Tyler Bernstein, CEO Zeno Power

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. The nation's rise till the world, there's a better way, today, and there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and it's time for another Atomic Show. My guest today is Tyler Bernstein, the CEO of XenoPower. And when he starts talking, I'm going to ask him to tell us what XenoPower is. Hi, Tyler. Hey, Rod, thanks for having me today. I've set you up. Now, tell us about XenoPower. What is XenoPower? What do you do and what are your plans for the near future? Absolutely. Well, Xeno is a company that a group of students and a professor started at a Vanderbilt University. back in 2018 really focused on this issue of access to energy and off-grid regions, region of growing importance from space, maritime to Arctic environments. And developing a technology, radioisetope power systems to provide clean, reliable power in these domains. And radioisetope power systems are small-scale nuclear devices about the size of microwave ovens, that convert the heat from decaying radioisetopes directly into electricity. Again, in isetope, with a long half-life producing heat over decades, convert that to electricity. You have small boxes, a generator electricity for decades at a time. And this is not a new technology. NASA has used radioisetope power systems for decades since the 1960s to power long endurance deep space missions, Voyager, Cassini, Mars, Rovers, along with the US Air Force and Space Force. The US Navy and Air Force policies thresholded power remote sensors and naval buoys. And when we really started Xenos in these dual-satisfied policies that, hey, there's this growing need again for clean, reliable power in space on the ground under sea in these areas of growing importance. And be that if we can commercially build a radioisetope power system that uses an available abundant fuel product, but in a lightweight form factor, that that would open up broad usability in these environments. And at a very exciting point in the company now with some terrific contracts under our belt, you know, announced recently contracts with the US Space Force and NASA to really build and deliver our first operational systems, as early as 2025, and begin scaling them for these broad opportunities for government and commercial customers soon afterwards. Are all radioisetopes a candidate for radioisetope power supplies or there are certain characteristics that make one type of isotope or one type of radiation better than another? Yeah, it's a really great question. And when we started early on at Vanderbilt, this was really the first thing that we investigated was what is an isotope that we can use to build a scalable commercial product line? And the remarkable characteristics that we investigated, some of the most notable ones being, it was you mentioned, what are the shielding requirements of this isotope? Is it an alpha, or a beta, a gamma, it, or is it going to require massive amounts of lead and concrete or can you have a more lightweight form factor, recognizing that especially in space, but also trust really for transportation purposes, a lightweight heat source and a lightweight power system has a lot of benefits. And certainly the shielding requirements is a massive factor in this. You also have the half-life of the isotope. If the isotope is a half-life of 30 hours, that is not quite as useful for a lot of these remote applications as nice to put half-life that's decades or hundreds of years. Another characteristic that is very related to that is a specific power of the isotope. Is this an isotope that's very high specific power or a lower specific power, which of course is related to the half-life of the isotope. And beyond that, one that we really focused on early on was the availability of the isotope. Is this an isotope that it's extremely rare? Does it require to be produced and specialized reactors and multiple sites in the U.S. and internationally? Or is this an isotope that is abundant? Perhaps it's a waste product, perhaps it's a liability to an apartment of energy and the nuclear industry. And when you balance out all these characteristics, the isotope that we identified as our near-term and initial isotope that we are pursuing is strontium 90, and largely because of that last trait. In fact, the strontium 90 is an abundant, really waste product from the nuclear fuel cycle. And early on, you know, we were really focused on ensuring that we can build a product that can scale, not build a product that can be built once or twice or three times a decade. And the abundance of strontium 90 really was the reason why we began pursuing that in the early days. You mentioned the characteristic of isotopes that are not necessarily favorable and not what you're interested in doing for you. It sounded to me like you're describing plutonium-238, which has been used for a number of NASA missions, but not a lot of NASA missions, because it is extremely expensive, has great characteristics, pretty good specific power, and almost no gamma radiation at all coming from it within 87-year-half flights, really sweet. But I think a kilogram of plutonium-238 is in the millions of dollars. Is that correct? So plutonium-238 is an unbelievable isotope, and there's a reason why it has been used for, you know, every single NASA deep space mission. It unlocks some of the greatest mysteries