Ep 182: MALWARE. Nuclear Energy Explained, with special guest Julia DeWahl, Co-Founder & President of Antares.

[00:00] Malware is a non-technical look at the tech news of the week. This is a podcast where we learn together about everything from crypto to AI to whatever comes next in tech. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. [00:18] The boys club podcast. No, no. [00:20] Just boy stuff. [00:22] Hey. [00:22] Hi, how's it going? Good. I'm so excited about this conversation. Oh my gosh, what a fun one. What a fun one. Wow. Before we get into it, I'm Natasha. I'm Dina. And this is Malware. Usually on our weekly podcast here, we cover the tech news of the week, but today's episode is a little bit different. What are we talking about here today, Natasha? [00:45] Today we're talking about nuclear energy and people have a lot of feelings about nuclear energy. What better person to have on than Julia DeWall. And why is that, Tina? So Julia, dream girl. Truly. President of Antares. They're building micro reactors. She explains it. [01:06] much better than I ever could or will, so I won't try, but she is a extremely competent person and did an expert job at giving us the lay of the land, really a 101 on nuclear energy. She worked at SpaceX on Starlink, just a [01:24] Honestly, I'm just so impressed with her as a person. I know. It's like when I grow up, I want to be this woman. And it's not because she's like older than me. No, exactly. And yeah, just really fascinating person, category, topic, learned a lot. I will say that one thing that we didn't talk about a lot in the upfront for the podcast is it's a very timely conversation around nuclear energy.

[01:54] dollars in a nuclear energy partnership. Microsoft and Google have announced similar plans. She called it AI fueled data center. [02:02] growth. So that's something that she brings up at the sort of the back half of the interview. But there's a there's [02:10] building interest and also building investment and partially that's due to [02:16] AI's need for energy, but there's a lot of different stuff that factors into it. And honestly, it's just been really incredible to learn and to learn from her, especially. [02:26] I loved it. I loved it. [02:28] you [02:29] Hey Natasha, so a question we get asked a lot is, what do you look for in a crypto platform? So let's talk about it. Well, Dina, I look for a secure, no fuss platform that I can dive into right away. That's why I love today's sponsor, Kraken. If you're waiting for the right time to get into crypto, Kraken makes it super easy and intuitive to get started. Plus, if you get stuck, they have an award-winning client support team that's available 24-7, along with a bunch of educational guides, articles, and videos to help you along the way. [02:59] go to kraken.com backslash boys club not investment advice crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to us customers through payward interactive inc [03:11] On today's podcast, we have Julia DeWall, co-founder and president of Antares, working to bring rapidly deployable micro reactors across the globe. We're going to talk about what all that means today. None of those words are in the Bible, but that's okay. We're going to figure it out. Previously, she worked on Starlink at SpaceX. Welcome to the show.

[03:33] Thank you. It's great to be here. Julia, so excited to have you. I want to jump right in. I want to be totally candid and transparent that I'm very new. We're very new on our journey to learning about nuclear energy. So we're going to treat today's episode as kind of a 101. The basics. I... [03:53] Got nuclear energy pilled a couple weeks ago listening to Bill Gurley at... [04:00] Diablo Canyon, which is a nuclear power plant in California. He did his podcast from there. You have an incredible article that I'll link in the show notes that gives folks sort of the brief history and sort of some context to where nuclear energy is as an industry right now. We learn in community here at Boys Club. So that's what we're going to do on today's podcast. And yeah, just I know you're the founder and a leader in nuclear energy. And so just to have some grace with what will probably be very dumb [04:28] and basic questions from us, if that's okay. That's totally cool. And I was in this spot about two and a half years ago. I didn't know the difference between fission and fusion. I mean, I had not the faintest clue about basically everything related to nuclear. So happy to start at the beginning. And I think it's all very learnable. [04:45] Amazing. I love that. Let's start there. So tell us about your background. What happened to you two and a half years ago that you were like, this is what I want to do? [04:52] per se. Sure thing. I know. I'm like, should I work backwards? Well, yeah. So I founded a company about a year and a half ago now in Terry's. We're building micro reactors, but I'll kind of back up to where I got started originally. Briefly worked in consulting and then got the kind of itch to head out to Silicon Valley where it seemed like interesting things were happening. So moved out, I joined Opendoor, which was a real estate consumer company as an early employee and just did the

