Kurt Terrani, CEO Standard Nuclear

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. It makes your voice tell the world there's a better way, today there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and it's time for another retirement show. Today is Kirk Tarani, who is the Chief Executive Officer for Standard Nuclear. That's a name many of you haven't heard much of before. They just came out of stealth mode after having raised about $44 million to help increase their capability to manufacture rice ores. Triso is an acronym standing for Tri isotopic. It's an advanced reactor fuel form that's been in development and testing since the 1950s. It gives reactors the capability to withstand temperatures far higher than today's operating reactors. Standard nuclear is an independent, not reactor developer, but fuel manufacturer. Welcome, Kirk. Thank you, Rod. It's great to be here. That's good to have you. You and I have known each other for a little while, but when we met, you were working for a different company. Can you tell me how you evolve from working for USNC to working for Standard Nuclear? Absolutely. In fact, Rod, I've known you much longer than you've known me. You've been providing great insights into the nuclear industry and the nuclear business for a very long time. It was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. We used to go book cabins next to the Pacific Ocean and listen to the waves and then we'll listen to your podcast or hear your interviews and discussion with a number of folks. I've been following your blog from back in the days and all the work that you've done and really commend you for having such a long perspective and so many insights on the industry. But you start to kind and flattery will get you everywhere. Fantastic. Great to hear. All right. Since we're off to a good start, let me, let me tell you a little bit about kind of my journey. I'll talk about it rather quickly and I mean kind of dive into the specific parts. I'm an engineer by by training material science from Arizona State University, followed by nuclear engineering grad school at UC Berkeley in 2010. I went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and worked for about just over 10 years. And then in 2021, I transitioned to US and C. When I was at, I consider myself a nuclear fuels person, which I think is a rare esoteric breed of scientists and nuclear engineer. It's different than nuclear materials. It's very different. It's a fuel is a different creature and different monster. And I wanted to do, you know, stay deep in the nuclear fuels and when I left grad school looked at a number of options that I had. I really liked the work that was being done at Oak Ridge National Lab and their nuclear fuels group, which was at the time. Very good group, but somewhat small compared to what it is now and compared to, you know, how it evolved during my tenure. And a big part of that nuclear fuels, groups technology and mission was manufacturing, characterizing and supporting testing of trisofule forms under the advanced gas reactor program. That program has been incredibly successful. We can, we can dive into it, testament to all the great work out of Idaho National Lab, brokers national lab leadership of key figures like Dave Petty. And, you know, trisof is great at, at NRC issued a safety evaluation report. We can again dive into that. So it's, it's largely adopted by a, but the advanced reactor developers. And then can start dawning on me. Hey, there may be a problem. If everybody wants to use trisof, but trisof production is not as widespread or at a scale. That's that may be needed. And, and I wanted to transition to industry to, you know, make sure that's not going to be a risk to the future of advanced nuclear. And again, looking around in 2021, I, at the time decided to go to US and see that I thought I'll have the right freedom to build the type of facility that I thought was needed. And, and, you know, the company had to had the right resources for me to do that. So myself and a number of folks in previous that over national laboratory with deep, you know, 10, 20 years expertise or more even in trisof transition to US and see. And, you know, we were successful in building a commercial scale at trisof line which unfortunate enough to still be sitting in the same facility at the same line. Now, US and see was that white sprawling and one of the things it was doing was, you know, manufacturing the field, which is, which is what I was doing. and it was so much more than what I was happy to do. But it was also developing reactors for terrestrial and space applications and was quite active in it in a number of parts of the value chain reactor design, licensing space reactors, potentially EPC operations market development. The company was, you know, doing a lot and it was a large 300 plus person company and the company entered a financial distress in 2024 primarily due to passing over one of its primary investors. And as a result of the financial distress, there was a change on the board and, and you know, the company proceeded into a chapter 11 for supervisor bankruptcy and sale process. You know, I was fortunate enough to be an interim CEO at the time to take the company. There you go. Thank you. That's the word I was looking for through that course supervised sale process, which was really an incredible learning and experience, which it's good to have now in hindsight, but it was, it was a lot of learning about a this was some of this. There's so much label very painful experiences. There you go. But fortunate that it was a successful success, sell process all the assets of us and see were sold. And so let's talk about standard nuclear standard nuclear as the company that was founded. To specifically, delivered the fuel to the fleet of advanced reactors. I want to use tricep, which happens to be most of them. And I can tell you about the founder of the company and you know how the vision came about a little bit later, but standard nuclear participated in that auction process and purchased all the fuel related assets from US and see. And, you know, the company was kind enough to keep me and and frankly speaking, most of the folks in the in the in the nuclear fuels group. We've all transitioned to standard nuclear with a really razor sharp laser focus mission of delivering the fuel, delivering the nuclear part of nuclear and facilitating the the wave of advanced reactors. And you say kind I say smart. You know, you, like he said, you're in a very small universe of fuel experts