in space, exploration of Pluto, the Voyager missions that explored all of the outer planets, Mars rovers. I mean, it is an incredible isotope that builds incredible radioisotope power systems. But to your point, it is an isotope that has to be produced in certain reactors, and is not at scale today in the way that other isotopes are. And while there's certainly enough plutonium to meet these marquee NASA missions, including the missions of coming such as Uranus probes, and of course the exciting mission to Titan, where we're going to, the Dragonfly mission, we're going to fly a quadcopter through the Titan atmosphere. And you know, where we saw it, you know, was that there is starting to be in the coming decade, a far greater growth of operations, especially in space, but also maritime and Arctic environments. When you look at the Artemis program, you look in the past couple weeks that you've had India in Russia, in Japan, later this year, U.S. landers go to the lunar surface. All of these systems that could use radioisotope power systems to operate, again, these off grid dark shadow regions. We saw this opportunity to build a radioisotope power system that is complementary to these plutonium systems, where the plutonium can be reserved for these marquee multi-billion dollar missions. And that we can build a commercially available system that might be a little heavier, might have a shorter half-life, but we'll still have a lot of usability as we start to see the growth of operations in these regions where radioisotope power systems can be used. Tell me a little about Tyler Bernstein. Where you come from? What did you do before you started Zeno? Give us a scoop. Yeah, so I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. And when I was eight years old, my life's plan was to go to Duke, then go to Washington University in St. Louis for medical school, and eventually become the St. Louis Blues Orthopedic Surgeon. I was a huge hockey fan, hockey was a huge runner up, and I recognized from an early age that I was not going to make it to the NHL, and I was fascinated by medicine from an early age. So I thought that that was a nice way to merge those interests. And really, it was my plan through all of high school, I shadowed a bunch of doctors, and my senior year in high school, I ended up taking a computer science class, and pretty immediately fell in love with this idea of building. And with just me and a computer that I could build a product that at a minimum was interesting and neat, and at a maximum could really help people solve problems. This was also at a time when I had a lot of doctors telling me not to pursue medicine. And the combination of these two, I ended up going to Vanderbilt University as a computer science major. And at this point, my freshman year really caught the computer science bug. And thought I was going to go work at Google, Amazon, Facebook, you name it. Freshman year started building a couple apps, you know, again, trying to see what I could do with just me and a computer, and ended up building an app that was for high school carpooling, where it would match a rider and a driver with similar routes to school to help them carpool. I also built the fundraising application for nonprofits in the Nashville area, again, just really, you know, in this bug of building things. And beginning of my sophomore year after interning at a company in St. Louis's off-rension year, I was talking to a close friend of mine, Jonathan Seagull. And we were having the classic, you know, early school year discussion on our internships. I was talking about my time as a software engineer. He was talking about his time at United Airlines. And we really talked about what we noticed that United is for Lions of the aviation industry on oil. And we played it with two of us got together, said, how else could you power an airplane with a clean energy source? And we said, what about nuclear? And, you know, that was the original foray into nuclear energy that, you know, was led to us in the early five years later with the wasino. So, you know, I will say this is not the path that I thought my life would be going down. I don't think this is the path that any of my family members did as well, but, you know, it's been a pretty incredible one. But, your enjoyment of creating things. Did you ever join the maker movement? Did I ever join the maker movement? You know, where we really started at the early days at Vanderbilt was at an innovation center called the OneDry on Vanderbilt's campus. And this was, you know, focused partly on helping students with ideas, incubating this ideas and can chat more about, you know, they were kind of the folks that really got us the first sort of funding to begin pursuit of what is now. You know, they didn't have a maker space there and I took a couple classes in there, but, you know, honestly, in those, you know, most of my making was, you know, on computers with software. So, you know, not as much of the maker space using 3D printers using wax, you know, all of that great stuff. Most of your making things, your creating stuff is electronic virtual, not good, physical devices. So obviously, Zino's a little different from that. So tell me how you went from computers to actual devices. Zino is a quite a bit different. And, you know, again, they maybe can continue the story was briefly going down before, you know, it really started