[05:22] company scale was really formative to me on, you know, how do you build a business? And then next, I moved down to LA to join SpaceX. And I joined right when Starlink was coming out of R&D. So I helped stand up the go-to-market and the business operations for Starlink. So think like building out starlink.com. How did we get these dishes out to customers? And that was my first foray into hard tech and actually sat right near the production floor for the user terminal and, you know, [05:52] supply chains can be [05:54] how difficult it is to physically make things. So kind of an appreciation there and appreciation for Elon and just big visions for things. And it was during that time, early 2022, [06:05] that I was helping get Starlinks into Ukraine when the war broke out there. And it just got me kind of paying more attention to the region, to the news there. It probably wouldn't have been something I would necessarily have followed so closely. But it reminded me of, I don't know if either of you have read Peter Zehan's books, but he's a geopolitics writer. And he writes about energy and how resources and energy are so important. And he actually [06:35] and is this resource powerhouse. And you just see this play out exactly in Europe. So Europe is seeing skyrocketing energy prices. It's really tough on everyone who lives there, not to mention industry there. And then you see Germany shutting down nuclear power plants. And I was like, that seems like a funny thing to do. If you're having energy problems, what's going on here? And it turns out, you know, there's this really big,

[06:58] anti-nuclear sort of social movement in Germany that actually is changing. But it just got me curious about this nuclear energy topic. So I didn't know the first thing. I had no idea, for example, that nuclear power is 20% of the US's electric grid. I thought it was about 2%. And most people I asked this question to think about the same. I do want to say you lead your past, present, and future article with that stat. And it is so powerful. It was totally news to me as well. I was like, wow, that's... Yeah, no, I know. No one knows it. So that was... Anyway, [07:28] And I wrote this article. I think it's one of these, you know, learning in public helps connect you with people. Right. And this is how I ended up meeting my co-founder, Jordan, who was also really excited about nuclear. And he had a very specific vision for building really small micro reactors, going military first with our go to market. And so that's where we kind of teamed up to start Interest. [07:48] Wow. So interesting and really inspiring to hear how all this has come from basically a blog post and getting curious about something and then researching it and then sort of the trajectory of your life going in a direction is really, really inspiring to hear about. So I think let's start... [08:05] Very basic. What is nuclear energy and how does it work? [08:09] Sure, sure. So atoms, you probably heard of these back in, you know, chemistry class. They're kind of the fundamental piece, building block of everything, and they hold a lot of energy in them. And so the nucleus, the center of an atom, is where the nuclear comes from. And as I mentioned before, there's fission, which is a type of way to get energy from nuclear, from nucleuses, nuclei. And then there's fusion. And so when you split an atom, that's fission.

[08:39] a bunch of energy in the form of heat. Today's reactors, which are called light water reactors, use that heat to create steam, to turn water into steam. Those steams turn turbines, which then create electricity, create power. So that's how fission works. Fusion is just the opposite. When you fuse two pieces together, you create energy as well. And there's a whole branch of the nuclear field that is fusion. This is not yet a technology that exists. So this is all sort [09:09] development in stage right now. There are several companies working on fusion, but fission is the class of nuclear energy that does exist today. There are 92 reactors, for example, in the US that are fission reactors. [09:22] You mentioned one of them, Dina, the Diablo Canyon plant. That's the single existing nuclear power plant in California. And again, kind of stat that I found so interesting is it's almost 10% of California's energy coming from or electricity coming from that plant. [09:37] So there are these big, big plants, they produce a ton of power, but it's all like gets back to that atomic level. [09:43] Okay, can I just make sure I'm understanding? [09:46] Yeah. There's an atom. [09:47] The atom is split. [09:49] Yeah, and you kind of like you throw in, it's usually in a uranium atom, right? Okay. And so where does the atom come from? Well, it's just, you know, think about everything. Like if you pick, I don't know, pick up this glass, for example, like it's, you know, it's a material and a bunch of those atoms are that material. Think of the like the elements, the periodic table. Uranium is one of the elements. And so, okay, you're hitting it with something smaller than the size of the atom. So like a single,

[10:16] nucleus and then you're splitting it and it's creating [10:20] It's creating energy. Energy is released from that splitting. [10:24] Okay. Okay. I'm tracking. And energy comes in the form of heat, right? So, is heat is what then allows you to create power. So in this, again, in this way, create steam, which turns a turbine, which creates electricity. [10:38] Great. I was reading to my kids last night and I was in one of their little super basic science books and there was something that said that there actually it actually isn't possible to create. [10:48] energy that all energy is already created and it's just about moving it from one form to another is that true or is that fake news yeah yeah energy is basically stored or in movement right so you can think of an atom as storing a whole bunch of energy inside of it and when it gets hit and split you release some of that [11:08] So yeah, it's like this weird thing where I, you know, I actually don't have an engineering background, so I don't come at it from like a super technical perspective. There's actually just so many dimensions to working in nuclear. But yeah, it is. It's. [11:20] Funny how that works. There's like on a totally different note, there's something like really beautifully philosophical about that where it's like, oh, there's all these things around us, all this energy around us. And it's just about how it's channeled and where it goes. And that that kind of helps me. [11:34] sort of ground this conversation. Okay, so I want to talk about other forms of energy. So [11:40] We have nuclear energy, which is what we're talking about. The other sort of options on the menu are...

