What Does The Nuclear Company Do?

0:00This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by RE Plus, the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Experience a complete agenda spanning solar, storage, micro grids, EVs, grid-edge technologies, and beyond. At RE Plus, you can network with the companies and experts advancing projects, improving supply chains, developing resilient solutions, and more, plus the tools to find them. This is where today's energy is being built to meet tomorrow's demand. Register at RE Plus dot com and use code Shift Key 20 to save 20% of a full conference pass. Hello, it's Wednesday, September 23rd, and it's New York Climate Week. Thousands of people are piling into the city today to discuss climate and energy issues. One topic that's very likely to be on the agenda is nuclear energy.

1:00I think over the past few years there's been a resurgence of interest in nuclear, and it's one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans in Congress conceimingly still agree on. The Energy Department has this new multi-billion-dollar program to subsidize 10 new nuclear reactors across the country, and in an age of rising electricity demand and overall low growth, nuclear has become more alluring because it's one of the few sources of energy where you can bring on a whole gigawatt of power online just at one go. One other thing that's changed recently in nuclear is the rise of what I would call nuclear developers. These are standalone companies who want to develop and then sell off new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants. The most prominent of these companies is a startup called, as it happens, the nuclear company. They arose a few years ago and they're involved in taking over the BC Sumner nuclear project in South Carolina. BC Sumner, as you'll hear, they were going to be able to new AP 1000 nuclear reactors in South Carolina on one site,

2:04and the company trying to build the project actually went bankrupt before it could finish the power plant. That project has now been taken over by Brookfield, the asset investor, and by the nuclear company. Today, we are joined by the CEO of the nuclear company, Jonathan Webb. Jonathan previously worked for the Department of Defense and then started and ran a startup called App Harvest, which built large greenhouses in Kentucky before going bankrupt. Jonathan started the nuclear company in late 2023. He and I had an interesting conversation. I tried to understand what exactly the nuclear company does, what they believe their advantage to be and what could come next for them. I'm Rob Tumire, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News at its all coming up on Shift Key. Jonathan Webb, welcome to Shift Key. Thank you for having me. So can you just start by giving us the rundown on what the nuclear company is? Certainly, your name suggests that you make nuclear reactors, but you operate in this very

3:04distinct kind of segment of the industry. I'm not even sure if at the time you were founded, there were other companies like you. So give us the rundown on what your company does and how it's different from other firms in the industry. So we're about 200 people built to deploy, operate and service nuclear at scale in the Western world, obviously a focus in the US. And right now we have about 40 to 50 people on site daily at VC summer, which was the abandoned site back in 2018, where $9 billion was spent, but unfortunately had to pause that effort. And so when starting this about three years ago, had a little bit of a counter-theses view point that while we remain technology agnostic and very optimistic about some of the great technologies that are going to come to market with these reactors, our viewpoint was we wanted to be an enabler to support the community and starting with AP 1000 because it's the only technology that

4:08we can go to deploy today. So building a team to support that program while being ready to help support others in the market is they reach a point to commercialize their technologies. So just give us a sense of where the nuclear company sits kind of with other segments of the industry because there's utilities that tend to operate or off-take power from big nuclear reactors. There's a handful of companies that make reactors, including Westinghouse with the AP 1000. The nuclear company seems to sit somewhere in between almost in a project management role. Can you just describe what you handle in the ecosystem of scaling up nuclear? Nuclear is uniquely different in challenging than almost any other sector or industry in a lot of different ways in which building a static building, building a manufacturing facility, you know, the Western world we talk about nuclear as if it's not working today.

5:09And what we forget to remember is it took decades to get to a point where we had fleets of nuclear operating at 93% capacity factor, meaning when the plant is up and running, it's operating at 93% of the time. You know, the viewpoint to build this team, I hired much of the people I could off of the Vogel 3 and 4 sites. So I didn't want to theorize about what the problem was. I wanted to listen to the people that actually lived on the Vogel 3 and 4 site. I was fortunate Steve Kaczynski, who was the CEO and chair of Southern Nuclear, Joe Kletchar, Chief Nuclear Officer, many of Joe's colleagues. In that first year, we were kind of just for the investor term in stealth. Really trying to study the problem. What happened? And what are we trying to solve for? And really best analogy, it's not a great one, but the one that was told to me that I now repeat a bit is like think of Airbus and Boeing. Highly regulated, zero margin of air. You need to get the plane up and running 100% of the time every time, but they don't actually make the jet engine.