with my friend Jonathan and I in this pursuit of a nuclear power airplane. And, you know, if we could put a nuclear reactor on a Boeing triple seven that it could be a clean energy source that could help you to the decarbonization of the industry. Now this of course is a challenging idea, let's say, for many, many reasons, but we ended up getting a touch to Professor at Vanderbilt, Professor Steve Cron. And Steve had shared with us in the 1950s, the US government spent over a billion dollars trying to build a nuclear power airplane to combat the Soviet Union. And, you know, Steve said it's been, you know, 60, 70 years. Why don't you all begin to this a little more. So, Jonathan, I end up writing a 2025 page paper on this nuclear power Boeing triple seven. We were, for some reason, pursuing a thorium molten salt reactor. I am not quite sure why we just went down that rabbit hole. And, you know, in pursuit of this idea, we end up getting in touch with a graduate student, an advance of Jake Matthews. And, Jake was a West Point grad who was getting his master's mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt. And, as a part of his master's program, he had written a paper on using a radioisotope power system to power an unmanned aerial vehicle, originally in the Martian atmosphere. So, if you could put a radioisotope power system on this drone, you could have a drone that could stay in the Martian atmosphere for years at a time, which again is actually now what is now what NASA is doing on Titan's atmosphere and later this decade. So, you know, three of us get together, Jake Jonathan and me and this professor, Steve, so actually four of us. And this was really what led us, delving into radioisotope power systems. And, you know, kind of the core foundation of the original Zeno team. So, again, a very weird roundabout story of, you know, how we got from originally wanting to be a doctor to pursuing, you know, computer science and building apps to, you know, a group of students and a professor saying we're going to build a radioisotope power system company. When did you know actually get formed? When did you incorporate? April 2018. So, you know, it was late 2017 when we started to get together with the four of us and we were kind of, you know, dabbling, you know, part time in early, early 2018. We ended up getting, you know, through the, the one dream this Vanderbilt innovation center, we ended up getting a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation through it's called the i-core program. And the purpose of this program was funding not. to actually do technology development, but customer discovery. Recognizing that nearly 70% of all startups fail, because they built something that nobody wants. And that's a very simplistic idea. It seems obvious, but against 70% of companies fail because they're building an interesting science project. Not a real technology that is solving problems. And the purpose of this program was over, about two to three months, interview hundreds of people in this industry from customers to regulators, as stakeholders to get a sense of the viability of this company before investing time and capital to do so. So we received that $50,000 in the summer of 2018, and we incorporated in April 2018 right before that. Who are your target customers? You obviously did some research. Who's who anxious? Who wants a radioized to a dollar supply? You know, at the high level, and I'll kind of dig in a little more, and you know, kind of mentioned this earlier to beginning, you know, it is really people operating in these off-grid regions. Where power is extremely challenging. And that ranges from the surface of the moon to satellites in certain orbits, to the Arctic, to undersea in the seabed. Again, these places where there are not grids, and it's very difficult to get power with current energy sources in frequently, potential customers in these environments. Simply cannot do what they want to do because they don't have access to energy. So this ranges, of course, from the government, from NASA to the Space Force, to the Army, to the Navy, in the commercial sector companies developing lunar landers and autonomous undersea vehicles. Again, with a power system, the size of a microwave oven that generates electricity for decades, we can enable these customers to operate as they would like to in these austere regions, in regions of growing importance, with growing activity in the coming decades. How big is it now? Are you hiring people? We are. We are about 30, 35 with full-time contractors today, a space book between DC and Seattle, DC being most of our business policy regulatory team, and Seattle being most of our engineering team. And you know, hiring quickly, you know, again, announced. Within the past couple months, a $15 million contract from NASA to work with intuitive machines and blue orgs and other great companies to enable long-endurance, long-lived assets on the surface of the moon, landers and rovers to operate during lunar night and operate in apparently shadow regions. We announced a $30 million program with the Space Force to build a small satellite powered by our power system with electric propulsion to enable highly maneuverable satellites. And as we embark on these projects and these contracts, we certainly need to continue to grow the team to execute against these. So hiring quite a bit, if you go on our