Managing advanced nuclear development during pandemic

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. The ratio boys tell the world there's a better way, today there's a better way. This is right Adams and it's time for another atomic show. What I've done is gathered five leading lights in the advanced nuclear world. Not everybody was able to get together at this time, so maybe we'll do another show at another time. But with me today, I have Caroline Cochran from Oklo, Pear Peterson from Chyros, Lars Jorgensen from Thorcon, Mark Mitchell from USNC and Carl Perez from Elysium. Each of these are leaders or founders or co-founders in advanced nuclear companies. And while everybody else in the world has been affected by lack of international travel and inability necessarily to work together in offices, they have also had the same effects. These are new companies and perhaps they've organized themselves in a way to allow them to work distributed remotely from the start. So what I'm going to do now is call each guest by name, let them say hello and a few words so you can get to know the voice and be able to recognize it and we'll move on to a conversation and we'll start with Caroline Cochran. Alright, thanks. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, my name is Caroline Cochran, the co-founder of Oklo. And we are doing a very small micro reactor, so we call it the Aurora Powerhouse. It produces about 1.5 megawatts electric and it's designed to help provide distributed and remote power source. Ok, great. Care Peterson. Hello, yes, I'm Para Peterson. I'm a co-founder and chief nuclear officer for the company, Cairo's Power. We're headquartered in Alameda. Currently have 142 employees working in Alameda as well as Al Alameda, New Mexico and our office in South Carolina. We're focused on the development of the fluoride salt cool, high temperature reactor. I think I'll have a few chances to talk about some of the characteristics of that reactor, but just quickly it uses high temperature fuel, the trisophule, but with a molten salt coolant, which means that there's very large thermal margins to fuel damage in both normal and operation and during accident transient. So I look forward to this discussion. Thanks. Great. Lars from Thorcon. Hi, I'm Lars Jorgensen. I'm with Thorcon. Our focus is really on building large power plants for the developing world that can be deployed quickly and can compete directly with coal or price. We're focused around having designed the power plant specifically to be suitable for building and shipyards. The lead on our team is someone who has built the four largest double hole oil tankers in the world. So we know how to design things to fit the shipyard well and look forward to this conversation. Mark Mitchell from USNC ultra safe nuclear corporation. Thank you. Yes. Hi everyone. My name is Mark Mitchell. I am responsible for the Micro reactors program at US and C. US and C ultra safe nuclear has been around since 2011. We've been developing our fully ceramic micro encapsulated or FCM fuel, which we are currently busy taking into operation inside our micro active power plant. The Micro reactor is a very small modular reactor, gas cooled and is aimed at about the five megawatt mark specifically for deployment in support of remote mines and communities in northern Canada. Okay. Great. And finally, we have Carl Perez from Elysium. Thank you, Rod. And thank you everyone for joining on this panel of discussion, which I'm sure the wind to be extremely interesting as we're going to be going around on multiple topics. A little bit about Elysium. Elysium is a technology company that was formed with a unique objective of ameliorating, bettering the quality of lives as humans all around the world and using energy dispatches as really the primary, the first focus in being able to create that vision of the world that we're so obsessed with. And it just so happens that if you really want to pump large amounts of energy all over the world and make sure that we complete eradicate energy poverty and pollution. A group of anti-nuclear, the strong entrepreneurs were able to come around and realize how nuclear generally have its real shot. And so we came up with a couple Navy nuclear designers who were working in advanced concepts groups and spent the three decades of their career over there just looking at all types of design that we could possibly imagine. And basically we got together and agreed on what we thought was going to be the future of nuclear. And so we've designed the reactor that although we believe it's part of the future, we basically designed it to be deployed in the mid 2020s. And in a fashion that these materials that are already qualified amongst other things that will most likely be talking about. For overall, thank you for having us. Great. Okay. So to summarize what we have here is some leading people designing reactor systems, power plant systems ranging from a very small 1.5 megawatt electric sodium cooled fast reactor with heat pipes to a 1000 megawatt reactor designed to be on a large structure very similar to a tanker. And in between there's molten salt cooled high temperature reactor using trisophules a gas cooled reactor using trisophules and let's see, I get everybody's and oh and and Alicia is a molten chloride salt very large reactor found that large reactor in the 1000 or so megawatt range that right, Carl. It's actually from 100 to 3000 megawatt thermal we use the same core. Okay. For all power output and all we do is add heat exchangers and pumps. Okay. Great. So we've got a big variety. We've got some real leading thinkers and what I want to do is start with a kind of a discussion about how you are managing technology development. In a time when you can't really travel very much and you are not able to go to meetings or maybe not don't have the responsibility to go to meetings and perhaps that allows you to have more time to do work. So Caroline, how about you start off the conversation? Thanks, Rod. Sure. I think like most people we use. video calling a lot in order to kind of capture that normal human interaction which includes facial expressions and gestures and pauses and all those kinds of things. We're pretty fundamentally built to be electronically based for lack of a better way of putting it. So being a new company and I imagine a number of others as well. We really focused on making sure all our design work, all of our cyber security's in place and everything to be able to do most things that we do remotely. So it was pretty seamless transition for our team. I wouldn't say it was necessarily quite so seamless for the NRC who obviously we're working a lot with. So that's been a very interesting time doing audits and our application acceptance review completely remotely was unanticipated and does present some challenges. I think it takes a hard thing and makes it a little harder. But I think everyone involved including the NRC has been working really hard to make sure that it could go as smoothly as possible. So that's probably been one of our most interesting aspects to these last couple of months is figuring out how to conduct audits in a completely remote fashion has been a totally new challenge for us and our company that exciting or interesting at least. Yeah, it should be worth mentioning that Caroline's company filed an application with the NRC I believe sometime in March and the acceptance review is scheduled to be done. A middle of next month or early next month. And so this has been a very interesting way to do this because you've a brand new type of application and a brand new way to review it and accept it. You guys are continuing to plow ground. Para sounds like you may have the largest of the teams available here managing 140 people remotely might be even more of a challenge and some can you describe I just working for you. Sure, I enjoyed doing that. The first thing is that because we do operate experimental facilities we've we've been maintaining basic