[11:46] Yeah, let's walk through it. I mean, I think it might be useful to just think about the electric grid in the US, right? What was going on? Like in 2023, we can look back, about 44% of electricity generated was from natural gas. [11:58] So fossil fuels, the next kind of biggest category there is going to be sort of tied between nuclear and coal, which are each about 18, 16 percent. Then you go. So coal, obviously, fossil fuel as well. And then you go into the renewable section. The major ones are wind, hydro and solar. So you have about like 10 percent wind and a little less than that of solar and hydro. So, again, it's kind of cool to see nuclear is a pretty big chunk, but fossil fuels are still the majority. [12:28] come out of the ground and you burn them and you get a ton of energy from them. [12:32] They are obviously downside here, carbon emitters, and we know that that's been contributing to the warming of the planet. [12:39] A lot of concern there. We can get into a whole debate and kind of talk about, you know, the climate implications here, but we'll talk about renewables as well. What do people like about renewables? You can create, again, electricity without any of those carbon emissions, again, solar, hydro, where you're usually damming up rivers. And then again, this, you know, how do you store energy? You store that kinetic energy and then you can release it and produce power. [13:03] And you have wind, which is similar, and then solar using solar panels to produce power. And those are also great forms of power, but the biggest downside there is the intermittency of renewables, particularly solar and wind. So when the sun is not shining...

[13:18] when the wind is not blowing, they are not producing power. We have made some headways into batteries, but to actually be able to have the magnitude of battery storage [13:28] to allow yourself to have 24/7 whenever you wanted electricity using solar or wind hasn't been accomplished yet. It would be incredibly expensive to do. So the way grids work best is when there's a mix, right? There is no 100% renewables grid today, and I don't think that would frankly work very well. This is why, you know, we'll maybe get into this a little bit more, but people are very excited now, finally, about combining renewables with nuclear, because nuclear can run 24/7. [13:58] It doesn't have that intermittency factor the way renewables do. And isn't releasing carbon into the atmosphere? That's correct. Yes. Okay. [14:05] And what would be the downside of hydro? You know, most of the big hydro opportunities have actually already been tapped. So we've gone in and we've dammed the biggest rivers already. Frankly, I think in this day and age, there's less appetite to go do that. I mean, there are environmental implications that are pretty serious. And you should see how hung up we get in building just other stuff because of environmental problems, like let alone trying to dam a river. So I think we're just kind of tapped out there. And there's probably not too much more we can do, especially in the U.S. [14:34] That makes sense. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, you spoke a little bit to this, but I'm sure there's more that you can expand on, but why you feel and why nuclear energy is superior than these other options? [14:46] You know, it's not necessarily superior. I think it's very complimentary. It's very differentiated. It has a lot of things to like about it. So why do people why do people think it's great? Well,

[14:57] if you're concerned about carbon emissions, you have only a few options, right? You can go to the renewables or you can go to nuclear for clean power. And it does have distinct advantages in terms of being reliable, readily available compared to the intermittent sources of particularly solar and wind. And then as we mentioned with hydro, not as much opportunity for expansion there. So this is why I think it stands out. It's historically sort of been undervalued. I think it's just been [15:24] when we'll get into some of the like baggage around nuclear, but just very overlooked. I'll give you one example here, the climate conference that the UN holds every year called COP. Last year, for the first time ever, they included nuclear in the conversation of where are we going for carbon, you know, for our carbon free future. People used to talk about 100% renewables, but it's really hard to do that there. And so I think this is where nuclear kind of [15:54] a big chunk dedicated to nuclear, which didn't always used to be the case. People sort of, again, thought we might be able to get there with renewables. We'll see what the progress looks like in terms of our ability to provide battery storage backup. [16:06] But for now, it's now sort of agreed that the nuclear is a very nice complement to other things on the grid. And I think we know that there is strength and diversity of energy types. [16:16] I want to talk about the [16:18] baggage backlash fears around nuclear. But before we get into that, I do think it's useful to have a conversation about the relationship between energy consumption energy and

[16:29] availability, I suppose, and quality of life. I've seen studies where the more energy is available and used, there's correlations to quality of life. And I wonder if you could just expand on that, because I do think that's an important sort of like mindset shift when you're thinking about all these things. [16:45] energy sources and these trade-offs and how nuclear kind of steps into, yeah, just a lot of possibility around it. [16:51] Absolutely. I think it's a fantastic topic. I think we take for granted the energy we use here in the U.S. and the quality of life it provides us. [17:00] energy poverty is a real thing throughout the globe and [17:04] There's actually the UN has this human development index where they look at kind of the human condition. Right. And, you know, a big part of that is kind of GDP per capita, but it goes beyond that. It looks at education rates, health outcomes and kind of combine this. And the most positively correlated thing to having a high human development index is energy access. It's how much energy you're using. And we know that just everything, the basics from having electricity access, especially consistent [17:33] electricity access allows you to refrigerate things so you're not you know having bacteria problems in your house it allows you to have hospitals running and providing higher levels of health care you don't have people um you know burning wood in their houses and and suffering respiratory problems from that in the same same way and so when people talk about some of the like the potential apocalyptic outcomes of climate change it's like you know what would be apocalyptic