website zenopower.com and click on the careers, you'll see a lot of the roles that we're hiring for and adding more on a weekly basis. Sorry, was there a second part to the question? Or was that the, we're asking, are we hiring? No, you've answered both. You answered how big are you and how, and are you hiring? And I presume that your website tells people what kind of people you're hiring. And I know for a fact that it's not all technical, nuclear engineers, you've got to have some other folks on your team, right? That's right. I think that is one of the very intentional things that we have done from an early day rod is, you know, not, we need unbelievable engineers and recognized that we have a lot of difficult engineering to be done. But in order to build a nuclear energy company and not just build designs on paper and not just build hard roads, going to sit in the lab, but really build the technology that can scale and that we can serve customers in multiple markets. We need great engineers. We need a strong regulatory team. We need a strong supply chain team to get access to fuel and facilities. We need a strong policy team, a strong business development team, a strong operations team, a strong people and culture team to ensure that we have a strong lease of culture and the people love working at CNO. So I think we've been very diligent from the early days to ensure that we're attracting strong talent and hiring amazing team members in each of these areas. And absolutely, if you go look at the roles that we're hiring for, it's a wide range of roles. And we also have a general application. You know, we're interested more than anything else and bringing unbelievably talented, passionate, ambitious and electrically honest people and to our organization. And you know, we're very open to finding roles for people. You know, if they're the right fit for the company, what we need right now. Do your systems use just the thermal generation, it's typical for the NASA systems where the thermal energy gets directly converted to electricity with semiconductors or do you have other conversion processes? Yeah, so there are really three product lines that we are developing and, you know, really kind of three broad categories of radioisotope power systems. And these are radioisotope heater units, radioisotope thermoelectric generators and radioisotope sternum generators. The most well known radioisotope technology is that second one, RTGs and radioisotope thermoelectric generators. And these are devices, as you mentioned, that use thermoelectric generators that use the seabech effect at the difference in temperature, the interior of the heat source and the ambient environment wherever it is operating. To get a flow of electrons and produce electricity. And, you know, RTGs is what has been used for all of NASA's deep space missions, Voyager, Cassini, Mars, Rovers. However, there are other useful radioisotope products and ones that have been used before. So radioisotope heater units are really just taking that heat source and saying, there is value in this heat. We don't just need electricity for everything. Heat can be very useful. In radioisotope heater units, frequently called Ruse, have been used on many deep space NASA missions as well. They keep electronics and other components warm in the very frigid environments. And, you know, for example, let's look at where we're looking to use potentially Ruse and where we're looking to deploy Ruse. You know, when you're on the surface of the moon, you were generally in lightness for 14 days and then you're in darkness for 14 days. During that 14 day darkness called the lunar night, if you don't have a heat source, you're going to freeze to death. And you looked at recently again, the Indian lander that landed on the moon a couple weeks ago. Recently, it hit the lunar night. They're hoping that it's going to be able to wake up when it hits the next lunar day and lightness comes back. But I might freeze to death. And for example, with a Ruse, just this heat source on this, you may not be able to have electricity doing the lunar night. So this rover or lander might not be able to actively operate, but you can stay warm, you can go to sleep, and you can wake back up the next day. So you have Ruse that can just provide heat that can have extreme value in space and other environments. You have RTG's, this traditional radioisetel power system that does provide electricity using thermoelectric generators that has been deployed on all of NASA's technologies. And the third flavor, one that we're now funded to develop with our new NASA contract is a radioisetel sterling generator using a sterling engine to convert this heat into electricity. Now, sterling engines have moving pieces, which does add some additional risk. It does add some additional complexities in the system itself. But because of these moving pieces, because the dynamic system that it is, you can get much higher efficiencies of thermal energy into electric energy. So with thermal electrics, you might be getting five, six percent of that thermal energy converted to electrical energy. With a sterling engine, you can get upwards of 20, 25, even 30 percent efficiency of that thermal energy into electrical energy. With that, you can have a system that is generating more electricity per mass of the unit itself, which can have a lot of benefits in a variety of