and an even smaller universe of tricep fuel experts. So it would have been really crazy for a company to come in and purchase the fuel assets without keeping the people around. I think that they made a smart decision. I know the guy from the Cisive point, which was the lead investor right for standard nuclear. Yeah, it was a good is a good characterization for his. document in companies and investing in it, if you're going to buy something like a business you need to keep the intellectual assets around tell me what you had several years ago you completed this commercial scale line, which would be scaled simply by adding more and more lines right. What's the status of that line and is it producing fuel today. Precisely precisely so. Tricep fuel manufacturing is a serial batch manufacturing process that is you get your feed stock at your uranium feed stock and you've got assets, gases, chemicals, and you go through batches of processing. And if I marched through it quickly you've got a chemistry step called a solution. You dissolve uranium and acid you mix up some organics and you form into droplets that does drop this gel. You collect those jell spheres and dry them that's the sol gel step, then you take those jell spheres you put them inside of furnace you cook them. It's not quite centering like pellet centering like light water reactors because there's chemical reactions taking place. It's not just centering that resulting in densification but there's also conversion. After that you've got all these nice round uranium bearing spheres that's you call your fuel kernel those kernels then go into a process called fluidized bed chemical vapor deposition or FBCVD. That's the process where you deposit all the coating there is that deliver you that tricep particle the buffer part of carbon second carbide and outer part of carbon layer. And then there's a final process where you go ahead and do on pack those tricep particles into a ball or sphere that's called a pebble or into a graphite matrix cylinder that's called a compact or into a ceramic matrix. Fuel form that can be a simple cylinder quite complex and you call that a pellet. So all these processes, you know, essentially have been around for a very long time tricep was conceptualized in the late 50s early 60s is really kind of good history of why people came up with it. And that technology has been around you us manufactured tricep commercial scale in the 70s 80s under geometromics and that technology has been around for a very long time. What we did was, you know, the technology that was at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that was kind of laboratory scale doing batches of 80 grams, 100 grams or so broadened and scaled it to kilograms or multiple kilogram batches. And that scale up is non non linear, you know, it sounds easy once you have that fundamentals of the process but scale up has you know, takes a lot of work. It's really important to do that go through that that process discover all the unknown unknowns and make sure you get in the right product and yield. So those modules these that do these four different steps. They all they're all scaled to the maximum that they can achieve. So for instance, one of them can do 10 kilogram every 14 hours and and and you really want to achieve the maximum capacity in unit mass of your area in per hour. So we did by either, you know, limitations like process limitation like how many how many spheres you can fluidize in a reactor bed effectively when you coat them or limited by crit safety on how much your medium can you have in a volume and and and staying quit safe. So we identified what are the limitations and requirements for each process. We scaled it to the maximum limit that we could. And then really really importantly, we designed, developed, secured the components assembled put in place, proceduralized, did the hazards analysis installed and operated these equipment, which again. There's a long journey between the PowerPoint or the drawing design and getting to an actual functional piece of equipment with a procedure that anybody can walk up to an operate that meets nuclear quality rigor and everything. This facility has all these modules scaled up. It is operating. It's it's. provides a very good basis for our future, having all these systems in place and operating. And is it manufacturing fuel? Indeed it is. We are in a radiological facility. We're very fortunate to be in a facility that we own and operate on the land that we own and operate. That's a little distinct than being in a typical, typically you see instances like this in a Department of Energy type jurisdiction, but we're essentially regulated by the state of Tennessee. And the state of Tennessee is what's called an agreement state with the nuclear regulatory commission that there's an agreement between the state and the federal government under 10 CFR 150. They regulate us. And so we are allowed to possess radioactive material, including special nuclear material. And so we've got a good amount of natural uranium at our facility that we process routinely for our to develop our processes and manufacture of tricytic distance to different specifications for our customers. But we also can process and we can possess some process of limited amount of enriched uranium. And we use that to make small batches of enriched fuel production that can support testing or the demonstrations that are coming down the line. So I'll pause here, Ron. So if you need to increase your production from 14 kilograms every whatever, you just add more of these, these large, right? Precisely. So the best way, best analogy is imagine you have a car assembly line and that assembly line can produce five cars a day. So if you want 50 cars a day, you just replicate that assembly line. That's, that's, you raise a very important point is that we've scaled as much as we're going to scale. We're not increasing the size of the individual production modules. We simply, if you want to have higher capacity, we'll replicate clone or copy paste that module in numbers to increase our capacity. So there's going to be some sort of economic order quantity. If you wanted to add say 10 lines, you buy all the components or set up an order and say, I'm going to buy these 10 components over the next three years. And you probably will get a lower price for each component, right? Yes, indeed, indeed. And you know, there's some interesting stuff going on here. So the modules are, so let's say one of them produces, you know, 10 kilograms batches every two hours. The