[18:03] find that just horrific in terms of what would happen to our health outcomes to our quality of life so i appreciate i appreciate the [18:11] interest in being energy efficient. And guess what? We have done so much on that front. [18:15] Everything about the way our appliances work today is incredibly efficient compared to what it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. And guess what happens when we become more efficient with energy? We just use more of it for other things. There's kind of a limitless, you know, you can use energy for so much and you can use it for desalination to get clean water. There's just so much energy can do. And so I think... [18:38] in some ways, you know, overconsumption, I think, has been a bit villainized and we're sort of forgetting how much energy does provide for the quality of life, the health outcomes that we take for granted. [18:48] Wow, so interesting. [18:50] Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the brand of nuclear energy. Bad brand. Personally, I'm like, I think we should think about maybe, like, changing the name, but that's not my department. But I'd love to hear from you, like, why do you think that is? Like, I think people hear nuclear energy and they think, ah, scary. Like, something bad is going to happen or... [19:12] I don't know, like Chernobyl. Like I go to these places that feel like apocalyptic or like just dystopian. And your article does a great job of outlining that. But I'd love to hear from you here. Why is that like, why is that? [19:26] the perception that I think most people have when they hear nuclear energy. Yeah, I think it's I mean, it's frankly kind of reasonable that it in some ways doesn't connote the great attributes of nuclear power, because it all started with nuclear bombs, right? Nuclear weapons is where, you know, the genesis of harnessing nuclear, the nuclear split, the split of the atom for something very powerful. Unfortunately, the first use case there was was

[19:56] is we continue to develop bombs, we do [19:59] atomic weapon testing in places like the Pacific Islands where there were real ramifications of radiation impacting humans there and so we were frankly quite irresponsible getting started with anything that was kind of called nuclear we a bunch of us joke that we should rebrand like let's call this vision power or you know elemental energy or something else but it's it's hard to rebrand a whole category [20:25] Um, sure. I mean, I'd love to, you know, it would be kind of fun to see, could you do it? Uh, you know, start calling it something else. Um, I think kind of, it is here. It is here to stay at the, for the, for the moment. But yeah, I think there's a lot of baggage around it. You mentioned Chernobyl. That was. [20:42] Frankly, that one was horrific. This was a poorly built... [20:46] Soviet technology, frankly. No containment dome. You had operators who were kind of like running an experiment at the time. Like just everything you could do wrong went wrong with that. That technology would not even become close to passing any sort of regulatory standard in the U.S. Just everything that could go wrong went wrong. And I don't worry about that at all ever happening again. Like we know so much more now and we would sort of never have allowed that kind of technology [21:16] Mile Island in the late 70s in the US, which was just one of these like completely blown out of proportion media events, right? And the 70s was the no nukes movement. People, by the way, conflated nuclear weapons and nuclear energy into generally no nukes, right? That's a huge problem. Like, thank goodness people like sort of know that there's a difference now. But yeah, Three Mile Island, the amount of radiation that escaped from the accident there, which was, you know,

[21:46] was about the size of like a chest x-ray in terms of radiation like no one oh damn like dying or anything else okay but it was totally blown out of proportion guess what like natural gas pipelines like blow up kill people like it's not it's hardly even news but people people just have you know it is this it is this thing where it's you know it's invisible radiation's invisible i i think it's a bit akin to people being afraid of flying even though the stats would tell you that you should be way more afraid of getting in a car you know there there's something about like a plane in [22:16] just it taps into into the irrationality, I think, of humans. And so when you magnify that by all of this negative media coverage and the media and celebrities being anti-nuclear at the time, it really, really left a tough legacy. [22:31] Yeah, you talked about the media sort of perception and [22:34] I mean, my experience with nuclear energy is... [22:37] Fukushima, so that was in my lifetime. I was alive then and then [22:42] Like The Simpsons with Homer working in a power plant, I think. And then Chernobyl, the HBO series, which was a big hit, I guess. And I'm curious why or suppose how the media sort of went that way. [22:59] with nuclear i mean i think you know media does well when it plays to people's sort of fears and and these like big narratives it's sort of unfortunate like the simpson stuff is super unfortunate like green goo you know all that i was just like so far from the truth but it kind of lands from an entertainment perspective so it's kind of these like one of these unfortunate side effects of something that is