environments. So, you know, we are pursuing all three of these in different programs and contracts that we have and see different, you know, different value propositions that each of these different products have. Even though you're using waste and putting it to beneficial use, at the time that your system is finished their useful life, there's still gonna be some leftovers. What's your plan to take care of the leftovers from your devices? Yep, absolutely. So, strong steam 90s, a half life of 28.8 years. And of course, the rule of thumb is that roughly after 10 half-lifts, there is no nuclear material that is left. And of course, that, you know, is not exactly correct, but you know, a good rule of thumb. So after roughly 300 years, strong steam, decays in its tables or conium, you'll have only zirconium metal left. 300 years sounds very long, but as you know, most of the nuclear industry know, that's actually a relatively short time period for nuclear systems itself. So at the end of life, it really depends on where it is deployed. And I'll, you know, speak to precedent radio, you know, the precedent set by legacy radioized to power systems. You have systems that were used in the Apollo missions that are still sitting on the moon today. You of course have systems and Voyager that are in interstellar space. You have systems on Mars that are remaining there. Terrestrially, the Navy has deployed radioized to power systems on the seabed. And there has been joint concurrence that the seabed is the end of life for those systems itself because in each of these environments, whether it's a surface of the moon, or it is on the seabed, the containment of these systems, we can be confident that a team will remain past 10 half-lives of the isotope itself. So these systems will be able to remain in situ for its end of life. However, there are certain environments where we may wanna take these systems back, crack them open and reuse the very usable fuel given that there will still be massive potential energy at the end of the life of these systems. We're targeting five to 10-year lifecycle. After that, again, so we'll have E90% of the potential energy of the isotope in that system itself. So I guess, you know, the short answer to your question, Rod, is it depends on the environment, but either the end of life, it where it was deployed, if it can be safely determined that that is its place of disposition, or it will be brought back and reprocess to continue to use that fuel for future systems. We mentioned, or you mentioned, that strontium 90 is a widely produced isotope. It's created pretty close to the peak of the yield curve for vision products when you split apart uranium in a nuclear reactor. But how do you get the strontium out? There's not much reprocessing going on in the worldwide. Is there an inventory of strontium available? Yeah, so there are large stocks of separate a strontium 90, both in the US and internationally. You know, this has been an effort from our very early days working with industry, with the Department of Energy, with international partners, to develop this robust strontium 90 supply chain using material that is already separated to your point, but there is not a lot of active separation of isotopes from using nuclear fuel today. So, you know, it's been a massive part of our effort again. You know, HRSAI and our team or chief commercialization officer has been leading that and is an absolutely exceptional job. And, you know, there's a lot of excitement both in government and industry of this idea of taking. What right now is sitting in storage and cask's in pools, a liability in reusing that as a power source to support space exploration, national security missions, support use of clean energy in these off grid austere environments. So, again, you know, that is really the effort right now is using this already separated material to build our initial systems. Once that inventory of material starts getting short or maybe the prices start going up, is this going to help it become more viable to recycle, use nuclear fuel? So, there is a lot separated. So, a lot to keep us going at scale for quite some time. But to your point, right now is a limited amount that a finite amount that is separated. And, you know, that is one of the broader questions here, Rod, is, you know, there's of course a lot of questions going on right now about whatever word you want to use recycling, reprocessing. And you have great programs at RBE, such as the curian onwards program starting to look at this. You have companies such as OCLO that are starting to investigate more of what recycling or processing could look like. And, yeah, one of the questions here is if we can show an economic case for material to right now is considered waste, if that can help push us over the edge, to help, you know, make the case for recycling reprocessing. So, you know, no, I don't think I can sit here and say that, oh, the strong T-90 market is going to be the single factor that makes it now viable to reprocess a recycle. But it could be a factor. And it's not just strong T-90, there's other isotopes in use nuclear fuel for industrial, for medical, for power purposes. And if we can help look and build this radio isotope market across the board of this material that right now is in this waste. Like, I'm potentially, that could be a part of the equation and a part of the calculation to say