Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The U.S. nuclear groundswell

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new reactors, Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, reached completion over a decade later. So is this latest wave of nuclear hype any different? In this episode, Shayle talks to Chris Colbert, CEO of Elementl Power, which on Wednesday announced a deal with Google to develop three nuclear projects of at least 600-megawatts each. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, is an investor in Elementl.) Chris, a former executive at NuScale Power, thinks last year may have marked the start of a nuclear revival: the recommissioning of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and Michigan’s Holtec Palisades; Big Tech deals to support small modular reactor development; and the start of construction on TerraPower’s Wyoming reactor, the Western Hemisphere’s first advanced nuclear facility. But until new reactors move beyond one-off projects to serial deployment, nuclear won’t achieve the cost reductions needed for widespread adoption. Chris and Shayle discuss what it will take to turn this groundswell of activity into widespread deployment, covering topics like: Current tailwinds, like load growth and interest from corporate buyers Why corporate buyers may be better positioned than utilities to take on development risks Elementl’s technology-agnostic approach Different nuclear technologies — light water, non-light water, and advanced designs — and Chris’s predictions for when they’ll reach commercialization Why iteration is essential to driving down costs (and why the Google deal involves three separate projects) How regulatory timelines are speeding up The steps of project development with a corporate buyer Chris’s criteria for site selection — and why attracting skilled labor ranks surprisingly high Resources: Latitude Media: Was 2024 really the year of nuclear resurgence? Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback? Catalyst: The cost of nuclear Latitude Media: Trump’s DOE is reupping Biden-era funding for small modular nuclear reactors Latitude Media: Utah bets on a new developer to revive its small modular reactor ambitions Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, and increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data plus tools that they’ve never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Mark your calendar for June 12, 2025. Latitude Media is holding its fourth Transition AI Conference in Boston. This year's theme, energy infrastructure in the era of AI-driven load growth. We're going to bring together investors, developers, researchers, and tech companies to talk about the creative ways to meet data center demand, and companies include Fervo energy, form energy, scale microgrids, spark fund, KKR, generate capital, or RENIA, flex-gen, national grid partners, and more. Plus, we're going to have a live open circuit episode featuring Caroline Golland from Google

and a live green blueprint episode featuring Rick Needham from Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Get your ticket at latitudemedia.com slash events. Podcast listeners get 10% off their ticket. Use the code latitude pods 10 at checkout. Latitudemedia.com slash events. We will see you at Transition AI. Latitude Media. Podcast at the frontier of climate technology.

I'm Shell Khan. And this is Catalyst. If you ever went to IKEA and bought like four pieces of furniture the same type and constructed them yourself, the first one, you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you're missing. The second, third and fourth ones, you're just knocking them out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear.

And that's just been proven over and over and over again. Coming up, new nuclear has come into the U.S., right? When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to energy hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions

that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR. An award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent

and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit fishtankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-F-T-T-R.com. I'm Shail Khan.

I lead the frontier strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right, so I've been thinking about this, and here's the word that I would use to encapsulate what's happening in the U.S. nuclear power market. It's a groundswell. I don't think anyone would deny

that there's something happening here, driven by a combination of political support and load growth, off-taker interest, capital formation, possible regulatory reform. But let's be clear, it is still true. that the U.S. has built one, count of one new nuclear project, in the past X number of decades.

And that's why a groundswell feels like the right word to me, because sometimes a ground swell leads to a massive wave, but sometimes it doesn't. So in my mind, the operative question is in which direction we are headed here. We at EIP, for disclosure, do believe that there's a wave coming, as evidenced by the fact that we helped to stand up and invest it in Elemental Power, the Pure Play Nuclear Developer, whose CEO, Chris Colbert, you're going to hear from in a few moments. But there is still a lot of work to do to translate all this momentum and excitement into actual capacity on the grid. Anyway, Elemental came out of stealth this week and announced a big partnership with Google

to develop a three-site portfolio of at least 1.8 gigawatts of new nuclear in the U.S. See, grounds well. Anyway, there's a lot to talk about, though, in translating that to real action. And so we brought on Chris, who is the co-founder and CEO of Elemental. Prior to that, he was the CFO at New Scale, which many of you will know is the first SMR company to actually achieve design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And again, for disclosure, as I mentioned, we at the AP are investors in Elemental, and I'm on the board.

