does depend on the design itself. So in our case, we're a heat pipe cooled design. [27:50] And I would argue it is single-handedly the best technology for... [27:56] very small reactor designs like ours. The best coolant technology. Can you share what that is? The heat pipe? Yeah. So a heat pipe, they were actually invented in, I want to say, 1958. [28:06] Maybe it was the early 60s, but [28:08] They were actually invented at Los Alamos National Lab specifically for space nuclear. So the idea is it's a pipe with a vapor chamber and then in the inner lining of the pipe, there's like a wick structure and there's a working fluid in it. So in our case, it's sodium. Reactor heats up. [28:27] Sodium vaporizes, which causes it to travel down the pipe and move heat as it does so. When it gets to the cool end of the pipe, it condenses again and capillary forces. So surface tension in the wick actually brings it back. And that cycle just repeats and the pipe gets to one consistent temperature and you're just relying on phase change to move heat. So there's no pumping. There's kind of no active mechanism to do that. It's like a fascinatingly simple technology, yet the physics is complicated. [28:57] thing I think is really cool is despite being invented for space nuclear, there's copper water heat pipes in your laptop. They're in our smartphone. It's like a ubiquitous technology. [29:08] Heat pipes are being used in radiators on satellites in space. It's kind of started from nuclear and then branched out into many different applications. But another thing that

[29:21] you know, we build them ourselves and test them ourselves. And it's fast and iterative. It's very unlike, you know, going out and having to design a new turbo pump every time you want to change something in your design. So it allows us to iterate much faster on electrically heated prototypes. You know, the issue with them is as you scale these designs up, you end up with just a lot of metal in your [29:41] core that eats neutrons and it just becomes less efficient. So the reactor size just kind of explodes as you go to larger sizes. And so you typically want to move to another coolant. So different reactor designs have a different degree of scalability in themselves. But what we can do is we can actually pair these systems up into a bank of systems as well. [30:03] So if you needed a couple megawatts of power, [30:07] you know, [30:08] we can... [30:09] Put. [30:09] you know, let's call it three to six of them together, right? In a bank. Those are kind of the options that you have. Cool. Yeah. [30:16] So as you think about like selling to defense, I'm curious what you've learned, what goes into this. You know, obviously this is like a very high area right now. Yeah. Probably second after AI is like defense and American dynamism. And obviously the way that you need to work both with the product you're building and who the customer is, it's very different than like building a SaaS app and selling it to a SaaS customer. You know, so like what what have you sort of experienced so far and what does it take to sort of work with like the DoD? [30:46] apps because I actually do think [30:49] There is... [30:50] an opportunity to bring more product-style thinking that exists in SaaS to hard tech. So one of the things that we found to be very successful is we don't just come in and sell a box of power and try to get someone to figure out what to do with it. We actually invested a lot of upfront effort with many of the folks we work with in the military in understanding what problem that they're trying to solve in the first place. We actually started doing this before we even had a reactor design.

[31:18] Right. Um, which is hard by the way, because like, how do you get people to talk to you when you don't have a technology yet, but like you also want to build the right technology for them in the first place. For us, that was kind of like an iterative, like credibility building exercise where like, [31:31] You start out, you ask some questions, and then you come back with something. And then over time, people get comfortable with you where they can chart your progress. So I would just say... [31:40] obsessing over the problem, the end user is extremely important. You know, working backwards from like what mission effect is trying to be created here. The hard part about selling to defense is [31:51] Like there is no like customer persona, right? There literally is not one. There's like an end user who is a beneficiary of your business. [32:00] product, they may either benefit from it or use it in some way, but they're not the person that buys it. Someone else is going to be responsible for buying it. And then there's probably people in the Pentagon that have some kind of policy or regulatory oversight, or they serve some planning function that decide when those budgets exist for ultimately an office to be able to buy it. And then Congress has a say in that too. And so a lot of what you do is actually you connect the dots. [32:25] Right. Which there's kind of different philosophies on defense tech. One is all of that is really, really hard. [32:32] So rather than like have to do all of that, what you do is you just, you know, you look at the budget justification books that get published every year and there's kind of a three year budget forecast in there. And you just look at what is the DoD already going to be spending money on and, you know, which of those programs do you think have lasting effect? And you just go build something that you can sell to one of those. Right. There's a lot less market risk in doing that. Problem, though, is.