that we should make that software recycling reprocessing and not just for policy. the purpose is, but truly for economic purposes. I think I read it pressurally somewhere that indicated that the isotope Amorecium 241, which is commonly used in smoke detectors, might be something of use in radioisotil power. I'm not sure if that came from you or from somebody else. What do you know about Amorecium 241? Yeah, so that brings it towards a great point here. Now I mentioned early on, you know, we did a broad isotope study looking at what isotope we want to pursue initially and in the near term for these products. With the biggest factor being what is an isotope that is available and exists so we can build a product that's scale from. But beyond that, there's a series of other isotopes that are very interesting. One of them being Amorecium 241, Amorecium 241 being alpha meter and Amorecium 241 hang a very long half light over 400 years. And as a part of this recent contract that we have from NASA, we are funded to investigate Amorecium 241 and look at the viability of the supply chain of the isotope itself to build extremely long lived and more lightweight systems for use on the lunar surface and in deep space applications. So we're really excited about that. You know, this contract is just getting kicked off. You know, there's some great folks in Europe at the University of Leicester and the European Space Agency that have been developing Amorecium 241 radioisotil power systems as well. And beyond just Amorecium 241 rod, you know, when you talk about the availability of Strontium and you know, where we can go after that, there are a wide set of isotopes that are in our product roadmap and where we can have in the future this product line of different radioisotope power systems with different isotopes that have different characteristics that open up and support different market segments. Thinking there are, we mentioned the importance of long half life for some of your missions, but I can envision a few places where a high power density intense radioactive source it may only have say a few weeks half life could be extremely useful as well. Exactly right. You know, a lot of these different isotopes have different interest in characteristics for different market segments and a lot of the strategy here is what is the right isotope to invest in for the development of that product line and that supply chain at what time. And that's allowed the great work that Hirsch has been doing from the supply chain standpoint that Lindsay of European engineering has been working on that Jake Matthew or CTO has been working on. Again, this balance of staying focused on the work that we have now and executing and delivering on these contracts, but also being prepared to diversify into these other product lines in the future once we have the bandwidth and keep the ability to do so. It is your company have some sort of philosophy like Google used to have where they had to severe focus on what they had to do today, but they also let their engineers dream or think for a certain period of time every part of their week or month whatever. Is it something like that going? You know, that is the balance that we are trying to draw here. It is funny, Facebook coined a phrase, move fast and break things. That was kind of a joke. Can't do that nuclear. You can't do that in nuclear in the slightest. And we like to say, we want to move fast and bend things. We want to push the limit a little bit of what is possible technologically, how quickly can we move but recognize that you absolutely cannot break things in this industry. And I think that is all this balance here as well as balancing moving quickly but very diligently and most importantly safely on these contracts that we have. But yes, as you said, still giving time to folks on our team to dream and explore and think about what this technology can be in the future where we can be making investments to ensure that we are always innovating and we are not staying stagnant. So I think that really is a lot of the ethos and thesis of our culture that we have been working to develop. And I think a lot of the ethos and culture that people on our team will share is this balance of being hyper focused on the work that we have moving quickly but recognizing that we can only bend things in this industry. We cannot even take the risks that folks in the aerospace industry can. Of course, you look at almost all of these, let's go to launch launch companies that their first rocket blows up and that is expected that of course cannot happen in this industry. So it's moving quickly, staying focused but recognizing that we have to operate diligently and safely within of course regulatory bounds that we are in but still giving that intellectual freedom to dream and think about what we can do in the future. I guess I'll pull your analogy just a little bit further, Induclear, you can bend which is certainly don't want to approach the point of plastic deformation and spring back into your original form, right? Well said, exactly. Exactly. Good, good, good, good, good at the end of the analogy there. As you guys hit certain milestones, have you actually produced a model that you are working model that you can show your customers, tell me a little bit about what you've actually built? Yeah, so we'll have some very exciting news for this in the next six