Anyway, here's Chris. Chris, welcome. Thanks for having me. Let's start by, I guess, getting your overall take on the state of the market, such as it is for new nuclear in the U.S. You've been in it for a while. What does it feel like? Where are we today? Yeah, so, you know, I have been in a while.

I first was recruited over to the nuclear in 2007 at the first nuclear renaissance. But, you know, it's been through its ups and downs since that time. But now I think that there's the right confluence of both, you know, market demand. investor sentiment and regulatory and government policy to really make it happen this time. And we feel pretty well situated to make that happen in this marketplace. So I'm pretty comfortable with where it is and really excited about where we are, given the journey I've been through with nuclear. Yeah, you said the first nuclear renaissance in 2007 or so.

That one was a mirage, right? So the question is, is this one going to be different? Yeah, so there's a couple of reasons why I think it's different this time around is that all the things that we learned from that first renaissance. And keep in mind, the Vogel 3 and 4 project came out of that first Renaissance. That's not a total mirage. Just a project. Just a project.

And it had issues. But all the things that we learned from that first time around in terms of the policy, the offtake, the execution stuff, I think, is now all available to us with people who are involved in that to make this next round be successful. But really the advent of the demand side where, you know, back in the 2000s, there was not really a demand growth. Now we're seeing phenomenal demand growth, which was strong to begin with, but just, I mean, really taken off with artificial intelligence driving it. And, you know, those trillion dollar balance sheet from those hyperscalor companies that can really allow nuclear to flourish and happen this time around. That wasn't prevalent

last time. Right. So I wanted to talk through the sort of where we are now through four lenses, which I think are the key lenses, and you've already alluded to a couple of them. But so one is offtake and customers. Second is suppliers, OEMs, like who's actually making reactors and of what kind and so on. Third is the role of the utilities, who obviously have a big role to play here. And then the fourth, maybe the big one at the end is the regulatory, state of regulatory environment for nuclear projects and nuclear reactors. So the one you talked about the most already, we can just go through relatively quickly, which is the off-take side. What difference does it make?

I mean, I think historically, correct me if I'm wrong, anybody who is considering new nuclear in the United States wasn't really doing a corporate PPA-type off-take prior to this new wave right now where, obviously, you guys just announced this big deal with Google. All the hyperscalers have made some kind of announcement or another on nuclear. So it feels like one big change there is, of course,

there is load growth in general. but also you've got this class of corporate buyers that are generally universally leaning into nuclear and interested in doing something creative with their balance sheets, going above and beyond just saying, okay, I'll sign a PPA when you get the price down sufficiently. Yeah, absolutely. The first time around it was all based upon regulated utilities,

getting the repairs to underwrite it. And at the time, they were trying to underwrite 17 billion, $20 billion projects, and their balance sheet or their market capitalization may be $20 to $30 billion. And the growth didn't show up. And their expectation for high gas prices at the time didn't come to fruition. We had cheap gas.

And so those two things really conspired against the demand side of it, where we have kind of the opposite, where we have pretty much all-time low gas prices, but still a huge demand. And a requirement from the hypers out there as corporate buyers that want, you know, reliable base load power and, you know, increasingly want to see. be clean and build for long duration so that they're going to have it available to them for a long period of time. So that has really changed from the first time around, both in terms of what's driving the demand

and the rest of the environment around it from a market perspective, really much better for nuclear this time than the first time. Can you talk a little bit more about what is the market or what should the market be asking of those hypers, of the buyers? again, above and beyond, yes, we will sign a PPA if you get the price down low enough, because there's a lot of risk to retire along the way in project development. Then there's also this question of how do we get the cost down in nuclear, which is at least in part of function of building multiple projects,

not a single project, and then driving down a cost curve. So I know the hypers have been thinking about, okay, what can we do beyond the obvious PPA? How do you think about that suite of possibilities? That's been the biggest change from the hypers probably in the last two or three years, is that, you know, when I was, before I came to Elemental, it was that new scale.