operations here in Alameda. I'd also echo with Carolyn that that working with the NRC were very actively engaged our licensing team has seven topical reports we've received back draft SC safety evaluation reports for several of those top equals. And so we've been very actively engaged in working through pre application review topics with the NRC. I do think there's the the the interactions are different than then would have been historically the case. And we've been able to transition to the remote communication pretty seamlessly. But that becomes in part because first of all in our sea is focused on keeping stable staffing on teams. One of the the issues is that if you have a staffing staffing changing frequently it becomes challenging because you're in the position of re educating. Because of that there's there's strong ongoing relationships with respect to understanding of the technology that we can build on and distance communication is working pretty well there. The other thing that differentiates the company of course is that we do have substantial experimental facilities that we've deployed into the Alameda facility. Our testing team has been able to remain productive working remotely. They they are they've essentially transitioned to making plans for future tests. But but resuming operations for us is it's quite critical. And we're focused on being able to move forward and doing that. We're actually already ramping up under the new guidance from the health officer here at Alameda to resume some of the construction activities. And we should be moving back into testing within the next few weeks. One of the things I'd point out about this pandemic is that many of the things that we're working on doing to manage the pandemic with respect to things like our experimental program. Really are things that support in a longer term. The the goals of of reduce staffing on site. Remote monitoring health monitoring and for non safety related functions even remote control of power plants. And we're learning quite a lot about that. One of the key things that differentiates Kyros is is the testing program. And one of the main reasons that we're focused in that direction is that by using solid fuel with a low pressure molten salt. the majority of the technical issues that we need to address are non-nuclear, and they actually align themselves very well with iterative experimental testing and modeling development. Basically, it's very much the SpaceX model that we're following with respect to developing our technology. So getting operations resumed is something that we're really focused on right now, and I do believe that we're going to be able to respond very effectively. Actually, the learning from this pandemic with respect to what we should be doing in advance, nuclear is really, really valuable. And it'll be good to discuss further on this call. Thanks. Yeah, that brings up some very interesting topics. For example, it's great to be able to remotely control something that you've had a chance to build, but it sounds like you may have some things that you want to build, and control remotely. You have a chance to build yet because of some of the restrictions on actual presence and face-to-face and people on-site. Is that a pretty fair summary of? What I would say is that we've had to pause some of the activities, because the testing team for the last six weeks or so has not been able to go into the lab space. And instead, we have been working remotely. That, of course, is not great if your strategy is the iterative testing and development. But as I mentioned, we're also in the process of bringing back up and resuming operations. And moreover, a lot of what we're doing is amenable to actually the remote monitoring. So the on-site staffing requirement for Chai-Rastafunction is quite small, but we do need to get these operations restarted. There is a lot of really valuable learning that comes from this with respect to our long-term goals for advanced nuclear, which again, we know that one of the major elements of the cost of nuclear is the on-site staffing requirements for the existing reactors. And there's room to really bring those numbers down using the types of technologies that we're using right now, actually, to respond effectively to the pandemic conditions. Yep. And minimal on-site staffing doesn't necessarily, and certainly doesn't equal zero, though. So I would agree. I would agree. And of course, it depends on the size of your reactor. And I know that for OCLO, getting much closer to autonomous operation really is an important goal, and I'm sure Caron will be able to talk about that as well. Lars is, I recall you guys are much more international than some others on the call in terms of your primary market is well away from your home headquarters. So tell us a little bit about what's going on with your Indonesian interaction. Right. So it's about as far away from here as you can get. What we've been doing with Indonesia is they have a set of regulations. They've got three test reactors that they've had for decades. They've got regulations for light water reactors, but they don't have any regulations for advanced reactors. So they've been rewriting the regulations to make it to allow for non-light water reactors. And we just went through a review process with them looking over the changes they wanted to make, and added some additional changes to make it feasible for an MSR to be designed within their design rule, and their guidance. The other activities there that we have an office in Indonesia and Jakarta, so they work the politics and local fundraising and local press relations, which I actually just got back from there as the out pandemic was breaking out. I had to rearrange my travel to not go through Hong Kong to get home, but it's time to get back there. Okay. More things going in the cross-border interactions you have between the US and Canada. If I can digress them in, I think you asked about the last meeting we were at, or not being forced to go to meetings. And I was very interesting in retrospect, we missed a trick. At our last meeting we were at it was the prospectors and developers meeting in Canada, where we were speaking on a panel on advanced reactors, and I was of course speaking in support of our project that we're deploying at Chalk River. And one of the questions was, how do you respond to Black Swan events? And I was a bit slow because I didn't realize that we were actually right in the middle of a Black Swan event, because literally five minutes before I walked onto the panel, I'd finished a call where we basically decided to cancel our global directors meeting for the end of that week, and have everyone travel to their home base. And so I think we've probably learned a lot about understanding and anticipating these events, but on the other hand, I think we were extremely lucky, and we were lucky really in two or three fronts. So the first place where we were fortunate is that from sort of day one, USNC has been a global or multinational company. So we work on four continents, six countries. We have people working at the moment in seven time zones. So those are big numbers, and basically that means it's just impossible to get a normal hands meeting. But I think that the fact that we were already operating that way has made our transition a lot easier. The next area that we realized is, you know, being a nuclear company, we have pretty robust, a pretty robust management system and pretty robust IT systems that back that up. And that means that the transition to, you know, that our work is demonstrably online anyway effectively. And that there wasn't a transition. We didn't have to deploy new systems and educate and bring off a cup to speed, which I think was a great advantage. It actually created an opportunity. We know just because what it did is it broke down barriers between people in different offices. Because it's now as difficult for me to speak to the guy in the desk next to me as to speak to somebody half a world