[23:22] frankly, I mean, like sort of a very... [23:26] powerful and special sort of technology. Again, you're producing so much power from something so small. And it has had this like mysterious and negative background that I think it was like kind of right for making these entertainment series. Chernobyl, I think, was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of a series. I actually didn't even see the whole thing, but from what I saw and kind of what I've heard. So people were trying to portray that like, [23:48] Yes, there were some things that went wrong. So like, fortunately, I don't think it was portrayed as all like, well, negative nuclear energy is all negative. But yeah, it's not played well in the media. And there frankly have been no competing narratives, right? There's there's nothing else that's out there that is portraying nuclear as negative. [24:05] A good thing, a positive thing, an impactful, you know, sort of change oriented technology. I think something that you said that really lands for me is this idea of whenever something's very hard to understand, what happens around it is that then a narrative gets shaped around that thing. And public perception is created in through the media and through like the easiest way to talk about it, which is often negative. I think we feel that a lot of boys club where we are really trying. [24:33] optimistic about technology. We think that there's all of these incredible innovations that are happening in the time that we're living in and what an exciting time to be alive and an exciting time to look at what is happening in tech. But when we sit down to write the newsletter or we do this podcast, it actually is very challenging to not just allow a negative perception to be the way that the conversation is guided because so much of media coverage, especially around things

[25:03] are so negative. And like we see that in crypto, you see that in like you see it in all of these areas of innovation. And yeah, I think especially with something like nuclear that has quote unquote like events that you could tie something negative to, it's hard to sort of shake that. So I'd love to talk about what if everything, things are going right, what's going to happen. So if nuclear energy were adopted, like what would it mean for climate change? What would it mean for emission reduction? And yeah, what are some goals and some [25:33] a vision of the future around that specifically that you see that's hopeful. [25:37] Yeah, totally. I've, you know, again, nuclear power is a clean technology. It's carbon free. This is what we're aiming to do, right, is to replace our [25:47] fossil fuel burning with something that does not emit carbon and so nuclear is just the perfect thing for that and it's such a perfect complement to renewables we talked about that intermittency problem before of you know sun and wind come and go and nuclear can provide this sort of base load or you know whenever you want it to run basically power source and as i mentioned before the the un climate conference last year for the first time you had 26 countries all sign up for tripling [26:17] nuclear capacity, nuclear power output in their countries by 2050. And that is, I think, a really powerful commitment to say that we believe this needs to be part of a clean grid and we need to build a whole lot more of it. Unfortunately, today in the U.S., again, not to try to go back to the unhopeful, because we don't have any new power plants under construction. But what's really

[26:41] There are several SMR companies that are being developed. That stands for small modular reactors, which [26:47] again, don't exist today. Right now we have these gigawatt scale large plants. People are excited about building at smaller scale for several reasons, like some different characteristics of the reactor that are safer, more efficient, et cetera, and also less costly to build. So you build something a bit smaller, you don't have to take on the huge capital risk. So that's, I think, [27:07] you know, we're excited about the SMR development, excited about some of these [27:12] tech giants, the hyperscalers, AI, especially driving some of that, getting into whether it's turning on retired power plants. We've seen that get started. So we have some hopeful movement in the US. You do see other countries, though, saying like, we're excited to build more nuclear. So it's definitely underway happening, but certainly needs to be a part basically of the climate-free energy generation future that we want to see. Really quick question. So from what you're saying, [27:42] or, [27:42] plants and then the huge ones. Yep. Okay. And so when you're looking at like development time, what is the timeline for each of those? [27:51] Yeah, just to kind of baseline, the reactors that exist today around the world are the vast majority of these water-based reactors. So again, that heat from splitting the atom creates steam, turns a turbine, which is the way also, by the way, when you burn fossil fuels, you also create heat to create steam to turn a turbine to create electricity. [28:10] It's a similar dynamic there. So that's the existing technology, and we can go build more of those. We just put two more on the grid in 2023 and 2024 in Georgia.

[28:21] at the Vogel plant. So we added two more reactors, but it had been decades before that really that we had built anything of that scale. So it's kind of exciting that we have recently done that. It took [28:31] i think about 30 billion dollars to build those two reactors they were almost like almost double the budget they set out to do the timelines were a decade plus to build them okay so it's hard right we're not good in the us at at building big infrastructure anymore for a variety of reasons you know we've sort of overburdened ourselves with regulation lawsuits bureaucratic red tape [29:01] these sorts of plants. So we have, you know, we've, it's just not something we're great at. And, but there's some issues. Yes, we, we, we will need to overcome them. And I think we can to continue building these, these gigawatt scale, these large plants. And then as you mentioned, yes, there's this kind of second category, the smaller SMRs. Some are using sort of different technology mixes, micro reactors. So what I'm building at Nteris is cut falls into that second category of a much smaller size reactors. These are even smaller than the SMRs that will go [29:31] after special purpose applications, right? Where today, let's say there's off-grid military or commercial activities. So we can use, let's say the missile defense sites in the Arctic, which run off of diesel generators today, like our, you know, our most critical defense assets are running off of these diesel generators. You could also look at other just like specialized industries that is operating in sort of off-grid locations are often using diesel and micro reactors can go in,