And we talked a lot to the hypers and really said in order for projects to go on, they needed to have some, you know, skin in the game or some exposure to the development cost because, you know, unlike renewables where the development costs might be in the tens of millions of dollars at most, it's hundreds of millions of dollars for nuclear.

And you can't just have a power purchase agreement to make that kind of investment as a developer. And it took a while for people to realize that that was what needed to happen. And necessity is the mother invention is that once people realize that I need clean and large amounts of base load megawatts, nuclear needs to be part of that, how I was doing before isn't going to work. That kind of moment really solidified over the last year and a half with the hyperscale. are saying, okay, I need to do more than just say,

I'll write you a power purchase agreement. We're going to make some investment. They've made investment, you know, mostly in the technology, but increasingly, as this deal we're doing now with Google, is in the upfront development, which is really the key part that needs to be reversed. Okay, so that's the customer slash off-take side. Let's talk about the supplier universe.

Obviously, used to be at new scale, which is one of the suppliers, OEMs in the space, but it's an interesting landscape there of like lots of activities, but also very few proven and or approved from a regulatory perspective products, I suppose, that you can buy as a developer. So how do you think about that landscape? So, you know, we approached it in that there's been billions of dollars invested by these technology developers

and either traditional light water reactors, which you call Gen 3 or Gen 4 reactors, which might be high temperature gas or sodium cooled. And they're all kind of nearing the end of their development process where they're not, quite ready yet that all kind of trying to solve for something, whether it's in supply chain or licensing or whatnot. So we're technology agnostic in the belief that, or the knowledge that we can go out and find sites that are amenable to the hyperscale is what they need for offtake and location that we can develop in a way that in a year from now or a year and a half from now,

we can pick the technologies that have made it through their sort of crucible of licensing and development and cost estimation that we can pick with confidence. that we know what we're going to get, when we're going to get it, and what it's going to cost. They're almost there, and I can't tell you which one of them is going to be successful, but there's so many of them out there that have invested so much. I'm very comfortable that there's going to be probably three or four at least that are going to make it through that part of it, that will be successful in the long term. Just hard to pick now, but that's how we really see it.

And if you look at the two different kinds of broad types of the fission reactors between light water and non-lightwater. The light water is 50 to 60-year-old technology. They're just doing it with better designs that are safer and simpler and bringing the cost down, sometimes smaller, so they do more work in a factory versus doing it in the field. And then you have the non-law and light water types, which have better safety characters and whatnot.

But it may not be really quite ready from a supply chain or the fuel supply or some aspect of it, which probably will take a little bit longer. get confidence around that part of the OEM's equation. But certainly what we're looking for in the early 30s and the late 30s, we think that that's the early 30s is the light water reactors, and the late 30s is when we'll see commercially more of the non-lightwater reactors coming before. You mentioned briefly the question of scale.

This has obviously been another hotly debated topic in nuclear world, which is, you know, historically we've built large mega projects, pretty much exclusively. There are technology companies who are developing everything from micro reactors that are a megawatt or five megawatts or something like that, up to, you know, gigawatt scale type reactors.

The deal that you just announced with Google is for three projects of 1.8 plus gigawatts total. So 600 megawatts plus per project. Is that scale borne out of sort of what you view as the sweet spot given the technology landscape? Or is that more a function of, this is the scale that a hyperscaler needs to fulfill the capacity of a data center or both?

It's really both because we're solved for two things, right? One is they have huge needs, but they want to see us get down the cost curve, which means you need to have multiples. And we look at the sort of intersection of doing multiples, the size of the need they have, the capital they can deploy, and what it costs for various, whether it's micro, small, or large reactors. The small light water reactors fit more jet, generally into that category, as well as some of the smaller Gen 4 reactors as well.

So this is kind of anything from 75 megawatts to 300 megawatts electric. That fits pretty well because, again, you get more swings at bat. So if you have one not work out, the other two will carry you through, which is how you want to see a portfolio work. And when you have multiples at a site and multiples in a deployment, you can get down those cost curves both in the factory and in the field more readily than you could with a large reactor. So that's really how we saw it playing out in real time.