away. And what that means actually is an improvement of our interactions between offices, which is something I found particularly interesting. And I think is actually improving our efficiency a bit. You know, we're still managing to operate at a very high level of efficiency, which to be honest, surprised me. In terms of the progress in Canada, I think we've been very fortunate there, that there is a huge amount of stakeholder support in Canada for executing projects like ours. And that there is a very strong level of support to keep things moving even when it is difficult and to switch channels and to work other ways. And so we've, you know, we're currently as of a week ago in a public comments period in part of the scoping analysis with the CNSC for our license to prepare site and environmental assessment. And it's going along very nearly to plan. There was a slight delay while the regulator transitioned to a digital and online approach to working. But that's pretty much back on track now and we don't anticipate any significant delays. And perhaps in closing, I think this is also we found quite advantageous. Because in fact, we can bring more of our people to bear now that everyone's working remotely on things like a public interaction, where we can, you know, because everyone is interacting remotely, it doesn't matter that we don't have someone in that area of Ontario, you know, that day. So I think overall, it's going surprisingly well. Thank you. That sounds encouraging. So for those of you who are interacting regularly with the government and regulators and making adjustments, can you give us a sense as how supportive the government agencies have been and how well they're adjusting to working in a different way. I spent some time in government and spent some time in the IT world and hope that things have changed quite a bit in the 10 years since I left. Well, I could jump in on that because as I mentioned, we've been working pretty extensively within the regulatory commission. I think that one of the interesting points, there's been a few hiccups and some of the transitions that are just natural because people are learning how to conduct calls and stuff. I mean, for example, here we don't have the facial cues in our discussion, so we sort of have to jump in as people have been moving on there. But the NRC was already obligated to make public the public parts of their meetings. And so they had the full infrastructure. They have had the full infrastructure and have used it for quite some time to allow people to join meetings remotely. And so really, this has been more just a transition in the degree to which we're using these communication tools for remote meetings. The other piece, of course, involves things like the on-site type of work and of course, there, things have been scaled back and we're still learning how to manage those dimensions. But today's NRC is not that in our sea of a decade ago or two decades ago. They've been evolving significantly and it's been actually remarkably effective for us to transition to the remote work with respect all of our pre-application work. The other thing I'd say that is actually working better is meetings that are mixed between people local and people remote tend to be very difficult for the people that remote. When the meetings are entirely remote, then it flows much better. So for me, it's actually been an improvement. It definitely removes the advantage of being able to jump in and raise your hand in front of the guy who's running the meeting. So, I like to add as well as just so people know more or less, Alicia and Tiffany have largely been uninterrupted because we used to have a large presence, a very large fixed overhead, 30 engineers in the same room in Boston. In fact, we flipped away from that model because we wanted to avoid having to cover large overheads of experimental facilities and so all the work that we do on a technical basis that we can't handle internally is being done with the national labs. So we've spoken about the NRC, but there's something to say about the national labs and how they've really been rising to the occasion. In fact, when it comes to modeling and simulation, obviously we're able to maintain all that work, but those facilities are also considered essential. So there are certain areas of the facility, especially on experimental work, that are still there. I have to say, I've been pleasantly surprised by the extent to which DOE's national labs has really tried to make sure that the transitional is seamless, especially when working with vendors. And something else to note is we may not be going to as many meetings, but please comment on those, but I feel like there have been more meetings. And the knowledge is getting out there, but we don't have to travel nearly as much. And there's so much time that is lost in the process of going to the conferences and coming back and that you've become obviously more productive as... as Mark mentioned. But in terms of just the NRC in general, I also have a feeling that, and this is based on conversation, that having less water cooler talk, some people working from home have actually given them also the more productivity that actually can help us in certain cases. So it's very easy to look at all the negatives, but I do think there's a lot of pauses take in here. And our economy is clearly not as resilient as we thought it was, and not just from the perspective of where the money is allocated in terms of industries, but also how we operate. And I think this is also just a rude awakening and to continue on, I think it was first point. This is a really important lesson for the future of how we operate in the future. And I really hope that we also get the proper lesson learned out of this experience. Perhaps a whole other question. So the next area I want to talk a little bit about is some of the interactions you've had with customers. And maybe some of you who are a little bit further along can talk to us about whether or not your customers are still or potential customers are still accessible, whether they've been completely distracted and are not really shopping much these days, or if there are people that are more interested in finding out what are some of the clean alternatives to the way we've been doing things. And I guess we again will start with Caroline because you guys are probably closer to getting to customers than anybody because you got a pretty small product. Thanks for that. Yeah. And just to, I didn't really pitch in much on that last one, but I think ending with Carl's comment was a great way to end because I do think there's a lot of positives there. And one thing, you know, I think most companies are not just interested in the tech for the tech sake, but partially because of what it can contribute for the environment and changing, you know, hopefully swapping out dirty sources for clean air, you know, mission free, nuclear. And I think one of their big source of problems is how many flights everyone's taking. And it's a really great point that Carl was making as far as, you know, a lot less travel, a lot more information transfer instead of, you know, people transfer. And I think that's definitely true. My point when I was mentioning earlier about being in the audit with the NRC and how that that is a little more difficult, it is a little different than just submitting documents and having meetings in usual circumstances and audit looks like they come out to your facilities, they interview employees, they maybe sit by your computer and you kind of dig through files and kind of show those. So it does, it is hard to translate that to a screen, but I think we're definitely learning and there as well and it has forced a focus that I think wouldn't have been there either. So I think to his point in keeping optimism there is there are some really interesting and key benefits that we're seeing. On the customer side, I think people's interest, you know, in electricity and clean electricity has not waned at