6:12GE and Rolls Royce do. And so while the reactor is critically important, the reactor can be maybe 20% of the total project cost when you look at the overall materials, but even after it's built, you look at China and how they've essentially borrowed in a loose term or developed on their own, have looked at every reactor possible around the world and they're building reactors similar to an AP 1000. Once it is up and running, it'll operate for about 100 years at 93% capacity factor. And that is very hard to achieve. And so you have other reactors that in China and Russian, France, even in the US, that you might build, you might build a mom budget, but they get up and running at 20% capacity factor. And so even getting a reactor up and operating at 70, 80% capacity factor, if you look at the fine-tune machine of what an AP 1000 is, it gives immense credit to Southern company and everyone involved that was able to complete the job. Well, the build was a

7:14challenge the way they're operating those units is just absolutely phenomenal. Well, we wanted to be a part of is enable whether it's a utility or reactor technology. I mean, the reactor technology is essentially IP. It's a blueprint, right? So you have to drag the blueprint through a supply chain. You have to get thousands of people to install them, even if they're smaller micro, you still have to get people in the field and physically install things. You can't manufacture everything. And then you have to get it up and running. So what I really wanted to do, our chief nuclear officers, really the head of deployment because we're viewing this entirely through the lens of what do I need to do to get this up and running safely at the highest possible quality at the highest capacity factor. And those last 18 months of delivery is where all the magic really begins. And so, you know, again, the team we've built in the gap that we see in the market, assuming the country builds, right? We've got a goal of 300 gigawatts is we're going to need a team to deploy these reactors, commission them, get them started up, get them running, and then service them. And so we wanted to be, you know,

8:17that team that you can call that you've put your life and everything into the R&D of those those reactor designs, but the AP 1000s and incredible unit just got a building on time on budget. And then once you do, it's up and running. And now the question's going to be can we find other units that are going to be built at a lower cost at a faster pace, but will they get up and running the way an AP 1000 will? Well, they last 100 years the way an AP 1000 will. Even a few years ago, this question of whether load growth was going to show up, whether we would see the kind of rapid growth in electricity demand that we are now experiencing nationwide was a bit of an open question. Obviously, it's now here and data center providers, utilities, you just straight up industrial customers, governors are rushing to get all the electricity that they can. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the company. Like evidently, you were early a little bit to the load growth thesis. You kind of had the sense that it was coming before it was a certainty. So just

9:18give us a sense of how the company started and how you became convinced that fleet scale nuclear and that ramping up nuclear specifically was the best option. Yeah. I mean, for me, growing up in a coal state, Kentucky was very foundational. I lived in a moment where in my early part of my career, graduated from public schools went to a public university, but didn't quite grow up in a community of world that talked about these global issues that much. But you could kind of see the writing on the wall where we're shutting down these coal plants. And for every gigawatt of coal, you need thousands, if not tens of thousands of acres of solar. And in my early career was a part of building solar. And so ended up being a contractor, had a clearance, was in the Pentagon helping the US Army build energy assets on military installations, very foundational being in the Pentagon. So I think going from a coal state, understanding that, you know, that it was very bizarre for me where

10:23wars, I think many people would say don't work typically very well. You create an adversary. And so this war on coal was a little bizarre to me to the sense of we should think the people that powered us through the Industrial Revolution and two world wars so that we could have the freedoms we have today. And many people don't realize this, but a hundred thousand people have died in this country, in this country, in coal mining accidents. Unfortunately, my grandmother grew up on a situation where she was impacted. They're dead, died in a coal mining accident. And so when I hear we can't build gigawatt scale nuclear in this country, I don't take it very kindly. There's a lot of people that have had to sacrifice a lot to get to this point. And you're telling me we can't do something, the country's already done before in the 60s and 70s. And we have much better tools and technologies and we have all the lessons learned of the past. We have an incredible safety record in the operating nuclear fleet. So, A, solve the gigawatts, we're going to need to be deployed and there's multiple

11:29way to get there. So you get strained together SMRs or you get strained together large reactors. I'm pretty indifferent there. For me, it's about safety and quality and speed and cost. But I do think that thesis of this company for better or worse, depending on how you look at it, is only going to become more extreme in the years ahead, where why can China build six gigawatts on one site and we can't? Why are we talking about places around the world that I thought were the US? I thought this is the most dynamic economy on planet earth that this idea that we're going to give up on big things because they're too hard is unacceptable. So finding a team of people that believed in this idea that we've done it before, we will do it again and yes, we might use different reactor technologies to achieve the same outcome. But we're going to go deliver dozens of campuses and we're going to put gigawatts of nuclear on those campuses. I don't want to get to the if we don't, but I can tell you, unfortunately, going through some of these Applatch and communities and hearing from local

12:30leaders, what motivated me with this company was a ice storm in the region several years ago, where unfortunately, I'd been read into a scenario where we were tipping close to a blackout. And if a blackout in my state would have happened, we would have had in zero degree weather, you've likely the number of casualties and not well insulated trailer park, elderly women, elderly men, young children. I don't know about you, but that seems unacceptable to me. So we need to figure out how to work together and solve these problems. We don't really have any other choice. And what we've had over 30 years is the luxury of two to three percent load growth. And you and me and others all see that that's radically changing quickly. And so while micro and small are certainly going to be a part of the solution, we've also got to be able to deploy gigawatts on campuses across the country. I think that coal is actually kind of a useful way in here because there was a small advocacy effort,