other one produces, you know, I'm using example at 14 kilograms batches every eight hours. So there's a little bit of a balancing. It's not like that you need one of each. You need, you kind of balance them. You've got eight of module A, three of module B, six of module C, and two to balance their production. But again, that's very typical in batch manufacturing. And the reality is that, you know, all these modules are kind of custom equipment. They are, they are a lot of times their furnaces. There's, there's, you know, chemical reactors. And we manufacture some parts of the modules ourselves in-house and we procure some other parts of the modules externally. So for instance, for furnaces, you know, it really behooves us to not go, you know, make our own heating elements. That doesn't make sense. There's a lot of good vendors out there that can design a furnace that can go to the temperature and have the working volume that benefits you. So we go procure that. But there's a lot of things like, like, housing that we control it, the effoluance system, the feed system. Those are all the stuff that we manufacture in-house and we fully control. Certainly when you go ahead and build a capacity, that's larger, there's definitely economics of scale there. But, Arad, I gotta tell you, the capex investment as far as the cost of tricep reduction, it's actually quite low. If you have a line that you're gonna operate for say 10, 20 years, and you advertise that capex over the lifetime of the line, that's a very minor contributor to your fuel production cost. So I assume that if the major contributors to your fuel production costs would be the cost of the fuel itself, the halo, for example, that is being used for many of the tricep fuel designs. Is that a reasonable assumption? It is indeed. The uranium is expensive and you're very familiar with the natural uranium feed prices. So what the market price is, is these days, that's quite expensive. Halo these days has a little bit of a premium attached to it since I think a lot of the folks that wanna deliver to halo, they wanna charge a premium to build that capability. So yeah, uranium is a very significant portion of it. The other significant portions are the feed stocks that you feed into the manufacturing process, the different chemicals and additives that go into it. And then don't forget the labor and the operating cost of those equipment. They are, you could argue that they're each about it, third of the production cost, if I give you a very, very rough kind of breakdown of where the cost comes from. But uranium cost is definitely significant. It's the biggest of the components. Your facility is located Oak Ridge, Tennessee. You give me a little bit of the history of this, right? What was it, what did it used to be? It used to be farmland, very, very few people living here. And then this gentleman named General Groves came out here and he wanted somewhere that was secluded, hidden between the hills and valleys of East Tennessee and happened to have a lot of power because as a part of the new deal, Tennessee Valley Authority had formed and there was a lot of dams, there was a lot of plants, there was a lot of power. And General Groves decided to purchase many thousands of acres here and site on the main sites of the Manhattan Project here. And so they made a grid, they put a site called X10, which was the site of the first continuously operating nuclear reactor, the graphite reactor. That site is now these days known as Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Little bit of adjacent to it, north of it, was another site called Y12 on that grid. That's where they hosted the Calutrons, the California cyclotrons that Mr. Lawrence had designed to try to take the uranium that's slightly enriched to the enrichment they needed as a part of the mission of that project. And then to the northwest of Y12, there was another site called K25. And that's where they had the gaseous diffusion plants where they pushed gaseous uranium chemical species through thin membranes. And the 235 just moved a little bit faster than 238. So that's how they partially enriched that feed before feeding it to the Calutrons on Y12. So where are we? We are on the site of the K25 gaseous diffusion plant, which is an incredible place to be on. It has a lot of legacy to offer. And certainly lends itself to the kind of work that we're performing on the site. It's an example of a kind of a huge success story. In the Department of Energy Complex, it did its mission, environmental management office remediated and is continuing to do so. And as the land becomes available, they're providing it to folks that can benefit from that legacy. And boy, there's a long line of folks that can benefit from that legacy. We are located on that K25 site and we've got a lot of really good neighbors that are also in the nuclear business and taking advantage of the legacy of the site. Do you have any idea how many nuclear focused enterprises there are in the Oak Ridge area? More than I can count. More than I can count. And those are just the public ones. And there's what I do know is how many more folks are looking to come here. I mean, you've got the perfect ecosystem here. You've got a population that understands, not just supports, understands, lives in a radiation work, has been doing it for generations and understands it. And because they understand it, they support it. You've got a great ecosystem of companies that are providing a number of services, that's really kind of considered Voodoo and impossible to find in other parts of the country. But again, people if they consider normal business around here. So let me give you an example. If you want nuclear quality assurance, if you want somebody to do some type of environmental work specifically to support nuclear projects. I mean, there's a lot of local awesome companies that do that. You've got the nuclear ecosystem. And then you've got the Department of Energy and why 12 is still there, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is still there. You've got an awesome VOE site office here. So it really is a nexus of some really amazing forces. And because of that, we've got an incredible presence of advanced reactor companies in addition to the folks that are still doing a lot of good work on the Lightwater reactor-based companies. And, Rod, I'm telling you, probably for every one that we know and we have publicly, they're two or three out there looking to come to this location and benefit from this great foundation. A common, maybe miss, I