[30:01] long lasting, you don't have to constantly be refueling them. So, you know, our micro reactor can last three to five years without needing to do anything. And obviously they're carbon free. So you kind of have these two categories, development timelines for the SMRs and micro reactors are still, you know, a few years out from seeing those first of a kind reactors come out. So this category is still in the R&D and development phase. This is not something we like have, you know, you can't go buy one today, you know, out of a catalog or whatever you. So this is, [30:31] where a lot, this is where the startups have been. This is where there's kind of a lot of new buzz and activity. But at the same time, like we need those big gigawatt scale plants as well. And I think that if we can figure out some different challenges around how do you project finance these? How do you get the right workforce together to do this? And again, I think those tech giants are going to be pretty instrumental in this and kind of catalyzing some of the growth. I think we just need both of these categories to be taken off. [31:01] like site specific, like, is it like, okay, as you were talking about in the Arctic, that would be built there. It's not like a thing that is portable. No, it's such a very good question. The idea is actually, and the reason they refer to the SMR category as modular, is the idea here was to do a lot more. [31:22] in a factory setting that is mass producible right so you could you know kind of print these out so to speak in a factory setting where you're not building a bespoke reactor every single time uh the way we've done with you know the vocal plant the big gigawatt plants where again we're kind of bad at these massive construction infrastructure projects we are better actually at manufacturing and so if we can build

[31:46] smaller scale reactors that you could put together in a factory setting. You can think about actually the SpaceX rockets as being a really good analogy here. [31:54] They are big. They are complex. This is hard technology to build. But SpaceX now builds one every few days. And if we can get to that scale with reactors, we're in a great place. And you get away from having all of this one-off, bespoke, on-site construction, and you move towards, it's ready to go. We do it standardized the same way every time. And then once it comes off the production line, we ship it out to where it needs to be, turn it on. [32:23] Cool. Really cool. [32:24] I want to ask, it feels like there's such a clear [32:27] clean energy, environmental, carbon reduction story. [32:32] with nuclear energy. And I don't understand why more environmentalists are [32:36] bracing nuclear energy. I saw [32:39] a Jane Fonda diatribe against it recently not to say that like she's the one to listen to necessarily maybe she is I don't know but she it got a lot of headlines and she was talking about how I don't know harmful dangerous it is and I'm curious why it hasn't [32:55] That's such a big conversation in the zeitgeist. [32:58] and it feels like there's [33:00] This is not a perfect solution by any means. [33:03] I don't think anyone is saying it is, but it's certainly, it could be part of a solution set. And I'm curious why it hasn't. [33:11] that hasn't taken hold. And I'm curious if you know why. Yeah, today, a vast majority of the environmental groups are still have an anti nuclear stance. And it is it is kind of curious that they haven't evolved from where they started back in the late 60s. It's sort of when the environmental movement

[33:28] got going. But there were just, you know, it was it was during this time that these, you know, certain groups and the movement itself was very concerned about overpopulation. I don't know if you've heard of the population bomb book. [33:42] But this is by Paul Ehrlich, bestselling book, bestselling author, big leader in the environmental movement. And he I will try to quote him, but he basically says a society with abundant cheap energy is the equivalent of giving a kid a machine gun. Like as in like this horrible could do it could do terrible things. And the environmental movement was very. [34:03] you know, small is beautiful, anti-growth, right? You kind of sometimes environmentalists are referred to as like de-growthers. Nuclear was just the opposite of everything they were trying to do, which is like keep things small, kind of conservation oriented, and just, you know, not excited about big energy, which meant, you know, big industry, which meant population growth and all these other things. So it just has its roots there and it hasn't evolved. [34:33] - Are other [34:34] groups popping up like you know not necessarily these old school environmental groups but that are made up of younger people who don't have some of the same baggage from that environmental movement plus some of the um nuclear weapons consternation for good reason frankly that the boomers experience um we don't really have that in our collective memory as young people so um i spent some time actually uh kind of involved with the diablo canyon question of like should they

[35:04] people who were anti-nuclear showing up to give testimony to the California State Senate were all older people. And the people who are pro-nuclear were young people. And so you do see a kind of a generational divide there. I'm heartened that I think the climate movement in general has started to be more open-minded to nuclear. [35:22] Even just like Greta, for example, used to have an extremely hard anti-nuclear stance. And she's just slightly, I wouldn't call her pro-nuclear yet, but she's just slightly started to come around and made some comments of like, maybe turning off nuclear in Germany to turn on dirtiest form of coal is not a good idea. So yes, still some baggage, but I think there are some slow signs of change. Frankly, I'm not, I'm a little bit [35:48] Environmentalists, yes, they have their voice, and I think they will throw up a bunch of lawsuits and things like that at nuclear. But there's so much else that's positive, right? Congress is incredibly bipartisan in support of nuclear, and they're not very often bipartisan on anything. [36:04] And then you have public perception is changing really rapidly. It used to be in like the 40s percent of people just like five to 10 years ago that supported nuclear. It's now in the 60 plus and rising. So it's moving in the right direction. [36:17] Can you talk to us about waste or spend fuel, I think is what they call it? What is that and how does that compare to other energy sources? [36:27] Yeah, it's a great topic. It's one of the big ones that the sort of anti-nuclear people use as like, well, what about the waste? And