13:34there was an advocacy effort from some national environmental groups to shut down coal plants, but the only reason that could succeed is because coal was also facing this huge threat in the marketplace from natural gas. Because at the same time, right, I mean, in the late arts and the mid teens, the country found a new way of extracting natural gas was able to tap these enormous natural gas reserves. And suddenly natural gas was available to producers extremely cheaply. And because you could sub in a gas turbine into what used to be a coal stack because gas was cheaper, it was cleaner, it produced far less pollution and was easier to manage, you could drop in gas into coal. And coal was basically outcompeted. Now there were forces that were trying to subject all generation right to air pollution constraints, but coal was outcompeted. And so yeah, I go on this one really quick. So yes, markets ended up dictating what happened, but I think what was not contemplated and what I maybe didn't quite touch on when I was just explaining that is that coal, you have

14:37about three months supply. If you go to an operating coal plant, you have about three months supply on site. So if there's a disruption in supply, you have three months natural gas, you pipe in. And natural gas freezes at the wellhead and slows in the pipes anywhere around zero degrees. And so when we talk about climate, it goes up, it goes down. We didn't use to have zero degree weather too much in Kentucky. We do now. It happens. And that when I talked about that potential rolling blackout, it was because our coal plants were shut off where you typically have three months supply. We've transitioned to a lot of natural gas. And while natural gas is resilient, it's not nearly as resilient as coal because it can slow down and the pipeline. And as a result, you can't feed the plant that needs to consume it to create power. That's why nuclear. We have the thing that we've done before that is clean, it's reliable. It runs 93% of the time. It can run in ice, it can run in

15:39heat. And so yeah, this is why a diversified portfolio of power, but you know, going full tilt and running the entire country on gas, you know, whether you want to debate about carbon or not, their their studies and everyone can read, but separate from that and go to reliability. It is both solar and wind and natural gas, they all have their vulnerabilities, which is why a diversified portfolio, but a country of our size, not having large amounts of nuclear on the grid, is borderline reckless. It seems like another kind of advantage of nuclear at this moment is that it is an energy technology that both parties can agree on. The current administration seems to support nuclear for a number of reasons, including its resilient, kind of a classic type of environmentalist doesn't like it, which is a benefit in some quarters. Democrats like nuclear because it doesn't create emissions, you can bring on megawatts, gigawatts in one go. Okay, you touched on the environmental thing, I'm going to say it. I grew up in Kentucky, but I

16:41love nature. I walk around and creeks. I grew up this way. The worst thing we did as a country, and I don't know why we got here. I don't know if it was fossil fuel lobbies. I don't know if it was just voodoo, fear and panic of celebrities who were scared of nuclear, but had no idea what they were talking about. I don't know if it was environmental, but my goodness, maybe the worst industrial policy that's ever happened in this country. I might argue it could end up being one of the worst policy decisions in the history of this country was not continuing to build nuclear. The fact that we have a 20% of our grid comes from nuclear power, and the fact that we've only built two reactors in 30 years, we're living off of our grandparents who built one fifth of our grid, and we shut that down. My goodness, have we keep, had we kept building in the amount of abundant power we would have and how low cost it would have been. I would argue probably the worst, I'm very biased. I live my life every day, so I see it through one lens of the world, but abundant, reliable, low cost power enables

17:43civilizations since the dawn of fire, and I would argue this will be the singularly most critical issue that this country's had that has allowed China to now beat us and potentially become the largest economy, and certainly the largest energy producer in the world. So I think one of the interesting things about this moment is that there's bipartisan interest in nuclear. I mean, I think there was interest from the Biden administration, and I think there's been programs from the Trump administration, and one of those big programs has been this effort from the energy department to subsidize, help organize, and back the creation of 10 new reactors across the country. How is that effort going to the degree you can speak about it, and kind of what needs to happen from on the government side to build nuclear at, let's just say the scale that the country was doing it in the 1980s and late 1970s. I, maybe it's an unpopular opinion, a popular opinion. I have no idea,

18:45trying not to pay attention too much, just do my job, but I would say I have no idea what else Washington, DC can do for this community. The private sector needs to get a backbone and deliver. There are more than enough levers on the left side, on the right side, with this administration, with the last administration. To me, the private sector, making excuses about the regulator is just un-concentrable. We have the safest nuclear in the world. No one in this country has ever been negatively impacted by nuclear power. Three-mile island is our biggest incident where no casualties. The technology failed exactly the way it should. We have a great regulator. We have great operators. So, I mean, where we do need to turn our attention is what we do do right here, which is we have the absolute best nuclear operators in the world, the safest nuclear operators in the world. But my goodness, when it comes to getting out in the field and building, we have to empower workforce. We have to organize teams of people. We have to utilize technology to enable those teams of people, and we have to go deliver. We need to compete with the other sources of electricity

19:49on pricing. And that's it. There's infinite supply demand for the electrons. The more than enough people will buy the power, there's more than enough capital to fund the projects. The private sector needs to sign up to a budget and a schedule and go deliver. That's it. But yeah, I would love to see more support in DC. There's a lot of support now. I hope the support continues, but they've done more than enough to ignite the industry, and we need to go deliver. That's on the private sector. Let's talk about delivery then. So, I think you guys are working with Brookfield in South Carolina on this old plant, VC summer. The local utility spent billions of dollars about a decade ago to get a plant up and running in this site in South Carolina and didn't get it done. In fact, there was a thing of a bankrupt trying to get it done. Ultimately, that site has kind of sat fallow as this extremely over budget project in Georgia. Ultimately did reach completion. That was vocal. You've now gone back into VC summer with, I think, Brookfield. How is that going? And what's going to be different about it this time? Well, I don't take lightly the