And the hyperscalers looked at all of them. And, you know, it was our goal, as elemental, was to find the right solution that kind of threads the needle between the OEMs, utilities, and the customers in terms of what makes the most sense, and that's where we landed up in our conversations with Google. Okay, so to sort of encapsulate what you're saying overall on the supplier side, your bet is that currently nobody's

quite crested over the commercial readiness hump yet, but you think there will be multiple vendors, OEMs, who will get there over the next year or two. And so you're basically positioning yourself to wait and see who gets through the crucible, or over the crucible, around the crucible, whatever the metaphor is meant to be. And then pick the winners there. But that's obviously contingent on anybody sort of like getting through and getting commercially ready, which maybe is a good segue to the next category here, which is the regulatory. the state of regulatory and permitting. Talk to me about where you see that.

Yeah, so, I mean, number of designs have gone through a design certification process, which gets you a license for your technology. Think about like Boeing gets their 78 jetliner approved. Some folks have gone out and gotten construction permits or the replying forum, so that's getting the permission to start constructing it. Nobody's gotten yet to the point of an operating license

where you get the ability to load the fuel into these new designs. So that's kind of like the remaining one. But for the light water reactors, this is really 50-year-old technology being run by the Navy successfully since the 50s and the commercial nuclear fleet since the 50s. It hasn't changed dramatically in terms of the fuel type of what you do. Basically, you know, you split atoms, create heat, make steam, turn a turbine, make electricity.

It's that simple. So all these technologies are going to work. And I would point out that, you know, all the technologies that have been deployed just most recently, whether it's an EPR, an APR, an AP-1-400 or an AP-1,000, they may have had challenges getting to the finish line, but once they got to the finish line, they are all working. And the AP-1,000 is working very well. So for light water reactor technology, there really isn't a technology risk. It's just pulling together the right pieces to, you know, de-risk it in the front end to get to a final investment decision and then start construction. and have a solid plan to be successful when you get into the field, because that's where the challenges have been traditionally.

Do you see any evidence? There's obviously been a lot of talk about having the NRC reformed in some fashion or another to speed up permitting. Do you see any momentum there from the NRC? Has anything changed? Do you need anything to change there? So, you know, there's been a lot of legislation over the last several years really driving the NRC to revise its policies, become more balanced in its approach for making sure

they'll maintain the safety to the public and the environment. But recognizing that there's a public benefit for nuclear power given its clean baseload attributes, that has been demonstrated by reduced timelines for them to review various applications. I've observed just in the 15 years I've been in the nuclear space where what once took four years is now being done in two years. the hope is that we'll get down to maybe a year, year and a half. But what you'd like to see is that for this baseload technology, which is what it is, to be sort of in the same time frame of development of a traditional combined cycle gas plant,

which might be two years of development and licensing and then two years of construction and then four years or five years, you're operational. We're not there yet, but I do see a path by which you get down to from the seven to eight years. We're looking at the first ones. to getting down to five or six years, which to me really makes a game changer

when people have their planning horizons, that brings it all forward to be a real equal discussion. And I think we're going to get there, and we have been getting there, clearly. All right, so then the final lens through which to look at the current state of affairs, I think, is utilities,

who operate basically all of the existing nuclear in the United States. Georgia Power is the one company that has actually built a new nuclear generating facility in the past, I don't know, three decades, four decades, whatever it's been. And now many of them are also exploring new nuclear, but I think, you know, coming into it maybe a little bit with a little bit more caution, at least than the hyperscalers seem to be. What's your perspective on what you're hearing from utilities? Yeah, so, you know, what I hear from utilities now is what I heard from utilities back in the past. right is that you know they fundamentally can't take development risk and you know that's a having done fossil plant development i did that for 15 years of coal and gas plants that's a business where you

expect to make two or three times return on your investment on the development of the fID and that doesn't happen for utilities they're stuck at 10 percent right so they're taking three X risk for 10 return, it just doesn't work out for them. And what we're seeing with the many of them, not all of them, but many of them, is a desire to have a developer like Elemental come in, align with the hyperscaler, take care of the commercial risk, take care of the development, and the construction risk, and then transfer the asset at commercial operation when, you know, you can just look at what Constellation trades at in terms of what their cost of capital is.