[32:58] Once those markets are baked, there's like 50 other companies that are trying to do the same thing. And I tend to think if you look at like the history of [33:05] of companies that have been really awesome, like venture returns, they were doing something transformational. [33:12] Right. Like that's the only like that's the only predictable way to win is you just do something absolutely transformational. Yeah. So I tend to think the way to do defense tech is you definitely don't just like show up with the best product in the world and say, you know, how do we spend years getting someone to buy this? Because that doesn't work. But rather you develop an information edge where you have some insight into how the budgets are going to evolve in years to come. And then you can be developing a product before the before the market is really there. Right. [33:42] sort of like starts with like a mission that they're trying to accomplish and then you're working backwards. Does that lead to you naturally building multiple products over time? [33:51] I think you really have to. Yeah. I actually think this is really important in defense tech because one way to think about a program office in the DOD is like you just think of it like... [34:03] like sales channels. There's a lot of work that goes into getting your foot in the door. But once you've established a relationship, you know, they could be 10, 20, 30 year relationships that you're compounding on top of. [34:14] Right. It's actually like... [34:16] high value and smart to find a way to get your foot in the door, start solving a problem for them. Yeah. And then figuring out what the synergies are between that and other things that you're doing. That's what it seems like because so much of the work is not just about this product at this time. It's about partnering with them to like really help them solve some large set of problems, probably around some center. Yep, exactly. Why do you think LA has become such a hub for hard tech? Is it related to this at all where there's, you know, some deep set of learnings and relationships

[34:46] people or is it an ethos or like what's happening that's making LA seem to become, you know, such a hotbed for hard tech companies right now? I would say it's, it's kind of all of the above. [34:57] A lot of people will say SpaceX is there and you've got spinoffs from SpaceX. But I would say actually go back further. Like, why was SpaceX there? The Primes. Well, that. But – [35:08] you know, it's Hughes Aircraft was started there, right? The South Bay of LA has just always sort of been a hub of Boeing, right? Always been a hub of aerospace and defense. The workforce is already there, right? It's like one of the, you know, if you look for like a machinist welding workforce, it's like one of the largest in the country in the South Bay of LA. The availability of industrial real estate that's zoned for manufacturing. It's one of the best places in the country, [35:34] A lot of people don't think that when they think LA, but like, it's just, and it's been that way since, since, you know, the Cold War, the end of World War II. You've got the port of Long Beach there, right? So SpaceX and other companies are making rockets. They're sending them down to the port. They go through the Panama Canal and then they make it to the Cape. You know, it's workforce. It's industrial real estate. It's, you know, some of the other just... [35:55] kind of key advantages that the city has, right? I think if you really studied it, like probably even like the roadways and the interstate highways there are just like better for trucking than like doing it in San Francisco, for instance, right? You know, I think there's some really interesting history in LA, even as it pertains to nuclear. So we talked about the NERVA programs, the nuclear thermal rockets. The rockets were actually built by