20:54privilege yet obligation that the state of South Carolina, the people of South Carolina, and, and, kind of, every stakeholder involved, that it's given us the right and opportunity to be there. We have about 40, 50 people on site at VC summer right now and every day we're there. People ask me, when does construction start? I mean, for me, I'm the type of person that construction starts the moment you put your feet on soil and your planning way in advance. So there's a gant chart with a schedule and all these milestones and, you know, win officially FID to COD. But I can tell you our team has taken it very seriously. And I mean, you had $9 billion spent. It's been sitting there since 2018. It was hard enough to finish in the first place. And now we're stepping back in midstream to go go finish it. And we owe it to the state of South Carolina and the community there to get these units up and running. It's not that we have, we're a Westinghouse company or an AP 1000 company. It's that we just believe that if the country's

21:54going to go deliver on this promise of gigawatts, micro small, large, whatever it may be, we got something to finish. And it's approved not only the US and the industry, but around the world that if we start something, we're going to get it done. And so I think we've developed a unique approach that we're bringing to this, this project, but it's going to be results driven. We're going to have to deliver a budget and a schedule and everyone in the world is going to see that. This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by RE plus 26, the largest and most comprehensive clean energy event in North America, bringing together 37,000 clean energy professionals and more than 1100 exhibitors from November 16 through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Experience a complete agenda spanning solar, storage, micro grids, EVs, grid edge technologies and beyond, with tracks built around policy drivers, tech trends, land use, grid integration, finance and business strategy. At RE plus 26, you can network with the companies and experts

22:57advancing projects, improving supply chains, developing resilient solutions and more, plus the tools to find them. Whether you're sourcing new technology, scouting your next partner, we're just trying to keep up with where this industry is moving. You'll find it here all in one place, all in one week. It's RE plus 26. This is where today's energy is being built to meet tomorrow's demand. Register at RE plus dot com and use code Shift Key 20. That's Shift Key 20 to save 20% off a full conference pass. Can you give me an example of what better execution would look like on this project? I realize it's tens of thousands of engineering decisions that go one way and not another way. Can you give me an example of an execution decision that maybe went wrong in VC summer the first time around or that often goes wrong with AP 1000s or that went wrong early on with Vogel that you're focused on getting right this time? Well, one has nothing to do with this company and has everything to do with the technology itself that you cannot go build

24:01commercial nuclear. I think it's been probably improving over time at this point until the design is completed and you finished some projects. One, just sheer baseline benefit is the fact that Vogel III and IV and Georgia were completed while VC summer was not completed. At a bare minimum, we have the lessons learned coming off of what worked, what didn't work, and how to solve these problems differently going forward. We also have the team that did it. We have people that lived on the job site, slept in the trailers, worked on that institutional knowledge is obviously critical. Brookfield is going to be controlling much of the joint venture that we've announced with them, and we're here to deliver based on how they decide to run on a go forward basis. I'm not going to talk too much about VC summer. What I will say about what we're doing unique and what I can talk about there is when I did start about three years ago on this effort, after bringing a lot of people in and hearing about the stories of Vogel III and IV, again, the two reactors that were

25:03completed in Georgia, it was budgeted around 14 billion. The project came in at around 35, 36 billion. It was supposed to take seven years. It took 12 years. It was supposed to take 5,000 people, and it took about 10,000 people. It was like, all right, these are pretty astronomical numbers. How do we get here? The thing we have to solve for them sounds like rocket science. It's really not. It's pretty simple. Well, interest on debt. If you're carrying $20 billion of debt over 12 years instead of seven years, so time. Oh, shocker. We need to do this faster. That makes sense. Then less people. If we have 10,000 people on a job site every day, which I think you said you're in New York City, buy a ticket to a concert venue that holds 10,000 people. Go to that concert. Look around. Think those people have to show up and leave every day on your construction site. A lot of this was being managed, not with advanced work packages, not with, I've got a lot of friends in the tech community we hosted a deep tech week event at our office recently. I look at

26:08the technologies this country has to offer, and I look at mega project construction sites, not even necessarily unique to nuclear. Why are we not equipping our minimum women with the most advanced technologies to organize and execute? It's unacceptable. The first year was studying the problem. The second year was okay. That's where we partnered with Palantir and others. But we developed what we have in-house as a nuclear operating system. AI enabled logistics, supply chain, real-time information, but to get to the point, those 10,000 people at Vogel 3 and 4 were maybe working 15 to 20% of the time labor productivity. Now, some people might say, okay, lazy Americans, I take deep offense to that. I mean, my wife, I lived on a construction site in an RV at one point. I can tell you there's some hardships and rain and cold. Our men, women need the best and latest technology. And so everything we've tried to build is for that frontline worker. How do I get them the information they need? How do I get them the training they need? How do I prepare