[36:35] So yeah, spent fuel, which is just fuel that's been used or waste, is in the nuclear industry. It's one of the only energy industries that actually manages the entirety of its waste chain. [36:46] So think about solar panels that head into your local dump and could be leaching minerals or chemicals out into the groundwater. Or if you've ever seen the pictures of wind turbines that get taken apart and they're massive, right? And then just like buried in the ground. [37:02] We just bury them. And we go through a lot of those because the lifespan actually on... [37:08] the renewables versus nuclear is shorter. So there's a lot of waste out there in general. And obviously, we know the byproducts of fossil fuels, not only just carbon, which is warming the planet, but you have particulate matter, especially from coal plants that are harmful from a respiratory perspective. So making electricity, there are trade-offs to all of them, right? No one's doing this for free, like with no byproducts. And so I would say nuclear has waste or spent fuel that [37:38] All of the waste we've ever produced in the U.S. can fit on a football field. So all in quantity. What they do today is it's all stored on site at the plants in these big metal and concrete casks. And so very well managed and secured. But it is true. I mean, parts of that waste will last hundreds of years. And so, you know, nothing is perfect. But I would say it is so much more manageable than we give it credit for.

[38:08] waste [38:08] It reminds me so much of the conversation around climate and crypto and how much of a backlash crypto gets for its energy consumption. But the reality is that. [38:22] crypto you can See it all you can track it all you have like a much better understanding of how much energy you're using than the global banking system but because of that it gets a really bad rep because I [38:34] there's like this ability to track it and look at it and you have to like face the numbers in a way where it's so impossible to do that with the global banking system. And so there's a little bit it's not exactly the same, but I feel like there's some correlation between. I think that makes sense. Yeah. OK, so you talked about the U.S. feels. [38:51] there's no new [38:53] reactors planned, I think is what you said. [38:55] earlier, no new ones under construction, at least you mentioned [39:00] regulatory burden. [39:01] regulatory overreach possibly. [39:04] workforce, not issues, but like not a very [39:08] not a workforce that's trained for building [39:11] these things and then obviously we've talked a lot about the public perception which could be an issue as well but as i was reading your your article i was really struck by the stat around france's [39:21] nuclear power plants supplying 70% of their, of the whole country's electricity. [39:27] crazy to me and then [39:28] China committing to break ground on 150 new reactors in the next 15 years. In the Bill Gurley podcast, he talked a lot about South Korea's efforts and kind of just how they're leapfrogging.

[39:39] what's happening in the US. Talk a little bit about why [39:43] what you feel like would need to happen for the US to kind of catch up or what you feel like is really holding the US back. Yeah, you nailed it. France was ahead of its time back in the 70s, decided to make a huge investment in nuclear technology. They don't have the same level of [39:58] carbon-based resources, so oil and gas production, that we do in the U.S. And they, I think, sort of looked ahead and said, energy security is important, important to the strength of our nation. They weren't worried about climate change at the time, frankly. So it was not really a carbon issue or a carbon-free issue. So good for them. But they aren't building a massive amount of new nuclear. I think they're just like sort of us in the Western developed world, a little bit [40:28] the just lack of ability to go build huge infrastructure the way we used to. China, on the other hand, as you mentioned, I think they have 27 reactors under construction right now, again, versus zero in the US. This 27 versus zero is something we should definitely be worried about. Energy, as we know, it's the crux of everything we do. You can build a whole lot of stuff with it. It's important. And nuclear, what's nice about it is there is a bit of a supply chain in terms of [40:58] to make fuel, but not having that fossil fuel dependence of needing to go get oil, coal, gas, you name it, from other countries, which China does not have a lot of themselves, is a really nice advantage for them. So it does allow them to be a bit more energy independent, energy secure. And they are, you know, they're a country with a little bit more of just a nationalist, you know, from the top down, like, hey, we're doing this, we're building this.