[36:17] So Westinghouse made the reactors, but Aerojet made the rockets at the Azusa plant. [36:23] you know, kind of in the LA suburbs and then sent them out to the Nevada test site. I also mentioned SNAP-10A, the reactor that went to space that was actually built in the Santa Susana Hills. And they did other ground tested reactors there too. We didn't really get into this, but the army actually had a nuclear power program that ran a [36:41] from like the 50s into the early 70s. And it was another one that was kind of cut when we had budget austerity. One of the things they prototyped was a potential mobile reactor called the ML-1 [36:54] It was brought to Idaho National Lab, but either the reactor or at least a significant amount of the componentry was also built by Aerojet at the Azusa plant. [37:03] So it's just always been a deep history around these things that, you know, we've, we've probably both heard people talk about the history of Silicon Valley and why it has such staying power. And it's really just like the network effects and the natural advantages that compound, right? Yeah. It's really hard to undo those things. Totally. I guess maybe that [37:18] kind of goes into my next question, which is around like the type of company culture, you know, and I, you know, Lattice was a software company. I've spent a lot more time with software companies and here, and there's a certain cadence to those companies. There's a certain culture, and obviously each one's different, but there's things in common. When you think about, [37:36] you know, building a [37:37] hard tech company, working with defense, doing nuclear energy. There are all these things that are really different. The timelines are very long. The stakes are very high. It's serious work. There's science involved. There's engineering involved. What are the things that you found most notable about building the team, the culture, the operating cadence? Our market

[37:58] Defense, typically slow. [38:00] Nuclear, also typically slow. And it's the total opposite. Like maybe the extreme other end of the spectrum is like if you work at a marketplace business like DoorDash or something. And like when those kind of companies work, the pace of the company is largely dictated by the customer. [38:14] The customer is just pulling you to move as fast as you possibly can to keep up. It's like you get a network effect going and you're just holding on for dear life. [38:23] Yeah. And like you go to sleep and then you wake up the next day with more work than you had the day before. Or there's a fire overnight or something. Yeah. You just do whatever you can to keep up. Right. [38:31] Businesses like ours, I think the locus of control is actually much more internal, right? Like you set the pace, right? You dictate it. And, you know, maybe the mindset shift is like you have to be doing things every single day, small things to like make things go faster. So, you know, we have long timelines to develop a product. We want to turn a reactor on by end of 2027. You know, very ambitious. We talk about that timeline every single day. You know, in some, 2027 sounds futuristic, but it's not that long. It's not that far away, right? Yeah. We talk about it every single day. [39:01] We break down a lot of our technical development into smaller milestones that we're using to just create a constant sense of urgency. So a lot of the culture building is really around creating and cultivating this sense of urgency. One of my favorite values that we have is we say, just make it happen. And it's kind of a recognition that the industry is slow. The customer is not going to drive our pace. It's actually up to us to come in and do something every single day to drive the pace. The interesting thing about this, too, is what I've come to...

[39:30] really believe is like [39:32] Why is there not already more money for nuclear in the federal budget? Why is Congress not already appropriated more funds? Why is the DoD not already doing more to buy this technology? [39:43] And overwhelmingly... [39:45] The feedback that we've received and what we think the answer is actually just the tech isn't built yet. It's just not mature enough for them. When you're playing your budgets three years out, you're not really going to set aside large amounts of money until you know that you're going to be able to buy something. And so the speed at which we move is what is ultimately going to cultivate our market. [40:05] And I think there's something like really powerful and exciting about that to come in and think about that every day. For sure. The other cultural thing I think about a lot is what we do is incredibly multidisciplinary. [40:17] Yes, there's nuclear engineering, but there's material science, there's thermodynamics, turbo machinery, electrical engineering, structural engineering. Like if you can, I mean, we develop in-house software. If you can name an engineering discipline, you probably have to do it to build a reactor. There's competing priorities between all of those different disciplines, right? [40:47] from a nuclear engineering perspective, is almost never, perhaps universally, [40:52] Never. [40:53] the reactor design that's going to be the most manufacturable and the quickest to build. [40:57] Right. So you always have a tension between those different groups. So one thing that's we think a lot about is like, you know, how do we make sure that.