27:09them on the ground so that they are ready to show up at 6 a.m. in the rain or 9 p.m. at night when their shift starts? We have technologies that are available today. And if you and your friends go walk around on a construction site, you're going to think we're in 1975. So again, I can't speak for the joint venture and I'm not going to speak for Brookfield what's happening there, but I can tell you we are closely going to announce our own sites where we'll be developing our own projects. We're still in the phase of site selection, still in the phase of technology selection, but I look forward to hosting you and some of your colleagues sometime and you can come see we're going to be unleashing the American worker in a way that we know is possible to get that labor productivity to 60 and 70% or even north of 80. And that's through just real information in real time and we can do it. The technologies are available today, but we have to enable our workforce and we can't think like, okay, we're going to go build like we did in the 60s when we have tools and technologies available today. It sounds like part of what you're saying is the better execution

28:11comes from software, which is maybe like a musk world lesson because this isn't as frequently discussed, but when you talk to folks who worked in the musk companies, what they say is the engineering software is actually what's so good and often isn't shared. So is that part of the play here? Absolutely. And I'm fortunate to have a lot of people that have worked in those camps, Brad Busch, just joined our board. He was on the board of Tesla for 10 years, Mike ran security at Tesla for about 10 years, he's with us. Yeah, that is our internal tool of how we're going to take millions. If in some cases, not billions of data points and get people real time information, I mean, here's an example. So if you have 138 people that are supposed to install some object on the site at 7am, I'm on a site in the Ohio River, that site is connected to a rail that connects to the port of Norfolk, in Virginia. A ship was supposed to arrive sometime at 3am

29:14or pick a time, 1am, and that object was supposed to be unloaded. It never showed up. And today's world, unfortunately, of what we've seen in nuclear or other industry, you wouldn't know, and those 138 people would be there at 7am. Now, why would we not be able to with AI and logistics integration have real time updates? Okay, here are the 138 people, here are their skill sets, here are their talents. They're not going to be able to do that work at 7am, but they can do this other work. So let's now send them an update on their phone when they're waking up in their RV at 5am. Here's a tutorial of where you're going to need to go to the site. Here's what we're going to need you to do. I don't take kindly this idea that Americans aren't willing to work. I think we've put the blue collar and front line worker in unimaginably difficult working conditions. And our job is to reduce that friction, make their life just a little bit easier, remove the constraints every day, and we can do that through technology. So I would love to say we're splitting the atom or sending a man to the moon, but really all we're doing is taking

30:16technologies that are available and ensuring in a secure and safe way, which is what's difficult with the IP related to nuclear, ensuring that we can have the data integration and real time information, but be able to get our teams real time updates just so they can do their job. I think you might actually be splitting the atom, although I may be that happens upstream. You hired the team that executed the Vogel projects, and both of the Vogel projects were AP-1000 reactors. This American design from Westinghouse, that's designed, as you mentioned China's building. Why go with AP-1000s in the first place? Why bet on that technology? It's the only thing I can build today. I get this question all the time, and there's only one permanent reactor that's been built a few times that I can go build today. And maybe that's the only reactor we build. Maybe we build five different ones, and the market will dictate how that plays out. I have met so many different teams that are designing new reactors, and I'm rooting for

31:17every single one of them. The reality is we're probably not going to have 100 different reactor types. There will be a few in different class and category, and they'll be used in different applications. So a few micro, a few small, small, relative. So all right, there's a gigawatt reactor, which is the large light water reactors, a lot of the reactors in the US, or gigawatt cold plants, or gigawatt cold plants. So gigawatt, there's a thousand megawatts in a gigawatt. So when we even say SMR, small modular reactor, that's somewhere in the 100 to 300, maybe a little above 300 megawatts, still not small, but small enough to modularize. So the theory was, let's take thousands of people off the construction site, let's move them into a manufacturing facility, let's manufacture off site. And then that's even further downstream to the micro reactor, where you're looking maybe a megawatt, five megawatts, 10, maybe 20 out. I don't know if there's the exact number on the categories, but essentially micro small large. And we're building the AP1000,

32:22because we believe it's a, well, there's no belief. It's a great machine that's running incredibly well right now in Georgia and got up and running very swiftly to 93% capacity factor. Well, I think some of these other technologies, you might be able to build at a lower cost, theoretically, there's also the challenge of getting them up and operating and getting them to 93% capacity factor. So it's a bit of whack emuls. So okay, is it easier to build? Well, I'm a little more concerned about the 100 year operating asset that you're then stuck with on the other side. And so is it a low cost fuel? Is it low cost to maintenance? Is it low cost to service? Is it low cost to operate? And then the other one is, I mean, there's really only for better or worse, and I don't know why, but one individual in this country that's really figured out manufacturing at scale, it seems like there's a lot of others that have tried, but Elon's one of them. So this idea that we're going to manufacture things at a lower cost, it's like, okay, well, call every car company that tried to do