all. And if anything, I think when people are at home more and less of their electricity is being provided proportionally by their workplaces or schools or wherever else, you know, they're using it at home now and I think that's putting more burden on the individual. And so if anything, individuals are thinking about that more. I, you know, our customer at OCLO is not right now the utility. We're planning on owning and operating. So that really means we have a very different business model from a lot of developers. And so we're not necessarily trying to, you know, just make a design and then hopefully a utility wants to buy it. We're able to talk in a sense more directly to customers. And sometimes those customers are utilities, small utilities in particular. But I would say that hasn't flowed what I'd call customer interest. And do you think of investors as being a potentially very important interested party? I don't think it's slowed that in any way either. I think if anything, too, having a product that can be autonomously operated or very simply operated has become even more important during these times where people are very concerned about, you know, large groups of people having to work together and things like that. I think, I think what we're working on it is maybe ever more important and valuable to people. Terrific. I'm going to interrupt the flow here for a second and introduce Canon Bryant, who is one of the key members of terrestrial energy. He's just joined the call. I can't everybody else has introduced himself. We've been talking about working remotely under the conditions of the pandemic restrictions on travel and those kinds of things. So, well compare, I don't know what is your current interaction with customers, or you guys more in the technology development phase of your enterprise? Thank you, Rod. This is a very good question. We interact regularly with senior executives at utilities around the United States. The target market for chiaras power is the United States. The challenge, of course, is that natural gas prices are quite low here. When we're meeting with the executive advisory board, I think that there is definitely strong interest and appetite in nuclear power. People are concerned that reliability and in such is an issue with intermittent renewables. They do recognize that transitioning to low carbon sources is something that is going to happen in the coming decade to two decades. The key, issue for nuclear has been and remains the high costs of both the construction and the operation of plants. What we know is that those costs are not associated in any way with resource consumption. If you break down and ask how much steel and concrete and uranium and other stuff, you need an order to build nuclear plants and operate them. The quantities are tiny compared to other energy sources. The high costs are really associated with inefficient use of capital and of manufacturing and of construction resources. The ability to bring down those costs, I think, is the thing that the market finds to be the most interesting and important thing to accomplish. That's a major focus of what Cairo's power is working on. Is addressing these cost challenges through the iterative testing? Bringing the safety on much closer to the fuel and the fuel that is feasible with the type of fuel and coolant that we're working with. Then also, moving towards ability to do have much more proactive online monitoring of the health of your components, the way that you get there is with extensive testing. That's a major element behind the testing program that we have for major components that are needed to make the reactor operate. The key thing I think when you're looking at utility scale, generation or grid scale, is the issue of cost. The utilities are very interested because they see the potential that those costs can be brought down. There's fundamental reasons why that's feasible. It's a matter of technology development to get there. There is appetite for new nuclear if you can hit cost targets in the United States. Of course internationally as well. And I think that everybody on this call from what I know of your companies is focused on addressing that gap between what the bill of materials costs and what the completed plant costs is a much bigger gap in nuclear than in any other energy production. That's where the opportunity lies though. I agree with that. You can actually find that factor in terms of what the nuclear thing will cost compared essentially the identical function or complement non-nuclear. So converging those together, there's tremendous potential for us to bring down construction capital costs. Then the other part of course is the operations and achieving staffing levels that are closer to what's considered to be appropriate for fossil units. Which again is surprisingly almost a factor of 10. And just something I'll add on this. This is the best time to speak with customers because they're dealing with complications right to COVID and their resilience is being tested. Their plan for emergency preparedness of all sorts are being tested. And what's really important as I'll just remind at the beginning of the call I mentioned that the way we started the company at Elysium was from the mentality of if we want to succeed we have to avoid failure. And part of avoiding failure was the first thing we did was we didn't even choose a reactotype. And you'll notice it's in my intro. I didn't even emphasize the reactotype because we're technology-agnostic. But the reality is we approach customers and said what do you guys want? What do you want? Flexibility, nuclear waste burning. We ask them what they wanted. And coming back to the current situation, so we're currently really trying to figure out the economics of this. But the reason why we have different modules that are 200 megawatts thermal each, if I'm sorry 500 megawatts thermal each and 200 megawatts electric, it's used for electricity. The basically you have six of them and each one can provide a different end use. And so one of the things that are really being discussed right now is you see electricity consumption decreasing. And so how do you make sure that a plant can keep running at full capacity and make sure the utility is still benefiting from sales? So a lot of it has been looking at using bypass turbine bypass to shift the use of the heat to the soundation or water filtration, hydrogen production, and basically ramping the heat wherever it needs to be used. The only issue from an economic perspective is seeing how if you have a type of infrastructure where we have code generation or at least different end uses being integrated into your plant, if those are not operating 100 percent or at full capacity or at almost full capacity all the time, can you justify the investment in those end uses? But it just goes to show that this is a really interesting time when it comes to talking with utilities about the ideal plant design and how to better their economics, especially in instances like this one. One of the things that today's market is showing is how volatile fuel prices can be with changes in demand. And it may if one was to sit down and try to design the cheapest power source available today, you might put in a diesel engine because oil prices are but of course today's prices are not necessarily reflective of the future. What are your customers talking about in terms of what are future fuel prices going to be? Well, I think in our case the dominant fuel in Indonesia is coal and they're exporting a fair portion of it, but they're also looking ahead and saying they are going to run low by mid 2030s. So their choices are more limited. They don't have the huge natural gas pipelines that the US has. So we've had a good reception with them. In fact, just before I went on that trip, they had a blackout for eight hours in the capital city, which was driven primarily by the lack of black start capability. So suddenly we became popular in the press because that's a standard