Pretty easy from to do that, very huge markups and value to them to do so. or they can operate the plant as the operator for in their territory. And we're looking at all those models with them. But what we really see is that the recognition that somebody needs to come in to take that development and construction risk, the government's taken a piece of it, but there's going to be a slice left over for the private sector. And utilities just aren't the right investor for that

because they're just a fundamentally different risk profile from what a developer does traditionally. I think the other thing we're seeing from utilities is interesting is like the subset of utilities that already have operating nuclear that either has retired already, I'm sorry, was operating and has retired, or is scheduled to retire, or that they were thinking about building, but then stopped building. I mean, they're all kind of reexamining all of that and saying, oh, maybe there is a nuclear renaissance coming here. How do I take advantage of the fact that I do actually have experience in nuclear to get that capacity back online or online in the first place? And that seems kind of universal, right? Like, I feel like every utility in their boardroom, if there's nuclear somewhere in their fleet, or there was supposed to be nuclear somewhere in their fleet, they're taking a fresh look at it. Yeah, I mean, I think that most of these utilities that are operating utilities of nuclear plants, if they had the opportunity to pick up an existing operating asset or one that was, you know, largely complete and de-risk, they'd be very inclined to do it because you just look at what, you know, Constellation stock

price has done. I mean, that's the example I look at since it floated, you know, has just been phenomenal returns because of the preponderance of nuclear in its base. And that's a purely merchant generator. It's not even a regulated utility constellation. It's phenomenal in terms of what it's done. But that just proves the value of nuclear to all these folks. It's how do you get the assets on there? And interestingly, through the investment that EIP made in Elemental, we're exposed to a large number of those operating nuclear utilities. So we have that capability. of working with them and they're familiar with what we're doing. And, you know, in part, validated what we're claiming to do,

which is to really, you know, span the void between the billions of dollars that have been invested by OEMs doing new designs and the gigawatts of demand required by hypers. How do you meet those two things? And us coming in the middle and making that happen is really what Elemental is about. Virtual PowerPy! plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched,

and being able to prove it, from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near-realtime forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories,

data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks, instead of engaging journalists or producing content?

Are you wondering why your competitors are getting press and you aren't? Fish Tank PR is an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early stage and established companies. Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible, compelling stories that resonate with the media, F-Tankpr.com. Check out fishtankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. All right, so I want to talk about project development for nuclear because I think it's actually something that people, certainly we hadn't thought enough about before we started chatting with you folks and getting involved with Elemental. It's different and distinct from project development of a wind or solar project, for example, or a battery project or even a gas or coal project.

So you just give me a quick snapshot of like end-to-end. What does project development look like for a new nuclear? Yeah, so we start off with, and this is the first thing we did, was we went out, find a customer, somebody who's willing to say, I want 20 to 30 years of power at this price range, and willing to put in a portion of the development. development capital. That was probably the first 12 months of our existence was doing that with all the hyperscalers. Just Google happens to be the first one across the line on it. And then working with them saying, where do you need these assets and working cooperatively with them and their host utility? Because many times they're building data centers where they have existing data centers and they know the existing utilities. We're coming in saying, we don't want to get between you and your

customer. We just want to give you what your customer wants in a way that works for you as a utility. That's a very different model from what you saw in the late stage as a fossil, which I participated in, which was basically if you build it, they will come. Also with renewables, we go out and get a plot of land, connect it, and then go hunt for a PPA from somebody. We've reversed that process by putting the customer and the demand first, then finding a site, working with utility, go through the red flags, analysis of it, do it in a technology agnostic manner, which he can do in the NRC process under an early site permit application. And then once that's end, and you've gotten a site proven up from that perspective, and that's really the environmental characteristics of it,

you then select the technology and do a construction permit that's particular to that technology. And that kind of brings us to, you know, say 25, 26, we're doing that first part, 26 to 28, we're doing a construction permit. You know, 29. We start construction, and by 32, 33, we're operating the plant. There's a lot more in there than what I just said, obviously. But, you know, there's a lot of pieces to it. It's more akin to a fossil plant development, but just much more expensive because the amount of work you have to do with the regulator,