think it's a myth about Trisophule, is it is very difficult if not impossible to recycle. But I think that as you mentioned, the challenges and the cost structure, you must have some means of separated, separating the fuel kernel from the coatings because I'm pretty sure you don't have a 100% yield rate. Absolutely. The manufacturing process, you remember we talked about kind of those four steps as you marched through it. Each step has a yield and it's not 100%. Like no manufacturing process is a 100% yield. I used to work in microelectronics and I can tell you it's the same thing. You go through step by step and you can never have a yield. You work very hard to increase your yield, but you don't have that. Now, the other thing you said, which is really correct is that, hey, this stuff that we're feeding into this process, this uranium is really expensive. So you don't wanna, this is like, no uranium atoms left behind type of mentality. We don't wanna waste any of that precious resource, particularly at a time like this. So we have a yield after each step of the process and then we have material that we reject as a portion of that batch after each process. The good news is that we fully completely recover that uranium. So after the first step, whatever's rejected, we feed back into our uranium dissolution tank and the same goes after each step. Now, there are different physical and chemical processes you need to do to recover the uranium after each step. But even after you code it, you can certainly recover the uranium. And Rod, this is not okay. It's not something I'm telling you that it is viable. This is something that we do on a daily basis here. So we fully recover the uranium feed. So if you give me 100 kilograms of uranium and you want that 100 kilogram of feed stock to end up in a final fuel form and try. So I'll give you 100 kilogram back. Now I'm gonna process 100 and change because I keep kind of feeding it back into the process, but you can certainly recover that as a part of a fresh fuel manufacturing process. What that tells me is if you can recover that stage, obviously with some more difficulty, it's possible to recover and separate the uranium. actinides fuel p-cernals from the trisocotings at any time during the fuel cycle. There's just other considerations, radioactivity, etc. But it's just a myth to say that it's not recoverable. It just made me a little more challenging and so on. But it may be easier too because the carbon-based materials that are used in coding these very heavy isotopes. There's a lot of physical differences between the two and physical differences is how we do separation processes. And chemical equation. Yeah, if I can, you know, maybe I'll continue a little bit more to have thought. It's certainly viable. There is actually a good deal of research in that. Some of the considerations is even like waste volume reduction after discharge to the river's done some good work. There are other folks in the DRE complex have. I will say that if you are going to recover, you know, uranium or TRUs from trisocotized field, that's probably, you know, it's going to be, if you have an option, feel like for instance, discharge used metal fuel or oxide fuel versus trisophil. That's probably easier to get it from the other kinds compared to trisobase fuel. The other thing is that trisobase fuels after discharge, they are truly repository ready. They are really made for long-term geological storage or, you know, deep isolation. Have that number. How are you going to look at it? I think we're trying to really shines because you can achieve much higher burn-ups with it and because it's repository ready, it may be that if you want to dispose, that's one of the best fuel forms to dispose. However, there has been, you know, a number of programs in Department of Energy and number of folks that have looked at it and frankly speaking, we are looking at it is there is a lot of spent nuclear fuel used nuclear fuel with, you know, precious TRUs that's sitting at the side of the various light water reactors. There's a lot of precious isotopes and they're not just TRUs, isotopes for radii-sto-power generation. So if there is process, if there's capability to reprocess those streams and there's folks working on it, you know, one of the companies we work with and are good partners is shine technologies. Those folks are looking at that. Once you can extract the TRU streams from those resources, now it's a really ideal thing to then make trice of fuel from those streams and then go ahead and burn those trans-uranics or TRUs in a reactor and really reduce their, it would be very effective for waste disposal and it would be a fantastic fuel form. And you know, 20 years ago it was a program, 15, 20 years ago called Deep Burn that exactly envisioned that. So you've got a lot of options on how you want to manage your fuel cycle. It's a very flexible fuel form. And you mentioned that Trisso can have a higher burn-up and I recall I think the number, but can you explain to the audience what kind of burn-up improvement there is between standard light water fuel which burns up roughly 3 to 5% of the actinides and Trisso? What's the proven capabilities? We'll do and this is an opportunity for me to kind of get into maybe some of the philosophy of nuclear fuel and these different classes. So I'll try to use analogy to convey that. So nuclear fuel in a light water reactor or any other reactor, you are simply splitting an atom and you're creating two new atoms. And if you look at the distribution of fission products, it's kind of incredible. That's why it's such an interesting thing to me as a field of engineering and science. You start with a material and then you're depositing one-third of the periodic table slowly into it. So I mean there is a multitude of chemical and physical processes taking place. There is incredible amounts of displacements happening in nuclear fuel. I'm talking about atoms being knocked off of their lattice sites. What a nuclear materials people consider high displacements where it's like tens or hundred of displacements per atom in the nuclear fuel you're looking at thousands. So again specifically what I'm talking about is the uranium atom for instance, it's knocked from its lattice site violently through a small explosion thousands of times. So nuclear fuel is really a remarkable material and it experiences really remarkable extreme conditions. Then the question is, alright I've got the nuclear fuel. I want it to fission and generate heat and I want that heat to come