feature for ours and the eight hour blackout was kind of a shock to the capital city. So we've had good reception with the customer. This is this is pair. You raise an important point with respect to fuel costs. And I think the neat thing about nuclear forces that uranium is very affordable. The current fuel costs for light water reactors is about 0.4 to 0.5 cents per kilowatt hour all in. That's the uranium enrichment manufacturing. If you convert that to sort of a $1,000,000 per million Btu, it actually works out to about half a dollar per million Btu, we consider in the United States natural gas to be really cheap at $3.00 and these days it's actually dropped down to $2 because of the reduced demand. So what we know is that the cost of nuclear fuel is not the issue right now. It's really the cost of the construction and operation of nuclear plants that we need to focus on fixing first. If you don't fix those big cost drivers, having cheap fuel and nuclear doesn't help at all because it's just not the thing that's driving the cost of electricity generation with nuclear power these days. Nor for the foreseeable future. A future world where uranium is really expensive and you actually care about that is a world that means we've succeeded wildly in terms of making nuclear work well. So we do have to work on fixing these other problems that are associated with the construction and operating cost. At that point then we also know how we can increase the efficiency with which we use uranium and thorium as well. And that's really I think one of the longer term objectives. Yeah, I agree with that. I do want to invite Canon to maybe put a little bit of real world experience into this conversation. The price of fuels can be very volatile even when we're talking about the price of uranium, which in recent history or at least in memorable history, jumped from $16 a pound to $137 a pound in a very brief period of time, which is one of the reasons why Canon's on this call. I say, go ahead, Canon. Yeah, as a matter of fact, that's true. I think what Rod is referring to is that he must know that when I started a uranium mining company back in 2004 and when I did so, the price of uranium was $16 a pound. And within less than three years, the price of uranium had gone up to $136, $37 a pound. So just by sheer dumb luck, we were very successful in our company. We did not anticipate that kind of price action. But if you will maybe indulge me in making a little bit of a fringe observation with respect to fuels and events nuclear, you're quite right in that fuel price volatility is a massive factor in global markets. And I would not attribute that so much to the uranium price because as I think it was up here who pointed out, even if the uranium price fluctuated quite a lot, even like a a tenfold increase, like we saw in the second half of the 2000s, it really doesn't have all that much of an impact on the cost of electricity from nuclear power. But the fuel price volatility on fossil fuels is very real and has a tremendous impact, even small movements in the prices of a barrel of oil has a massive impact. And the thing about fuel price volatility that maybe some people don't realize that are not involved in capital markets is that fuel price volatility translates directly into risk. And when you have higher risk in the system, it means that the cost of capital is higher. You have to adjust the cost of capital to adjust for that risk. And if the cost of capital is higher, that has a massive impact throughout the entire system, even a few basis points of the higher cost of capital just thrashes its way throughout the entire global system of capital markets. So here's a scenario that potentially have a tremendous impact that most people would maybe not be able to foresee. And that is if you can use high temperature nuclear systems like the large system or our system, and I'm sure some of the other ones, some of the other ones being represented on this call, can of course use that high temperature power to make synthetic fuels. And this is still something which is a bit on the fringes because the economics are still being worked out. But if you can make synthetic fuels at a cost that is competitive with petroleum based fuels, so I'm talking about gasoline aviation jet A diesel. You can make those fuels using high temperature nuclear and a feedstock of water. And let's say maybe flue gas from the cement factory or whatever it is. Then those feedstocks, let's think of them as commodities because what they are is they're going into the factory and they're coming out the other end as jet fuel or whatever some useful industrial commodity fuel. And of course water and flue gas those types of things as commodities they have no fuel price volatility whatsoever. So what this process might allow you to do, what might allow the nuclear innovation sector to do is to in fact make transport fuels that are carbon neutral because you're using carbon which would otherwise have gone being emitted into the atmosphere. And you can eliminate fuel price volatility. So you can take all the geopolitical and all the other factors that go into the price of the barrel of oil and you can strip out that fuel price volatility and what you then do is you are removing your eliminating system risk and you are eliminating what they call the beta, which is just a fancy word for price volatility from the cost of capital. And if you do that it will have a seismic impact on global capital markets in the sense that a major element of cost is being removed and that's really important. An important part of synthetic fuels that a lot of people don't think about. So a little bit a little bit some potential rod but I hope that's a useful answer. That's good. The reason I brought that up is I do want to make sure people recognize that you need to have some folks in your company who are paying attention to various risk factors and to bring up the point of the cost of capital. We all remember that back in the early days of atomic energy in the US when we were building plants and suddenly interest rates climbed into the double digits. Many of the plants that came online in the late 1970s early 1980s or mid 1980s had total cost were two thirds of the total cost of the plant when it's at a banker's pocket in terms of interest rates. And I believe I just saw something online to the effect that pinkly see about two thirds of its total cost is really the cost of addressing financial risk in that project. So an awful lot of that gap between material, bill of materials and total cost of plant is in financial risk. Just a continue. I think it's important to make a point that the uncertainty that you currently see with fuel prices. I don't think we're doing it justice if we just look at the demand piece. There's the supply element as well with Russia and Saudi Arabia playing around with their fuel supply as well. And the question is which oil? If we're talking about oil futures they're supposed to be delivered at the end of the month then yes you're looking at at wall prices. But in a day our energy infrastructure really relies on oil and gas. And if anything you really want to look at how there are states like South Dakota, whose economy is driven by the extraction and transports of fuel for the most part. You have countries like Nigeria whose net exports are about. Their economy is about 90% driven by oil and for sure. And so I think what the uncertainty has also done is help us look at who are the most vulnerable to the clean energy condition. And how do you make sure that those people are also part of it and reaping economic benefit and value because those are the real people who are going to oppose any change. And uncertainty is great. If you're in the capital market you want uncertainty. You want volatility because yes that's where there's risk. That's where there's the money. And I guess what you really want is a level of uncertainty that you can somewhat control. So you want volatility. You just don't