any amount of design you have to have done. And the fact that, you know, unlike a two-on-one C-CGT, which you can go out and talk to Siemens or GE or, you know, Alistam, or whoever's out there doing those now, they have proven designs. We're still getting through that end of the development cycle for the new technologies and nuclear. You talk a little bit more about the site selection bit. Like, what are the, just at the high level, what are the characteristics, where the checkboxes you have to check for a site to be suitable for new nuclear? So, you know, it comes down to which of the technologies by size you're looking at,

because generally size dictates how much fuel you have on the plant. And the amount of fuel tells you how much danger or risk you have. So the smaller plant sizes, the small module reactors looking at for Google, can probably fit about 100 acres or so or less, and you have no other consequences beyond that. But the sites have to be seismically qualified for the design you're building, and some designs are more seismically robust than others. So you kind of have to envelope that part of it.

You want to be sure you have access to transmission because I'll tell you that, you know, it's going to be easier to permit and get a nuclear plant built than it is to get new transmission lines. And that's just historically how it's been, you know, everywhere I've been, whether it's in the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., Australia, over in Taiwan, Philippines. People think that somehow a transmission is a uniquely American problem. It's not. It's a challenge wherever you go because transmission lines are infrastructure that don't provide a lot of spinoff economic development. for the people whose property crosses.

That's just the fact of life. So you want to be close to that. But fortunately, in the U.S., we have a pretty robust system where any former coal plant or any former large industrial site will typically have the transmission infrastructure necessary for it.

So that's the key piece of it. And then beyond that, it's pretty much you can be in a lot of places. And we have a proprietary system that we've developed through a number of different databases and vendors that rapidly just select down those sites that meet those criteria and then layering over it, where is it that our customer wants to be in the utility they want to work with?

And that's probably the interesting thing because people, you know, started off investors asking, like, well, what's the right place to be? And the answer is the right place to be is where our customer wants to be. Well, where do they want to be? And what we found is that there is some geography to it. but they are more focused on who the utility is they're working with because they feel they have a better relationship with some utilities than others and given that they're going to be making these investments for assets

that will provide benefit not only to the hyperscaler but also to the rest of the grid because frankly once you add a very robust nuclear plant to the system it benefits everybody that's connected to it because of the reliability and the stability it brings to the grid they want to make sure that they're getting proper benefit for that recognized in what they're doing. And, you know, some utilities are more evolved than others in doing that, or the discussions between the hyperscalor and utility are more evolved in that regard. So, you know, that's kind of the process that we've been going through in the site selection.

And, you know, I would say that finding sites hasn't been the challenge, quite honestly. it's making sure we know where the people want them. Once they tell us where they need to be, we can find sites. All right. I want to get to the, I guess, the last key questions about nuclear in the U.S., which are how much, when, and at what cost. Maybe we'll start with at what cost. You know, the knock on nuclear in the U.S.

has been, to the extent that we've done any of it, it's ended up being very expensive, cost overruns, et cetera, et cetera. And there's lots of different theories on how you drive down costs and lots of different examples from other countries. whether it's Korea or China or whatever it might be. Given your strategy, what is your thesis on how we get nuclear in the United States to be cheap enough to be economic for whoever the customer is? Obviously, it's a different answer if you're Google or meta or whatever versus somebody else. But clearly we need to drive costs down.

It's not entirely clear. The first project anybody builds is going to be the cheapest. So what does it take? Is it just repeatability? Do the same reactor over and over again? Is it at a site level? What's your thesis on cost? Yeah, there's probably two levels to it.

One is repeatability, right? So just doing a one-off design isn't going to work. And so that's why it led us to the three projects with Google. You know, is three a good number? Yes. Would five be better? Absolutely. Does it need to be five?

It would be a bigger check for people the right to do that. So you can have to be constrained by what that part is. And, you know, to put it mildly, You can't do enough large reactors in order, you know, and raise the capital to do it. It's just too much of a check to write to make it happen. So you need that repeatability because, you know, Google and everybody we've talked to recognizes that, okay, the first one is going to be more expensive than the second one than the third one. And, you know, if I have a project that has two units on a site,

the first unit that site's going to be more expensive than the second unit on the site. That was true for Vogel. That was true for Baraka. That's true for any single, you know, any time you've looked at a construction, that multiple of the same units in the same site. Units 2, 3, and 4, you're amazed at how much less they are. But it shouldn't be surprising, because if you ever went to IKEA and bought like four pieces of furniture

of the same type and constructed them yourself, the first one, you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you're missing. The second, third, and fourth ones, you're just knocking them out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear, and that's just been proven over and over and over again.