weeks. Hopefully, can chat again afterwards but I will say that from the earliest of days, we have had a focus on building hardware and we've had a focus on building nuclear hardware as quickly as we can. Recognizing the models are great but models don't give you and don't give customers and don't give the public the credibility that actually having a nuclear fuel system does. So, you know, that has been a hyper focus from our earliest of days is ensuring that we have actual data to back up our models and moving as quickly as we can to actually build nuclear hardware. So, in addition to just the development of our technology and of our power systems, as mentioned early on we've had just as much focus early on in the development of the supply chain, access to fuel and facilities and not just build these one off of buildings at scale. We've had a hyper focus on our regulatory environment and ensuring our engagements with state regulators, with the NRC, with the FAA, with our government stakeholders from Navy to the Space Force that we've been engaged with those folks early on and very excitingly earlier this year we had our payload review application with the FAA for Space Systems approved which means that they have now started this review targeting in early 2025 approval of our launch. There's still a lot of massive work to be done in that environment. So, you know, I think I mentioned this to you. You know, when we're working to set this up on multiple of those fronts we'll have some really exciting announcements over the next six weeks. Really a massive six weeks for our company is super exciting six weeks from engineering and supply chain efforts specifically. So, be able to share more specific details in the future. But you know, again from the earliest of days we've been intent on building hardware and on getting to a nuclear prototype as quick as we can. I can't wait to hear more and I understand the need to keep things a little quiet until you actually are ready to release. So, let's just push this up with, oh, go ahead. Oh, no, we would love to share. It's hard to hold it back but, you know, certain contractual terms and, you know, NDA's and all that good stuff. Need a wait till things are all buttoned up to share the news. But, you know, we're really looking forward to sharing it soon. Good. Let's bring it home with a little conclusion or at least what I want to conclude with is what's your view of the importance and unique qualities of getting energy from atomic nuclear rather than from the electron cloud that surrounds the nucleus. You know, I think that the three characteristics that really, and I'm going to try to narrow it in specifically on radioiset power systems here. And I think this really does go beyond it. But it is of course the fact this is a clean energy source. Second, that this is a high density energy source. And the third, this can be a long-lived energy source that does not need any outside refuelling or any inputs to continue to produce the energy. Resulting in for us a box that is a clean energy source with a high power density that generates electricity for years at a time without any human interaction. And I think you can expand that to a lot of reactors as well, especially microreactors that are hoping to have those similar traits. And, you know, why that is important? You know, people talk a lot about this amazing time that we're in in the nuclear industry. You know, perhaps you could argue the greatest innovative ecosystem, especially in the commercial sector ever for this industry. You know, people like to stay away from the, you know, the term Renaissance for obvious reasons. But, you know, it is an unbelievably exciting time. And I think one of the factors, like unrecognizing that I am newer to the industry, you know, only about four years into it. But from what I've heard from previous, previous decades, you know, one of the differences today is the multiple sources of tailwinds for this industry that are enabled by those three characteristics. You know, first, you of course have the clean energy transition in the decarbonization efforts. And really in DC, you know, I'm based in DC, what is now bipartisan support and acceptance of nuclear energy. And this recognition that nuclear has to be enrolled in our fight against climate change. And that it has to be a role in our decarbonization efforts. And that is a massive tailwind because of the clean energy nature of this power source. Second, you have this renewed emphasis on energy security. You know, you look of course what is happening in Europe in the war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You look at what has happened in Germany and the shut down the nuclear energy plants. And it's now, you know, importing natural gas from Russia. And you see a renewed emphasis in the US and internationally on energy security and on joint domestic supply chains in nuclear can have a critical role in that. You also look at the resilience emphasis of nuclear energy. And you look at the Department of Defense, you know, very excitingly, you know, last week or this week, you know, choosing o-clo to power to power is an air force based up and up in Alaska. So again, this combination of the resilience of nuclear energy in this renewed emphasis on energy security, this is a massive tailwind for nuclear because of those characteristics. In third, you're starting to see