out. But I don't want any of these fission products, these two new atoms that I created and that radioactivity to come out. That's ultimate philosophy of fuel. I want it to fission, I want the heat to come out as efficiently as possible and I don't want any of the radio nucleus to come out. Okay. So there's two different ways of doing this. One way is imagine like what a reactor fuel where we have uranium dioxide pellets and we put them in a thin rather soft zirconium cladding. So a good analogy is I've got, you know, you're doing very delicate work and you put a very thin, very flexible, very delicate nitral glove on your hand that can protect you and you know, you're continuing your hand there. Now you can't do any rapid movements. You can't move your hand too much and it needs to be very delicate but it can certainly protect you and it lends itself to those light water reactors that can use. And so how much, what's the burn up from light water reactors? It used to be about, you know, 4% 5% FEMA, FEMA FIMA stands for fractions of initial metal atoms. That means if I had 100 uranium atoms in my fuel, I have fissioned about four or five of them. So most of them are still there. This certainly crept up, you know, the U.S. power plants operate the light water reactors better than anybody else in the world without almost no fuel failures, which is an incredible achievement over the decades. And this charge burn up nowadays, days is about 6% 7% all the way up to 8% FEMA. Now let me also give you another quick trick. If you're used to megawatt day per kilogram of uranium or gigawatt day per metric ton of uranium, 1% FEMA is about 10 megawatt day per kilogram of uranium. It's the same as 10 gigawatt day per metric ton of uranium. So that kind of gives you an idea of the burn up that's coming out of light water reactors. So then there's another philosophy of nuclear fuel. That instead of this, you know, delicate, natural glove, I'm just going to have a very woolly, you know, a mountain that I can move my hand, I can bend my fingers, and I can mechanically decouple this fuel that's experienced in these extreme conditions of temperature and radiation damage and chemical processes. So I can mechanically and chemically decouple that fuel from the cladding or the barriers that are protecting it. And you see that in Tricerfield, and you see that in sodium fast reactor fuel that's that uses the metal sponge with a sodium bond. So those folks are saying, you know what? It's a fool's errand to go ahead and try to make sure the fuel doesn't do anything bad to tear through the cladding or the aquarium cladding gets a light water reactors or the nitro-glove and an analogy. I'm just going to decouple it. And that's what that buffer layer around the kernel in a tricep article does. It decouples it. That kernel will twist and turn and have bubbles and voids and will split, but it just it all a bit screaming and tossing and turning. It can't communicate that to the coating layers of a triceau, those ceramic pressure vessels that contain it. Same in metal fuel. You've got that sponge that's twisting and turning and that sodium bond that decouples the fuel. This allows you to get to these very high burnups. So what are these very high burnups? So that's a more than 2x increase in it's about 2x increase in what we see in light water reactors. And if you look at the experiments that actually easily all of them have surpassed 20% burnup, but usually the reactors, they can't necessarily burn them that far. And so that's why those discussions about the fuel cycle and recovering and recycling make make a lot of sense. But yeah, these fuels can achieve incredible burnups. And certainly in case of tricep fuel, you've got to feel that's inherently safe. It's got multiple layers of encapsulation that keep the fission products there in discretized manner. And it can go to extreme, extreme temperatures and extreme burnups and extreme levels of radiation damage. You mentioned the program deep burn. Are you, is that something that anybody's pursuing anymore? And what was the score where the goals of that program? The goals of the program was exactly what we touched on quickly was if you look at the waste that's the spend nuclear fuel that's discharged from nuclear reactors like light water reactors, you've got a lot of fission products that have half lives that are relatively shorter compared to the trans-uranic elements that are heavier than uranium like plutonium, carrier and California, you know, and a recent new name it. And so those elements they have longer half lives. But they're also really valuable. You can burn them in reactors and generate energy. So the purpose of the deep burn program was to recover those trans-uranic elements and then manufacture a tricyl from them. And, you know, plutonium tricyl or trans-uranic tricyls have absolutely been manufactured and irradiated in this country and in other countries, particularly Germany. And they work extremely well. So the idea was to recover those trans-uranic manufacture tricyl fuel from them, irradiate them to high burn-ups because tricyl is able to achieve those high burn-ups. And you've greatly reduced your waste load and in the process you've generated energy. It was a program that closing the fuel cycle, leaving it open is something that we kind of go back and forth as a national strategy. But it certainly has been in the picture in the last few years. And I believe there is a specific parts of Department of Energy that are looking at closing the fuel cycle again and idea like deep burn really lends itself to that kind of mission. What is standard nuclear vision for their customer base? What kind of tricyl materials are you going to sell? Are you going to stay with the stuff that's been proven? What's that balance? Fantastic question. So what's our vision? Our vision at a very high level, we want to enable advanced nuclear. And we want to enable it by delivering this key ingredient that allows it. to function and deliver energy at low cost at very large scale. And really kind of the analogy that's happening right now that I can kind of use is that there's a lot of great advanced reactor companies out there. I mean, I'm very familiar with them. Incredible people doing incredible work. And imagine like we've got these different car manufacturers. You've got Toyota, you've got Ford, you've got Chevy, you've got these different cars. And they're all, you know, having some of them have different value propositions on the same value proposition. And honestly, rotted by my