So, you know, I think the key thing is that the repeatability and going in there at the mindset of you're doing multiples on a site and multiple sites really allows you to have the confidence because it's been demonstrated even at Vogel. Unit 4, I think, was 40%

less than Unit 3. I mean, just think about that part of it. So if you started off at Unit 4 instead of Unit 3 or example, you probably would have been okay. But that's not the way it played out. And then there's the site-specific stuff, which you know, again, lessons learned, is just make sure you have a good plan going in.

And we all know what a good project looks like. You have to go through and have the design complete, have the supply chain lined up, and most importantly, have a plan for attracting the labor you need when you start and keeping the labor there for the three years you need it. And that's not that hard. You're just going to be able to, as an owner,

admit that if I have to pay a person $5 extra an hour to keep working on my project, as opposed to going down to the data center project down the road, then you pay that because if you don't, the cost for delay is not $5 an hour. It ends up being five times that. So it's really kind of having a plan and sticking to it and working with labor because that's the most uncontrollable aspect of this because we're a free country. And labor can go where it chooses to go.

You're not going to prevent that. So your best goal is to make sure you incentivize them properly and treat them well. And you should have a successful project. All right. So that gets to our final question, which is how much and when. Not specific to elemental, but what's your view? I mean, you did mention some timelines for projects you guys are working on where you expect commercial operation in the early 2030s. Realistically, given what you see out in the landscape in general, how soon do you think we could or will have new nuclear operating in the United States and how much can we get in like the time frame that matters to today's customers? Yeah, so, you know, our goal was to have a gigawatt under construction by 2030, 10 by 35, and 100 gigawatts by 2040. We're now looking at 4.2 gigawatts by 2030, so we've already quadrupled that or halfway there to our 2035 goal. You know, I think realistically, for commercial deployment, it's going to be the early 30s. OpG, it's just in Canada, so it's not part of the United States yet.

Ontario Power Generation. Yeah, Ontario Power Generation. Up in Canada, they're talking about their first plant being a GEH, BWX-300, starting construction, nuclear safety-related construction. This month or next is what they had announced. They haven't announced it yet. And then being operational by 2029, 2030. So North America, that's the time frame.

You have others like Dominion, Duke, TVA, AEP, whole tech with their plant out of palisades, all talking about light water reactor, small ones in the early 2030s time frame. So I think that's still a pretty good prognostication on it in terms of when we'd expect to see it. Arguably, some are further ahead than others, but again, whoever starts first doesn't mean they always finish first.

But I think for a number of reasons, we can see these folks being available. and working those projects in the early 30s. And in terms of the cost, you know, the first ones are going to be expensive, but overall we're looking at once you get down the curve, we're probably $10,000 a kilowatt. So if you have a 600 megawatt plant, that'd be about $6 billion. The first one might be, you know, 15, 20 percent more than that.

The follow-on is going to be less and less and less. So, you know, we expect these to come down fairly dramatically over time. as we get through it. But getting through the first one is key. And we have a plan for doing that to be successful. And we have great support from folks like Google who recognize that, okay, I'm willing to accept the first one is going to be more expensive. But I'm sure it's not going to accept it.

The second and the third one cost the same. And they won't. We're comfortable with that. All right, Chris. Great to finally be able to talk about this publicly. Excited to go on this new nuclear journey with you for the next. hopefully decade and not decades. Well, I've already been at it for 15, so it's another 20 or so, right?

That's right. Yeah, I'm with you. I expect to have 10 gigawatts by 2035 and you can hold me to it. I plan to. All right, thanks, Chris. This is great. Chris Colbert is the CEO of Elemental Power. This show is a production of Latitude Media.

You can head over Latitude Media.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude Backs Visionaries, Accelerating Climate Innovation, that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode is produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing in theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.