a growing use in interest in nuclear in more application based environments. And I say that these are not areas that are buying nuclear because they're dollar per kilowatt hour. They're buying nuclear because of the new applications that are enabled in space environments from nuclear thermal propulsion to nuclear power on the surface of the moon and maritime environments looking at undersea power nodes to looking at, you know, the shipping industry that can be using nuclear to enable new applications there. And again, because of these multiple sources of tailwinds from the clean energy transition to energy security and on-choring domestic energy supply chains to application based uses of nuclear energy, I think that the characteristics of being a clean energy source with high power density in a long-lived energy source is enabling all of those. It is giving, again, multiple sources of tailwinds to this industry that hopefully will help push it forward as we really start to, you know, in the 2020s, demonstrate these technologies from radiois to power systems to microreactors to SMR's diffusion and hopefully scale on all of these fronts into 2030s and beyond. Well, thank you. That was a great summary. I have to admit that I don't shy away from using the term Renaissance at all. I remind people that if you look back in history and try to ask historians when the Renaissance began, they'll give you dates that vary over about a 50-year time. In other words, it took a long time to move from the dark ages and to get a sustainable Renaissance that everybody agreed was happening. So we're only, say, 10 or 15 years into what we call the Renaissance. We have a long way to go. We had a long, dark ages, long period of time when we weren't building anything new and all of the technology was being developed. It was locked up in laboratories just waiting to be released. There's this huge bit of creativity from people like you that's just ready to be hitting the market at the time when we needed the most. So, Todd, I want to thank you for joining me. I think what you shared is very exciting, people. Most technologists love space for various reasons. So what you're doing is exciting there. I'm also excited about what you're going to be bringing to the terrestrial world. And just an impressed. Thanks for visiting. Thank you, Rod. I really appreciate it. I love what you said there on the Renaissance's take time. I think that it's very easy to caught up in short-term thinking, thinking about just a couple years down the road, even looking at a decade at a long time. But I think in this industry we're trying to do is ensure that by 2100, by beyond, that this world, and other worlds perhaps we're visiting or inhabiting, have reliable energy sources. And that takes time. So I think that's a really great point, an important mindset to shift towards long-term thinking, which impacts the data, the data, the decisions that you make. So I, again, think that's a great point, but really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks a lot for having me here. I'm gonna bring one more thing back in, reminder for what you first started telling us about when you were a teenager and thinking about your life plan and planning to become a doctor. People complain about nuclear, because it may take 10 or 15 years from the time being. Think about it until the time you've got a reactor deployed. But if a doctor, a kid wants to be a doctor, they'd better be thinking about 15 years ahead of time, right? That's exactly right. I have lots of friends in mind that are just finishing up med school, going to the residencies, they still have quite a bit of time until they're, you know, living the doctor life, they don't like to be. So now it's, I think a lot of these fronts, great things take time. And that is okay, that's the case that that's the way that it should be. But you have patience, you need to have the grit, you know, grind through the, the woes that come across that way. That's, that's correct. Yeah. And when it comes to clean energy, we're not going to stop needing clean energy in 2050 as some people seem to think today. There's some sort of magic precipice that will happen that year. We're going to still need clean energy in 2100 and 2503000. Absolutely. For your time, talk to you soon. Thank you. Talk to you soon with updates on your, your cool announcements. Yes, absolutely. Looking forward to it. All right. Bye, Tyler. Hi, Rob. Thanks. This episode of the Atomic Show is brought to you by Nucleation Capital. We're a venture capital fund focused on selecting ventures with extraordinary promise. They're building the advanced nuclear sector and helping expand our clean energy options. We're building a portfolio of ventures on behalf of investors like many of you. We don't just take funds from the large institutions that typically allocate to venture capital. We believe that regular investors should have access to the opportunities in modern nuclear for their own portfolios. We allow people to subscribe on a quarterly basis, starting as low as $5,000 per quarter. A four quarter subscription will get you exposure to between four and six ventures. If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about how you can participate, please check out our website at nucleationcapital.com. That's nucleationcapital all one word.com. 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