account about 80% of them want to use tricophil. And for a very good reason because of all the safety benefits we talked about, all the flexibility that we talked about. And the regulatory acceptance that Triso has, which, you know, the only other fuel that has that kind of regulatory acceptance is that like what are reactor fuel? So they want this fuel, but it's, there's no gas station. There's got to be a gas station. So all these cars, whether it's a Toyota, whether it's a Ford, they can pull up and gas up and operate. Because it turns out, as you know, if you don't put fuel in a reactor, it doesn't matter. We have a great reactor. It's not going to turn on just like a car is not going to turn on if you don't have gas in the tank. We see our role as enabling this fleet of advanced reactors for a whole host of mission missions, be it for hyperscalers, be it for defense and security applications, space applications, industrial heat applications were wholly agnostic to that mission and we're wholly agnostic to that specific reactor time. Then you asked, what is it that we're going to make manufacture. So we are benefiting from again, the great work that was done under the advanced gas reactor fuel or AGR fuel program, which again, very methodically defined a program for designing a fuel specification, manufacturing at a laboratory scale, manufacturing at even at a larger scale to through the campaign and irradiating it and collecting very good sophisticated irradiation data. In pile, that is from the reactor and after irradiation post irradiation examination and all that data was then reviewed by NRC and energy issue to safety evaluation reports saying that as long as use a particle within these bounds. We have a good understanding of what the performances with the performances and we can accept it now again, deal is not decoupled from the reactor rod you notice but I'll say it for benefit everyone. You can just say I haven't feel that works I don't even worry about the reactor fuel was a part of your overall reactor licensing strategy and your overall overall rate unit retention strategy. But for those who use triso, triso is 95% of that overall strategy so that's extremely valuable as reactors look to complete their design and licensing. AGR triso was defined for a mission at the time. The reactor was that was looking at using that field there was a reactor program to that end shortly after was launched. It was looking at using a triso that's going to operate to much higher burn ups and much higher temperatures. You look at advanced reactors today they tend to be smaller more compact lots of micro reactors or smaller seminars. They want to be versatile and they care about they don't tend to go to the temperatures that the program had envisioned 25 years ago the reactors will go at least for now. And so we've got reactor developers that are either staying very close today. AGR triso specification or deviating from it in small ways or deviating from it in larger ways. And again that's not there's nothing good or bad about that that's that's again that's the burden is with the reactor developer. To go ahead and make the case to nuclear regulatory commission whoever their regulator is and the regulator you know leaves room to for the reactor developers to to make the case. All this is to say that you know standard nuclear we are agnostic to to this is to the details of the the fuel specification that our customers want. We we certainly have manufactured and we do manufacture triso for some of our customers at one exactly a gr specification triso. We are also manufacturing triso that's that's a little bit slightly different than a gr triso that our customers want and again they're they're going to make the case about why they believe that that's the right fuel. We'll have the right performance for their application and rod on the other extreme we're making triso that's like never been made before with a completely different kernel chemistry or completely different coding layers and often those are the type of particles that are used for. A space power space propulsion application so so it's the whole gamete are manufacturing is really agnostic and quite flexible to accommodate the triso architecture triso architecture being. a uranium sphere of some compound that's individually encapsulated in ceramic pressure vessels to to again to do to do those two things that we talked about to release the vision heat and make sure we don't release the the radio nucleats and. This is kind of the situation today. I do believe going back to the car analogy. We need more. We we don't want our customers to be so fragmented and have all these different specifications we think a more standardization is is is needed. Be it going back to the HR specification with some of its limitation which which i'm not going to go into now or a new standard. We are certainly talking to advanced record developers one on one but we're also you know at very much working closely with the department of energy national laboratories, particularly I don't national laboratory and the advanced fields campaign which again there are also quite aware of this and and and thinking about this problem so I think there's really good opportunities for. establishing a standard that everybody can use that lends itself to today's applications, because our goal is not to have a proprietary triso that only one vendor can use let me give you an example imagine Toyota made cars. And then they said hey by the way you also have to like go to Toyota gas station and use this specific Toyota blend of fuel you know. So, we see ourselves as again we want an industry that's quite large and is is delivering this critical energy that the world needs and we want to be the large scale low cost supplier of that we want triso to be a commodity which again you you you you're not going to hear that from anybody else but you know this is really our vision. And and we think for it to become a commodity we're starting with a really good basis with a GR triso and we think there's work to be done to for the advanced reactor community to benefit even in bigger ways from this foundation. One of the things that it occurs to me is that using your analogy if each of the car vendors has their own fuel and you can only fill up at the specific fuel station that matches your car. You know be a lot less options and your fuel prices might resemble California's fuel prices for example, because they have very unique fuel designs there. And going back to standard it the name standard nuclear