want too much volatility. You want predictable volatility. And I think what we're investors sit right now is they ought to be thinking about how they want to diversify their risk. Especially on a technology perspective because when you look at nuclear power plants sure that they have a high upfront capital cost but you have a lot of infrastructure that has a high upfront capital cost. But when you go to the finance fears of nuclear power plants those are pension funds. And I think what pension funds and sovereign wealth funds among other major funds who have to allocate capital in a way that is much less risky are looking at the fuel prices that are jumping around right now and telling themselves well we ought to invest in power infrastructure. I hope at least that's part of what they're saying and hope this call actually helps them get to that conclusion but we should be investing in nuclear power plants that are going to give us stable $500 million and again that's in the context of a one gigawatt plant but stable $500 million revenues every year. And something I just want to talk about fuel for is at least we actually have the problem flip upside down in the sense where our fuel essentially lasts forever because we're a liquid fuel and obviously it takes us 30 times more time to consume the fuel from abroad and then it is than before years as spent in a light water reactor. And why is that important? Because the lifetime of our plant is not reliant on the component. It's relying on the fuel because if the fuel can last 120 years before full consumption essentially you need to be replacing your components. So what we're also looking at is the refurbishment model which has actually been quite quite successful in Canada especially with the pension fund. for these very financial reasons. And so I think we also need to just take a much broader look and not try to get to the weeds of oil versus renewables. But we really need to show investors, we need to show states, we need to show all stakeholders of the energy transition discussion, how they're going to win money with nuclear coming online. And I think this is the best time to make that case. Mark, I think it's a very good question, but I would point out that I think, we are continuously in touch with clients and have busy with them for a long time. In fact, you know, a lot of interest are first sort of iterative intent from a potential off-taker. As we also completely believe that we are selling either power or energy as a service, not planned, was dated 2014. So this isn't the first change or even radical change in fuel pricing we've been through. And I absolutely think I need to endorse cannons analysis that actually volatility is the problem. And I think that my summary of hard work is that nuclear allows our clients to create certainty. And that is an absolutely very hard thing to put a value on. I'm sure you can, as Canon highlighted, but I think that that gives them a certain certain operation. So the fact that recently fuel prices have dropped is not really impacting our discussions with clients because a price that can go down can go up again. And I think that they're, without exception, all the clients we speak to in this space are a mature and experienced enough effectively, not to be as focused on near-term trends as more the longer-term view and strategic objectives that they're pursuing. Things like decarbonization, getting off fossil fuels, you know, energy security, perhaps more than just price security. So those are my thoughts. I just add, sorry for this, but I mentioned the Russia and Saudi Arabia production playing an important factor in the volatility of fuel prices today. And I hope that utilities, but just the US in general and other countries are thinking about the importance of energy in the payments. And making sure that their supply chain or prices are not adversely affected by how other actors are behaving. That's an important point. I think one thing I'd like to wonder about, a lot of the oil and gas companies have recognized that their business models are for want to have a better word fraught with risk going forward. Have any of you had any interest or discussions with companies who've up to now have been energy companies focused on extracting hydrocarbons was maybe a little bit of green washing in wind and solar. Have any of those companies started to say, I wonder if we should look at this uranium and thorium playing again? Rob, that's a good question. I have some interesting background on that. This is Para. I was talking with a congressional staffer who represents Texas. And of course, they have a deep investment in fossil fuels asking why should I support anything to do with nuclear? And I think that the answer is that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with fossil fuels. The big issue is our practice of mining or drilling and then burning them to generate heat. And it's not logical to use fossil fuels for that purpose when you can get heat from the vision of uranium and thorium and not have to emit a lot of pollution into the environment. But if you step back just a second, then you realize that if you're not burning fossil fuels, there's many other beneficial things that we can use with hydrocarbons that we extract from the earth that range from making fertilizers to making plastics. To also, for very high value applications, such as say aviation, it can be logical to burn them. And so the success of nuclear doesn't mean that we don't use any fossil fuels in the future. It's just that we use them for higher value applications. And the value added from extracting them and using them is much larger than it is currently. Because frankly, burning fossil fuel to make heat is about the dumbest thing you can do. And we seem to keep doing that as everybody seems to know. I just had the most of the game. Sorry, Lars. I think being focused on the developing world, we also see a different perspective. Indonesia has about 10% of the power per person that the US has. So it's not just a question of can we continue burning fossil fuels, but does anybody believe we can create five times the current supply of fossil fuels? I think people understand that that is not going to be happening. So it's a concern over, as their economy grows, where are they going to get the fuel to keep growing their economy? And the lack of electricity actually is costing them. As companies are moving out of China, they're going to Vietnam because Vietnam has to be a better electricity supply. So it's recognized that it's holding back their economy. And that is in part because they just can't build enough coal plants. So it's growing the supply of electricity, not just being able to shift it from where we're at now to using nuclear, but having to expand it by four or five acts of worldwide. This is where I kind of come back to Canada's notion of potential being really important. And the best way to accomplish that transition is by bringing in the fossil fuel industry. And interestingly enough, the fossil fuel players are increasingly interested in nuclear and in advance nuclear. And what's even more interesting is that they're interested in it because they're not cannibalizing any one of their existing lines of work. They're not cannibalizing any of their existing R&D. They're not eating at their own market share. So being able to actually make that diversification plane to nuclear is quite logical to them. The difficulty is really for them to carry out the appropriate due diligence because they see all these reactor concepts. And they don't really know how to tell a difference between one or the other. Now, they have the fifties for one over the other based on temperatures, based on, I know that for us, we're very heavy on chemical engineering with a liquid fuel. So that's something that has caused a created conversation in terms of human component. But I saw that mark you were going to say something. I don't want to hog the mic. But you want to interject? Well, I was