33:24that that wasn't able to, right? So this idea that we're just going to manufacture off site and it's going to be cheaper again, a great idea and theory, but China is not figured that out and China has endless buckets of capital. They've been doing this for decades and they've concluded that the lowest cost, most efficient best way to deploy gigawatts of nuclear in their country, were to do what we did in the 50s, 60s and 70s. So while I'm rooting for every technology, we're trying to figure out which one of the few are going to actually going to work across the spectrum and we want to help enable their success. So that's a long, very long wind away of saying why they pay 1000. So it's available today. I can build it today. We can get it up and operating today and I hope there are many other reactor types that will get there, but for better or worse at the moment, we have one to work with. Are you looking at this Toshiba? Because there is another NRC certified boiling water reactors, this Toshiba boiling water reactor. They got built in Japan and Taiwan and was going to get

34:28built in South Texas. Hasn't been, is that something you're looking at and how does that compare to the AP 1000? I'll say our team has looked at every viable technology on planet Earth, both in the US and abroad that's available. I've got a bunch of engineers upstairs right now that are all evaluating every day what's coming to market, what's in market, what's been in market. So when you asked early on, what are we? So I ain't quite get to this and sometimes I go off and don't explain the company very well. So that is where we see a core part of our role, right? So everyone's coming out saying, I got the new Bugatti engine, I got the new Lamborghini engine, I got new this engine, new that engine. The reality is like not every engine is going to be the best race car engine, right? So again, if I go back to that original analogy, which I think I talked about when the airline industry, you know, we have the best airline operators in the world is safe airplane. They fly, we're, you know, I know we'll go to the airport and you're a little frustrated at times, but typically speaking, our pilots are great, airline operators are great, very safe, high quality

35:31airline industry. The utility industry, the electric utility industry in the US, exact same, their elite best nuclear operators on planet Earth, just data. We operate these plants at a 93 percent capacity factor have the best safety record in the world, 100 percent safety. What we are trying to do is evaluate a wildly complex market that's evolving every day, every week to figure out how do we get operators, the best airlines, the best airplane to fly. And I can tell you, it is dynamic evolving and we're trying to stay ahead of it. And that's our team's job every day. Again, our job is to be objective and just review the data and try to figure out how to bring reactors online at the lowest cost, the fastest speed, the highest quality and the safest. So we're more bullish. I mean, we think the country has a great reactor right now. It's the AP 1000 and very fortunate to have the Camico team who owns half a Westing house. You hear about Brookfield a lot. What you don't hear about is the largest Uranium minor in the Western world,

36:35our partner friend up in Canada, Camico, who owns the other half a Westing house. Really wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today without a few of their team members helping early on kind of help me get into the industry while we're soup incredibly bullish on what they have. And they're going to have an incredible run at getting these AP 1000s in market. There are a lot of others that are coming. And there's some others that have been in the past that could be brought back off the shelf. And so again, our team's job, we've had some of the largest electric utilities in the US visitor offices in the last few weeks. And our job is to look them in the eye and be able to say, look, you fly the best airplanes. You run the power plants. So our job released to stay ahead of the market, evaluate what's possible, evaluate these reactors, and then try to cut through the sales job of, you know, which engine is better than the other engine and just data driven of what is actually going to perform better in the end. Let's change about your company's thesis since you launched back in 2023. Not much a couple additives. So my motivation is cheerleader. Gigawatts on the grid.

37:44It'll low cost as quickly as possible. I think that this is unfortunately is becoming more true by the day where we are way behind the queue. We've got AI data compute that anyone who's been following AI for at least five years could have seen the ball a bit. Reindustrialization, we knew we had to make more stuff in this country. We outsourced for a long time. So we're doing that. And the electrification of everything. So those three things happening at once are, you know, we had a luxury in time with that two to three percent load growth. So that means power went up two to three percent demand. And part of that was because we outsourced our manufacturing. So load growth went down a bit. We did have energy efficiency technologies. But all that stuff's happened. So now it's, you know, we're going to have to figure out five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 percent load growth in this country. So the thesis, I think is right. The only thing we've added to is we did get into nuclear services. There's a lot we don't talk about with this company. And this is a one that I think

38:44you're going to hear us talk more about next year. But we are now servicing over 40% of the operating nuclear fleet today. And I don't know that many people even know it. And so then people ask me, okay, why did we do it? Well, two things. One, we are in a business as much as I'm mission oriented. We got a return capital to shareholders. And I got to pay employees so we can recruit more people. And it's going to take a while to build projects. So we started in services because, okay, great. I could tell my CFO it's a good way to get revenue. But more importantly for me is it's a good way for us to build credibility in this industry show the utilities that we can show up and fix and maintenance and assist in their operating fleet. So we did add services. So when I say, when you say services, kind of what do you mean like maintenance and repair? Yes, sir. That's, you know, we've got a team right now that's out doing work that we would say we probably doubled tripled in the last year. And so it's work that's needed throughout the year to keep the fleet up

39:46and operating, right? So another way for us to build relationships with trades, build relationships with frontline workers. I mean, again, I look at what is my job? My client is the frontline worker in the end. If we do this right, I'm probably one of the more relevant people. And I would say much of our corporate team and even bored and even whoever's buying the power in the end, that's not really our client or who we work for. Our job is to reduce the friction, understand the constraints of the frontline worker. And so it was a great opportunity for us to build those relationships with tradesmen and women to understand what do you need to be successful? How do we get you on an office site more quickly? How do you do this where we can train you in a better way? It's been an incredible jolt for our organization. I can tell you one example on training. I was someone that couldn't read too well until I got into the third grade. Retain information differently. I can absorb information differently. That didn't go well and average curriculums. But if you look at how