also brings to mind a company that was dominant in the oil business for a while called standard oil is there any kind of call back to them. Yeah, it's it's a you know that we love the name we you know i've definitely studied the history of standard oil and john de rocket feller and all the great things that he did. Our goal, you know, somewhat consistent with with what standard oil that is to is to deliver a standard product at at a low cost that can enable all these other other industries and all these other applications. Ultimately, as I said, you know, we we we we we're actually working against this kind of proprietary fuel and high value fuel we want the fuel costs to be extremely low. We want the fuel architecture to be open so so that the developers can readily adopt it and use it and and you know have a very easy time in sourcing and securing it so that's why you know we like to take the. One aspect of that history that enabled this country to you know go through a really an amazing energy and industrial revolution and bring that to the nuclear sector. You mentioned that there's a large number of advanced reactor developers using Christ so in various ways sometimes in a molten salt reactor sometimes in a micro reactor sometimes in a space reactor. All kinds of different different applications there are these vendors and people like or companies like yours getting together and thinking about the commonalities. That they might want to work together to say convince the regulators and even the public that once you're using Christo based fuels, you need a lot less other boundaries and barriers outside of the fuel. Absolutely. We see that all the time we see and again this is it's an industry that's moving collectively as one, you know when when one of the vendors submits a topical report and they they establish kind of a. And then as I said you know there are forums best. Best. In those indirect ways again I can't you know repeat how many times how much the industry is benefiting from all the investment of the Department of energy into the advanced gas reactor fuel program that's enabled all these different developers. And then as I said you know there are forums best best brought together by again the Department of energy to kind of bring everybody together and talk about establishing these these. and these foundations where we get the right buy and from the regulator from the public and and all the stakeholders on on on how to move forward and give the credit that's due to this this this fuel. We certainly see that in our one on one or you know small number of parties interactions will be also see that taking place at the national stage again under department energy and national laboratory leadership and raw this is a really important point you raise. And I'll say it trice of fuel is expensive. I mean it's significantly more expensive and the field that that goes into light water reactors. So people aren't using trice of fuel because it's cool or people aren't using trice of fuel because it's hard to you know it's more expensive to manufacture that's not it's not it's not that. People are using trice of fuel because they don't have to go spend 20 billion dollars in concrete and rebar and vessel to build a gigawatt class large reactor, they can. We talked about they can discretize it right so you don't have a rod or you don't have a vessel that if you get one puncture you can release all the all the radio activity no you've got literally billions of small pressure vessels that don't melt and and and you know you have if. 100 of those pressure vessels fail that's still like at one time centre to minus seven release which is an inconsequential release so the reason people are using trice. is because it enables these reactors to be inherently safe. That's why people are using it. And that's safety. This is what a good news is that when you make a reactor that's inherently safe and passively safe, then it negates the need for expensive containment buildings, expensive active safety systems. And it allows a reactor to come online a lot faster, we'd be much more versatile. And that's why people are using Trisol. And that's why it's extremely important not to go and have it feel that's extremely safe, but because of that, it's more expensive and then have to do everything else that you had to do before. So there needs to be a shift there. I will say we're very fortunate in this country that the nuclear regulatory commission understands and accepts Trisol as functional containment. What an important reward, functional containment. And RC accepts that. I think, and again, and RC's actually kind of ahead of the curve, if you go look at regulators in other parts of the world. So there's, excellent work's been done. And like you said, it's important to continue to establish that. And it's a key part of the value proposition of these reactors. And the reason why so many advanced reactors are choosing to go over Trisol fuel. My view, Trisol can change the cost paradigm. And everybody says, well, nuclear is really expensive, but the fuels are lit, cheap. Because with Trisol, you're going to end up with the reactor, the system might be actually pretty cheap. It might be, heaps a natural gas combined cycle turbine. But the fuel is going to cost you about the same as a natural gas combined cycle. Plant, maybe a little bit less. Because really expensive is a relative thing. And it compared to the 0.7 cents per kilowatt hour, overall cost of fuel, it might be three times it might be four times it. But that could still be cheaper than natural gas at $6 or $7 a million BTU. So anyway, I really think that the public and the politicians, and everybody needs to continue to hear the message that if you've got a Trisol-based reactor using that nice robust fuel form, there simply isn't a lot of things that need to be done outside of the reactor itself. There's fewer layers, there's fewer emergency systems, there's fewer automatic shutdowns or whatever it takes. It is a completely different animal. And I'll say this because I got excited about Trisol fuels in 1991. But I still have a very clear memory in my mind of briefing the Department of Energy with Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Bill Magwood sitting at the end of the table. And I'm saying, well, you know, your ad invention sounds great. But here's this advanced gas reactor fuel program that we have. And I said, well, when is that going to be done? He said, 21 years from now. Amazingly enough, they almost exactly made that time for him because