just going to back it up. And I was going to say that in my experience today, you have power companies and your energy companies. And the term energy company actually refers to a petrochemical company effectively. And I hope that this will sort of over time allow for a convergence where energy companies can become truly energy companies. And you know, in other discussions with energy companies, it looks very encouraging that I think we're probably a long way away from meaningful action. And I look forward to that being a hostage to fortune and maybe being proven wrong. But I think there are a lot of opportunities here for energy companies to become sort of full-scale energy companies. I just think we need to account into our numbers the fact that there is a cost. So we can propose a very compelling LCOE. But the energy companies, those are in oil and gas, also added the displacement cost. That is factored on top of whatever we're providing. And that is something we really need to be aware of. And it's why I really, really recommend leveraging the trillions of dollars I've been put in subsidies in the oil and gas industry. And using that to our benefit in some way or another, whether it's essential development. But I saw that Caroline was going to say something. Yeah, that's important. Yeah, I think to the general topic, I think how we allocate energy expenditures and investments and how quickly things can come up. I think that's been core to OCLO-C-C-C is showing that that can happen quickly. And starting with a very small plant to really demonstrate that and then growing from there. So our first product is not intended to drop the air last. I think that's been key for us being able to raise a true venture lead series A, really the first revision to do that. And I think what our investors, especially the ones that didn't invest, this first round and our interest didn't invest in the next one, what they wanted to see was, is I think many see an incredible regulatory risk. So they see applications started and never finished or are reviews rather. And they see that the ones that do finish sometimes can take on the order of a decade between how it used to be done. And I think corner art thesis was trying to do regulations in a very different way, show that that piece can be be risked. And then also development costs and finance risk is also huge. So when you're talking about a billion dollar plant and any delay really adds up quickly, especially depending on interest rates. Now we have really great interest rates right now. But still risks on a multi billion dollar plant are huge. Even just looking at Google, this is kind of a black swan event who could have predicted this kind of delay. But here they are faced with months of delays, potentially as a result of coronavirus, even as they're still admirably trying to finish up that project. So I think early on in OCLO, and of course, I'm from Oklahoma. So I had some connections with oil and gas executives, billionaires, whatever, and talk to them. And they were like, well, just to build one well, I've got to get five different government signatures. How many signatures do I have to get to build a plant like yours? And that's colloquial discussions between friends. But I think that is a very real consideration. How many signatures are we going to have to get? How many months can that delay something? Talking with even very small utilities in Alaska, they would describe how it took them a decade to build a very small hydro project. So it's not just nuclear that faces these issues, but it's a huge risk. And if you can get a natural gas client up and running a couple of years, I think, to Paris Point, it's not even just about fuel costs. It's about other things, too. And construction costs, I think operation costs, there's so many different bytes of the Apple that we have to take all at once. And I think those are things that OCLO's tried to de-risk early on with a very small and simple product, but try to scale that hopefully for the whole industry. These kind of arguments that we're making now in our application process with the NRC are ones that could really be cost drivers, whether it's security staffing or operational staffing, or how you do QA, so many different things that people's eyes will start to glaze over, but all those things end up being really important in the end. So I just want to really highlight, it gets back to economics, stupid. So it's really important to be able to license quickly, to build quickly, and to not have quite some of its capital tied up in order to build a plant. And that's the things that we've tried to tax in order. I can't imagine what we'd like to be within months of completing a 12 to 14 year long project and be faced with an unlimited number of months of delay. Or a... Unknown number of months of delay. I thought I I hoped it to people that Georgia power can figure that out That's an awfully big project to be at a point where they are and and seeing oh Well, we don't know when we can get people on site to finish up these last tests The risk of such a large project. It's such an you know opportunity time is gotta be pretty pretty scary Hey, I know that all of you are our busy people and it's it's early on Monday morning I probably don't want to keep you too much longer Like to move towards a conclusion and give each of you an opportunity to You know three or four minutes max of Final thoughts and we'll start with Lars. Oh, thanks Rod for bringing us together It's an exciting time. We're pulling together. I think there are several companies that have Tackled this problem, you know, I think we all see the the basic problem that the Current nuclear industry has gotten itself to be way too expensive And we're tackling it for different markets in our case. Thorcon. We're tackling it based on Using the large factories that exist in the ship building yards Where we have already built things that are twice the size of our power plant in less than a year so Building quickly is something we know how to do and know how to execute on I think that's very important when you come to a large capital project that has a large political risk Time is both money and risk and so We're excited to see how things are moving forward. Mark. Thank you. Yeah, Tiffany. It's the sentiment There's been a very interesting discussion. You know, I take away Is well embedded in us and sees operations And that is it's it's more beneficial to do it than to talk about it and we really need to as a collective Work very much on executing on these ideas Because I'm absolutely convinced and we all are that these are absolute game changes But as long as they remain ideas, they're not going to make a difference there Thank you, Rod. This has been a really fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you convening Together this group. There's very bright and capable people here The thing that we're really looking at I think is is how to accelerate innovation In the nuclear technology field. It's a regulated field For very good reasons, but there's other regulated fields where where innovation occurs much more routinely Things such as is the biomedical field one of the ones we benchmark off quite a bit Is aerospace in particular looking at companies like space decks that that have been able to achieve These major cost savings that that also that fundamentally nuclear can do this as well so The collective effort of the advanced reactor community and working together to do things such as get advanced reactor design criteria Regulatory guides in place on the NRC This this is what opens up the potential for us to do the same thing in the nuclear field And if we can get some closer relationship between the cost of the resources and the cost of a nuclear energy production That has enormous implications for the future of humanity So it's actually really exciting to be working in this field because there's so much potential for us to Work and make this world a better place and and that's one of the