[41:07] There's no priest class, right? Everybody has an equal voice. We also have this cultural value that we say, let great ideas beat great arguments. And so we really try to deliberately bring things back to the idea itself, the merit. It should be how well somebody argued something. Exactly. Yeah. I used to always say that a very persuasive person with a bad idea is super dangerous. 100% agree. Yeah. Especially in something like this, where there's so much [41:37] almost have to force yourself to argue like the other person's perspective. [41:41] And I think you just make better decisions when you do that. So we've really tried to be deliberate about that. How do you [41:46] find and assemble like the teams for all of this. It's so interdisciplinary. There's such, you know, deep knowledge in various areas. There's government, there's, you know, there's all this different stuff. Like, how are you, how are you spending time figuring out how to assemble these teams given the wide range? [42:02] So we talked earlier about... [42:05] Like, what are the things that are driving this new interest in DeClear, right? Right. [42:09] So one of the things that I think is just... [42:12] amazing, so rewarding, so inspiring about what we're doing is... [42:17] this technology has... [42:19] great national security implications. It's going to make us a safer, more powerful country. You know, it will be a part of the solution to climate change. [42:27] It's also going to expand... [42:29] you know, humanity's reach into space. [42:32] Can you name another technology that allows you to do all of those things that you get to come in and work on? Pretty hard. Pretty hard, right? So the mission is like incredibly inspiring to a lot of people. Yes, I have a company where you don't have to work very hard to explain why this is important versus, you know, with other companies. You have to like really go to great lengths to get the mission to resonate. This one, it sort of speaks for itself. And I think a lot of the people that we get that show up are default clients.

[42:54] missionary, right? Like they, they, they want to work on something that's incredibly inspiring and motivating. Um, and you often want to do it at the intersection of like, [43:04] hard and interesting technical challenges, which I kind of got at earlier, like the interdisciplinary nature of this and the complexity of it is a lot of what makes it really fun to come in and, and, and work on every day. So, you know, we did an onsite interview recently where, um, [43:17] Someone works at a really awesome company currently, but like... [43:21] the technology problems are kind of already solved, like not the best use of a skillset anymore and loves that like there's true novelty in what we're doing. We lead with that a lot. And then the other thing is, um, [43:31] We're a two-year-old company at this point. I'm incredibly proud of the progress that we've made in a really short amount of time. You can look at our momentum and compare it to some of the other options in the nuclear industry, and we kind of stand out in that regard, right? So I think that's pretty exciting and appealing to a lot of people. [44:01] you know, three years from now, Jordan. Definitely another problem. But one of the things that [44:06] You know, I'll just kind of tie it back to the customer that the reason why [44:10] For small reactors, the reason we're seeing this new customer demand is, you know, it's resiliency, right? And what that often means is like when someone says I want resilient energy and they want nuclear energy.

[44:24] to be the solution to that. What that often means is they're familiar with the fact that our grid scale nuclear power plants have like 93% capacity factors. It's like the highest... [44:35] uptime of any... [44:37] energy production method that we have, right? So the expectation is micro reactors are going to have that. They're not going to have that right off the bat, right? We're going to have to have iterative development cycles to get to that. So we see ourselves building multiple test reactors and using the first test reactor to actually drive down the costs in the timeline of doing the second and the third, which by the way, is another huge benefit of building such a small scale system is we can build our first reactor and iterate to the second and third with sums of [45:07] raise with venture capital. [45:08] If you start with like the, you know, SMRs, hundreds of megawatts, kind of large grid scale reactors, you can't really do that, right? Because you might need, you know, billions, $10 billion to get to a first of a kind. It's really hard to then say we're going to turn around and then do the next thing after that. And, you know, maybe this time we won't need 10 billion, but we're still going to need like five. Right. Yeah. But in parallel to that, yeah, we see ourselves scaling up manufacturing as well. And we eventually want to be able to make like, you know, over 100 of these a year, which, you know, again, for us is, you know, [45:38] megawatts a year of production. So it's, you know, it's crazy kind of in volume of assembly, but not crazy in terms of the size of, you know, power that's being produced. Awesome. Well, it's very inspiring. Yeah, this conversation was awesome. I really appreciate you making time to have it. And yeah, thanks for spending the hour. Thanks for having me.