I said in that meeting in 2002. Yeah. Yeah. HGR was done right about 2023 is our recall. That's yeah. Indeed. And again, this is why it's so important to leverage this incredible foundation that the HGR program has given. And you know, again, people ask, why is it that so many reactors are choosing to go with Trisol is because they are benefiting from this this foundation. It is an investment in a fuel qualification, establishing and starting a new fuel qualifying it in the there's really good paper from 2007. It takes about 20 years. And that's what DOE told you and that's what they did. There are good discussions about accelerating fuel qualification cycle. And that's possible. But still, you're not looking at six months or or anything like that. You're still looking at maybe cutting that timeframe by by five years or maximum 10 years. So we have a system, a proven fuel system that performs really well happens to be extremely flexible. And it provides that that great foundation. And like you said, it's a it changes the paradigm. I read your blog on this. I mean, analogy to gas gas power plants is combined cycle plants is really on point. But it's also really important that, you know, it's you have a more expensive fuel. But your ability to not have you're not require tens of billions to deploy a plant. Okay, to not have to enter the billion dollar regime. Your ability to be able to deploy within a timeframe that's not, you know, a third of a generation. It's really, really important. And you know, a lot of the people say, why is that that the country is continuing to deploy gas? Because it lends itself to the operations and of, you know, power deployment. You want to have a known schedule. You want to have something that you can wrap your head around. You want to have something that you can finance. And this is again, what's really attractive about the the separate the reactors have used trice of fuel because they're in that paradigm as you very correctly point out, very similar to gas power combined cycle plants. All right, we've been talking for almost a jock in hour now. So I want to offer you the opportunity for some closing remarks. Tell us what else you want the public to know about standard nuclear. This brand new company was a very technology with a long lineage. Standard nuclear, you know, we are, we've been a team that we've worked together for a long time. A good number of folks in the company through the DOE National Laboratory system. I when I left graduate school, that was 2010 and there was going to be the big nuclear renaissance with big light water reactors. And unfortunately, the the black swan events of earthquake in Japan in 2011 disrupted that. I really couldn't believe a private industry like it is today. The number of advanced reactor developers, how much incredible progress the community has made as a whole. And there's so many different extremely qualified, extremely capable vendors that are that are deploying energy. And I couldn't imagine, you know, having the type of interest and pull from end users. I think that's really unique in that it's not just government is saying, hey, let's go build nuclear, there's actually end users that are begging that are absolutely needed. And there's a whole range of them, hyperscalers, defense applications, remote applications, industrial heats and just clean energy. And seeing not just an incredible push by by the government, particularly this administration and the incredible executive orders that came out, seeing the demand pull from the end users. And don't forget the private capital that's out there that's really dead on this industry too. And it's not by no means this is like taxpayer money off. The team at at standard nuclear, we went to a very difficult transition to come into to standard nuclear. You know, there was a really nice article in Wall Street Journal for those that haven't read the summer website. They go check it out. We a lot of us went when during a very tough period. But honestly, we stuck together on because we kept every day, you know, folks not getting paid that we, you know, they showed up to the facility. They maintained safe operations that actually made fuel. They made, they made components. We kept our facility alive because every day we came here and we looked at each other and told each other, there is no way that there isn't value in this important thing that we're doing. Having the largest Trisoproduction capability anywhere in a world outside of China operating that and knowing that all these advanced reactors depend on it. So it's a unique team that's gone through a lot and it's executing with a lot of trust and conviction. And we are rooting for this industry and it's essential and critical that the vast nuclear comes in and comes in in a big way and solves a lot of our energy problems. Fantastic. Kirk, thank you for your time. Oh, everybody enjoyed the show. Thank you, Rod. Quick reminder, that was Kurt Tarani, Chief Executive Officer of Standard Nuclear. Their website is standard nuclear01Word.com. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Atomic Show. This is Rod Adams. I've been your host for the Atomic Show for more than 15 years. As the publisher of Atomic Insights, I've been speaking with experts in analyzing nuclear energy for more than three decades. About half a decade ago, it became clear that investing in advanced nuclear developments could provide exceptional returns. Successful investors facing Silicon Valley Agreed, while I'll continue to produce new content. Atomic Insights is now a part of Nucleation Capital, a venture capital fund that specializes in nuclear and nuclear adjacent emerging companies. As a managing partner at Nucleation Capital, I'm expanding my access and digging even deeper into nuclear energy companies. My partners and I are working hard to select ventures with extraordinary promise and success. Their building the advanced nuclear sector and helping to expand our clean energy options. We're investing our own money in diversified portfolio adventures and enabling investors like many of you to take advantage of our diligence and selection processes. We use an established software platform that allows us to offer full-featured investment subscriptions starting as low as $5,000 per quarter. A four-quarter subscription will get to exposure to between four and eight ventures. We encourage longer subscriptions with greater diversification by offering a discount on our fees for eight quarters or more. 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