40:47we're trying to train our tradesmen and women, it's black and white pages, PDFs. I read 184 page document. It was a very specific way to train on one specific part. I tried to read the 84 pages by the time I got to the end. I can barely remember the first part of it. It's just that my brain doesn't work fully linear always that way. But we took that and with the software and technology we've developed and agentic AI quickly turned that into 3D models, 3D renderings. Now you can take maybe a young man or woman who didn't graduate from high school but is very talented and maybe is going to struggle in a classroom to contribute. We can meet them where they're at and we can do it in a way where technology is available, which is again what gets me deeply frustrated when we say the American worker can't work. It's like we're not even given them a shot. If you want to go tour community colleges and trade schools with me, you will look around and you'll

41:49go, wow, this is incredibly uninspiring. This is not acceptable. We have VR, we have AR, we have the best technology in San Francisco, we have AI, why are we treating people and teaching people with word PDFs and pieces of paper. So again, services for me in this company is less, well, it's very important to our CFO. So we're out, we're going to double revenue year over year is excited about that. But more importantly, it's our ability to build a relationship with those tradesmen and women, understand what their problems are, figure out how to fix those problems now so that when we have to go mobilize 5,000 people on a construction site, I can train them in six weeks instead of six months. We can get them tools and technologies on the construction site to help assist in their work so they can be better welders, better pipe layers and better craftsmen and women. And unfortunately, our country is not doing that right now. I mean, I was curious because I think when the nuclear company first came out of the gate, you guys were kind of the only nuclear project managers,

42:54developers out there. I think since then, there's been a number of companies that have announced that have been founded or kind of entered a similar space. There's been blue energy, there's been elementals. So it makes you different. I don't know the team's incredibly well. So I can't say what they do specifically, but I've, you know, some interaction here and there. We're maniacally focused on nuclear. So I know some are trying to bridge nuclear to gas and natural gas to nuclear. We think nuclear and delivering gait-a-wats of nuclear, there's plenty of space for us to run. So we're solely dedicated and focused on the nuclear industry. There's others that are out buying land and trying to permit the land and trying to get financing for the land, which is kind of what you would see in like a typical solar developer world. We have a team and a deep, intricate ability to deploy, operate and service nuclear power plants. And, you know, if someone develops a piece of property and they need a team to go to deploy the reactor, that's a perfect place for us to step in. So people try to ask me again all the time, what project manager developer, yeah, those are small

43:59segments of like what we do. Like, I would say maybe two, you know, two people on our team do like citing work at this point. And there's a couple hundred. So yeah, that's a piece of what we do, but I would say very akin to what we do and what I've not found a direct corollary to yet, although I'm starting to try to reach out more into the community to collaborate. We hosted a bunch of actually hosted a bunch of people in our office that quote unquote competitor, I hate that term. How do we partner and collaborate? What do we do? But as far as deploying the asset like an air bus or Boeing airline industry, I don't see anyone doing that. We have a team that can take a reactor, turn it into a power plant, get it up and running and service it. If there's people in the world that can partner with us to do that more efficiently, are really only competitor in the Western world. We as an industry, it's China and they're winning. We're all losing. They're building 10 gigawatts a year in perpetuity. They're about to be the largest nuclear operator on planet Earth. And we as an industry, you've got to work together and lock arms and go to liver. And so I personally

45:01don't find anyone in this industry to be a competitor. Also, don't find anyone exactly yet doing what we're doing, but we're happy to collaborate. We're happy to, you know, I would say look at, look at our joint venture with Brookfield is a great example. You know, there's a lot, a trillion dollar allocator Brookfield can bring to bear. There's a lot Westinghouse to bring to bear. And on that specific joint venture, we're trying to be an enabler of that success. And I would say to those listening that are in the industry, don't hesitate to reach out to our team. We are going to win as an industry or we're not. And the consequences of not winning as an industry has much more impacts than people's balance sheets. It's our countries at stake. We need more power. And we need to work together to get that power online efficiently safely and at a high quality as quickly as possible. What do you think China does here that the US isn't doing? They started where we stopped in the 80s. So essentially, you look at the when we off-short manufacturing when they started in the 80s, when we slowed down the 80s. There's this idea in the US that technology

46:07is going to just save so many like. And then you look at people like, you know, who ran Redwood, this former CTO of Tesla, JB, it's maniacal execution. It took China decades to get to where they're at today. They've been doing this since the 80s. They've tried to build every reactor type on planet earth. You do it over and over again. You train people. You get better. You figure out how to whittle away costs. It's the repetition. So I would end with fleet scale deployment in this country. We've got to design once and build many. We need to get reactors out. Small reactors, micro reactors, also gigawatt scale reactors. And we need a print and print and print and print and keep getting these reactors in the field. And you will talk to some of the people that built the power plants down in Georgia. You had people out of school. People with not great college degrees necessarily. They were the most brilliant people in the industry now because they lived on that construction site. One year on one of these sites is like 10 years in a classroom. So China's done the hard work.