[41:24] frankly, a little less regard for environmental issues and maybe workforce issues. So, you know, don't they don't have the same sort of [41:31] built out regulatory system that we do in the U.S. These are for better and for worse, right? There's some maybe some good reasons we have environmental protections and things like that. But we have been just very slowed down by a lot of this, again, regulatory burden, kind of atrophied workforce that isn't kind of set up for this. I think one of the biggest risks or the biggest problems you see in the U.S. is who's going to pay for this, right? That $30 [42:01] single utility to take onto their balance sheet. So, you know, when you have China or some kind of national authority coming down with lots of money, throwing money at the problem to do this, you will see it get done a little bit more easily. So what I am sort of hopeful on, though, is that this [42:18] new data center, AI driven data center growth that we are seeing reflected in the growth in electricity use in the US and the forecasting is even steeper, is I do think this is going to force things to change. And because the big hyperscalers have now demonstrated very concretely their interest in clean, firm power, so nuclear power, I think that the economics and the equation is [42:48] to go figure out how to build nuclear plants because [42:52] There's a there's strong demand for it. There's a market for it. And people want this type of power. And so let's get our heads together and figure out how to do the risk sharing, right? It shouldn't just be a single utility having to take on this risk. If

[43:04] If the Googles and Amazons of the world can figure out how to come in, provide capital, take some of the risk on, and frankly, just like be that catalyst of like getting the project going, I think it can be very, very powerful. And then like anything else, there is a learning curve. The more you start doing things, the better you'll get at them. So we just, again, we just finished those Vogel plants. Like there are people who just built a nuclear power plant. Like we should harness that. Get those people on the next project and we'll start to get better at it. [43:34] 30 billion again. It should cost a bit less, then a bit less, then a bit less. And this is why doing anything at scale is really valuable. And what China is already starting to see is their costs come down. South Korea, that was mentioned by Bill Gurley, is an example of they built the same exact reactor over and over, and they saw their costs come way down. So I believe we have it in this. And I do think the catalyst for it, hopefully, we're going to see is going to be these hyperscalers that, again, have the demand, they have the need, and they have the money to go [44:04] Thank you. [44:05] We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back. [44:08] It's time for a more open, inclusive, and transparent financial system. A system that serves nearly everyone, everywhere, all the time. That's why we love today's sponsor, Kraken. Kraken is a crypto platform that provides a super simple on-ramp to the world of crypto with a 24-7 support team. Crypto transcends physical and imaginary borders. No matter where you are, you can send funds easily and quickly to almost any part of the world. Plus, forget about waiting times and waiting lines. You can send, receive, and trade crypto anywhere near instantly.

[44:38] Kraken.com backslash boys club, not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to us customers through payward interactive Inc. No third-party transfers available. [44:50] That's a perfect segue into, I think, the last few questions here around really what's next and what's happening in this moment in time that is affecting nuclear specifically. Super interesting to think about sort of the energy dependency that AI requires and how that will sort of provides a market for some of the things that we know exist. [45:11] is needed for nuclear energy to grow and become what I think you hope that it will. Have there been any advancements that make the industry materially different than it has been in the past today? Yeah. [45:25] Yeah, I think the couple things I'll say here is one is you do have some new players and some new options in the space now, right? Different SMR companies, micro reactor companies like Antares. And that just allows, you know, innovation that allows for competition that allows for choices, right? So the hyperscalers can say, oh, I want [45:45] you know this size reactor i want these attributes from or i want to partner with this new company and and help them get to these goals and and you know build some reactors for myself over here so great to see a lot of players in the space which is i think always a good thing and second is is kind of what i was saying before i think there is this moment now of wow we're gonna want to have more clean firm electricity and these this this ai fueled data center growth i

[46:15] It will catalyze change and build starts. And that's what we really want to see. And again, some of the news that's come out over the last few weeks has been really exciting. You have Microsoft turning on a retired power plant. That's never happened in the US. We've actually only decommissioned plants over the last 10 years. I think it's like 13 plants have shut down. This is the first time we're bringing one back online. [46:45] is I think just gonna be really powerful in some of the change we'll see going forward. [46:50] This has been such a wonderful conversation. It's been so nice to chat with you, Julia. Thank you so much. I think just as we're wrapping up here, if people are now curious. [46:58] to learn more to go down a rabbit hole what do you recommend people listen to they read of course we'll link in your show notes to your article which is fantastic but where else would you recommend that people look [47:10] Yeah, it's fun that it's become a bigger part of the conversation. So there's, you know, there's kind of two flavors of podcasts you can go listen to more of, right? It's like listening to a generalist podcast that has a nuclear episode, kind of like Bill Gurley, this conversation today. [47:40] That has a few ones. I mean, there's a book called The Case for Nukes, which I hate that they use the word nukes instead of just nuclear energy because it sounds like weapons. But anyway, it's a great overview book. And if you want to go a little deeper and like kind of get more into the weeds on like why is nuclear, like where do we come from? Why is nuclear power great? So yeah, there's a bunch of things to check out. This was so wonderful. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. And I feel like I learned so much. I'm like, oh my gosh, leaving so much smarter than I came into this conversation. So thank you for that.

[48:10] Thanks for having me here.