things that The the ability to enable the world's transition to clean energy That's that's something that can get you up in the morning That certainly is the mission for chairos power and that's what gets our 142 people Up and going every day and and online Working hard to advance the technology to commercial deployment. Thank you. Caroline Thanks, Rod and thanks everybody. I think to your point You know starting with peeking this whole podcast off was that there's a lot going on Despite all all the Change worlds as coronavirus and shelter in place I think that's definitely true for ochle. I know it's happy to share a little bit about that today We'll be continuing to try to share more. I think we'll have some kind of webinar or something to explain How the application is going so people might see that on social media But think both us and everyone on this call shown that there's a lot going on and if anything We're almost working harder and faster, so it's an exciting time. Oh It's your turn. So you you all heard my voice quite a bit today I'll try to keep it short at the end of day. Thank you all for for making it I think that the more frequently we speak The more important is not just to the audience But even to ourselves and being able to communicate amongst ourselves as vendors say things with similar challenges We face every day is just tremendously important And especially to all the vendors to be that are that are in the audience Like me five years ago, but but the thing I really want to end on is We spoke about a bounce nuclear and what's going to take really to accelerate and get the ball rolling and as an industry We've been reacting to news Well, we've been looking at the situation then and reacting and We have some of the brightest people not the brightest people in our industry The brightest engineers now. I guess frustrated when I say the sky is blue and I get corrected and called a liar to the sky blue instead of blue So you know it does have its inconvenience as a sign But at the end of the day I think we also need to take a step back and look at history and open-fruitment spoke about how the dish the difficulties with government is that there's no there's a no mechanism for recognition of error And when you make mistakes as a government you expand programs because they were not enough fun If you're a company and you fail or you run out of money It's you had a bath strategy or a bath technology or a bad vision or a bad but there's there's a recognition of error and in 1973 Alvin Weinberg was fired from Oak Ridge National Lab for for being Concerned about solid fuels and and he advocated again for for moles are reactant. It's just funny how sodium paste rack is were favored and 50 years later We're making almost the exact same assessment with MSR funding going down with in view and so I think what's really important to make sure that the government has Not just the right reception But has the right information when it's making those decisions and the last thing I want to say is The one thing that could really kickstart the nuclear industry is incentivizing mergers and acquisitions in our space Because innovation has been done within large corporate with very large overhead And you this is evidence with the f-way that just came out which basically asked 160 million dollars To be able to complement that with 160 million dollars and spend that money over two years and that's that That's not necessarily the best business model or for the future of nuclear And as you can see with the NRC audit with Oaklow and being able to do all your work in DOE national labs is one way of Counterfact that and I think we should really be looking at How we want the nuclear industry to look after this this this COVID situation And part of that is going to be ingrained in the lesson learn But I really hope we look at it from from the proper perspective and that is not just the anthropological Perspective of climate change and decarbonization, but also what have we done wrong? What can we learn from the Empire program? What can we learn from so many programs that were launched but failed or or Or at least the nuclear renaissance that that failed and I really think we just need to do things differently and that comes down to the mindset that we have Long winded by my apologies. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Carl and Ken and you were the last in so you're all to get to be the last out Hey, thanks for having a apologize again for Getting me times on I would just carry on that the messages of hope that we can hear from from the other panelists I Observe that you have invited all the top Top companies on on this call and in my own personal view people ask me you know which company should I keep an eye on and Those companies are participating in this call today my outlook similar to the others on this call is in the short term and Long term are tremendously helpful right trajectory in regulation and Government support in the form of in the form of grant funding or loan guarantees and Even capital markets are starting to Get the slightest hint that this is This is an emerging sector in emerging markets So I really feel like we're going to a few of us or are in the process of bridging value of death feel very Very helpful about our own situation Our own prospects for Crossing that that family. I projected onto my colleagues on this call as well. I think there's a lot of great great chances for success here and long term. I would just Maybe try to suggest to everybody if you haven't figured out already. We have a We have such such an extraordinary opportunity to to be part of an to be part of a an industry which can really be the Premier technology substitution for fossil fuels over the next 10 to 20 years and beyond on a massively grand scale As as we all probably know everybody sure everyone on this call knows 85% of global energy is still fossil fuels high temperature nuclear systems have have the capability the total capability of If the world really wants to substituting for all of that fossil fuel capacity in various different modalities Including synthetic fuels which I'm becoming a rather local proponent of and Industrial heat of course making industrial products out of hyper-temperature nuclear drive and all the other ways in which we can capture Maybe up to 50% of total global energy in 50% of total global energy 20 years from now It's going to have no resemblance to 50% of total global energy today so The opportunity is I know we all know and I'm not telling anybody anything new But I just like to just repeat it for drill We all have such an extraordinary opportunity here and I hope We really do all rise to it and not short change ourselves and not be Like the conventional nuclear power industry being downtrodden and quiet and in sealant about in fact outgoing and proud and ambitious and that we will we will capture those markets And yes, we will have to I think it's inevitable. We have to play nice with with the Some of the traditional industries like like the petroleum industry We need them For some of these things and that's fine and The heavy infrastructure and the know how and so on but In the end at the end of the day it will be Nuclear fishing that's driving global energy markets and not hydrocarbon combustion Wow All right, and that's a charging charging remark Everybody go forth and do good work and and I hope that Goose pimples have started to subside from cannons inspire closing. Thank you all for participating. I do apologize to those leading companies that were not able to make this call, new scale, ex-energy, and there may be a few others that I missed. But for everyone, everyone who's here, thank you for your time. And I'm so encouraged by hearing how you are progressing in spite of or even because of the challenges you've been faced in the last few months. So once again, thanks a lot. Thank you, Rod. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. There's a better way to deal with this better way.