47:09They've enabled the industry. And this country needs to get back to building. And we need to build a fleet scale. And we need it not only double, but triple the current operating fleet we have today. And the only way to do that is to get in the field and build. So they built up the know how. I mean, it sounds like in other words, right? They've accumulated kind of human capital and know how over the over the decades to be able to execute now at this high level. Yeah, you look at France. They built 40 reactors in 15 years. It's interesting because this would be the case for SMRs. I mean, this would be the case like right from the must companies is that modularity wins and manufacturability wins. But it kind of sounds like you're saying ultimately nobody has figured out how to make these things manufacture. And so even though in theory modularity wins for SMRs. I can tell you I'm trying to decon I've got like drawings of cranes that China has on how they're moving like one of the largest cranes in the world to move large reactor vessels, you know, advanced rail cars. I mean, somehow China hasn't figured it out. So I don't know about you, but I

48:10personally didn't want to bet my career against China. I assume if there was a cheaper, more efficient way to do things and get things up and running, they have a pretty large country that built a lot of stuff at a very low cost. And they have a pretty good way of, you know, finding out maniacal execution. So I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying to this point China has and figured it out that's certainly going to happen. There will be a few of the micro and SMRs that work and we look forward to enabling their success and be a part of that. Hopefully they'll choose this as a partner. But it's all going to be hard. Manufacturing is hard. Feel directing things are hard. Thousands of people in a manufacturing facility is hard. Thousands of people on a construction site is not all of it. It's very challenging. We just got a roll up our seats, sleeves, do the work. And I'm a big all the above. So where we started earlier on in the energy portfolio and solar and wind have attributes, batteries and natural gas, nuclear has got attributes. But within sight of nuclear, you know, there's going to be applications where different reactors are going to play better. But we got to get in the field and do it. And my only thing with this

49:13company was can we not give up the thing we did before and act like we can't do it again? That to me just seems flatly unacceptable. We want to continue to act like we're the greatest country in the world and have the largest economy in the world. We've used the plane analogy a lot to talk about kind of nuclear development and how rolls, Royce or GE make the engines and then Boeing or Airbus make the planes. It does seem though there's a lot of like reasons why a company that makes the reactor would want to eventually bring project development in-house. And you're working with Brookfield actually in South Carolina. So what's your theory of like why it makes sense to have a standalone nuclear developer basically as opposed to this eventually being vertically integrated within the reactor companies? So again, I would say deployment operation services, anyone can develop a property and go permit it and get financing and you know, developing solar is vastly different than deploying these assets. I again, go back to the airline industry because it's one of the most heavily regulated industries. You need to be 100% all the time and probably one of the better

50:16corollaries to nuclear power not to say some wouldn't and they should. I mean, I hope. I hope so. And and just you know, but Westinghouse tried it before and that didn't quite work well. So others have tried it before and haven't. I would say having a team back to some point midstream we were talking about being objective. So I mean, personally again, I'm biased. I think there's value in having objective team that can look out and work through. So if you again, we throw this word develop, you know, what is a role? In many ways, we are trying to figure out depending on what region, what community, where we're working, you have local regional assets and supply chain, you have local regional construction teams and engineering teams, you have large EPC firms nationally and globally. And so what is our team's responsibility is to look at, okay, what is the IP, what are the blueprints, what are the drawings, what's the best supply chain to efficiently run those drawings through. And then how do we deploy these on sites with teams and so evaluating, we do have great

51:20constructors in the US. We have some wood to chop and get a bit better, but there's good constructors, but they're not good at everything, right. So understanding, you know, which EPC firm should take this portion of the work, which regional firm should take this portion of the work, what can we do to accelerate auxiliary buildings, annex buildings, road, that to us is the deployment aspect. So could these companies do all of this in house? Absolutely. And we hope they do. And some of them well, do we think there's going to be a place in the market for what we're doing? I would say all we're doing is what US utilities used to do in the 50, 60, 70s, which is you didn't have the reactor team, be the team to get it up and running and get it deployed. And so the question for us was, you know, does every US utility want to go build our team and invest in technology, or can we help enable our success? But to answer your question, head on, there will absolutely be a few companies that can figure it out full stack. And maybe we can be a part of their success as well in some ways,

52:20but we're going to be here for those that have a gap in the market and need our help. Well, we're going to have to leave it there. But Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on Chiffke. Thank you. And that will do it for us today. Before we go, though, I want to thank HeatMaps newest correspondent, Alexander Kaufman. Alex is probably the country's best nuclear reporter. He knows so much that's happening in the industry, in the field. He knows what's happening in the US, what's happening abroad in China. Of course, he writes, he maps morning newsletter, he maps AM. And he just has this commanding knowledge of the industry and was able to advise some part of this interview before it happened. And so if there's something you like about this interview, it is almost certainly Alexander's responsibility. If there's something you didn't like, it is probably my fault. We will be back next week with several new episodes of Chiffke. I'm very excited about them. Until then, though, Chiffke is a production of HeatMaps news. Our editors are

53:21Jillian Goodman and Nicolore Cella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lampur and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kromelow. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.