Cheeky Pint - Julia DeWahl of Antares on building nuclear reactors for the US military

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Julia DeWahl is the cofounder of Antares, a company developing nuclear micro-reactors for the US military and critical infrastructure. She sits down with John to discuss the vision for the "Starlink of electricity", and why AI hyperscalers are driving a nuclear renaissance. They cover the bipartisan shift in nuclear regulation (and why the NRC’s old mandate made "zero" the safest number of reactors), and why true energy resilience requires more than just solar and batteries. Julia also shares lessons from the early days of Opendoor and Starlink, including why customer obsession sometimes means sitting outside a bagel shop.Timestamps(00:00) Lessons from SpaceX and Opendoor(02:46) Introducing Antares(06:30) The path to market(12:20) Nuclear vibe shift(15:11) Regulation(19:21) Possible energy futures(24:02) Stripe Radar(24:55) Nuclear supply chains(26:43) Antares origin story(30:24) Funding Antares(36:09) If Julia was energy tsar(42:33) Restarting shuttered plants

Julia Duol is the co-founder of Antares, which is designing nuclear microreactors for the military and other off-grid use cases. Cheers. Cheers. It's great to be here. So you started out as first Open Door and then SpaceX. What did you learn at each one does that you took to Antares?

Yeah, sure. I think one of the big things is always about customers, right? I mean, at the end of the day, this is why you build a business. At Open Door, a lot of us were pretty young starting the business. I was one of the early employees there, and none of us had ever bought, let alone, sold a house. So a lot of it was like learning what that was all about. And I remember in the early days, we just were working on writing the copy for the website. And we're like, we don't really know much about this whole thing.

So what can we do about that? We just went and sat outside a bagel shop for a Saturday and a Sunday morning and just bought people bagels and just asked them about their processes buying and selling a home. And learned a ton and just really, you know, thought about what language they were using, what were the pain points. And that was really important to just like really get to know what we were trying to deliver on as a business. And then, you know, fast forward to joining SpaceX after Open Door. I joined as Starlink was coming out of R&D and into go-to-market. That's why I was joining to lead that team and the business operations there. And we launch and we get our first customers.

And so I invited our first customers to come join us via Zoom for in all hands. And it was honestly the first time that many of the engineers had actually heard from the words of a customer. for themselves about the experience. And of course, everyone loved the internet, right? The fast internet was amazing. Rural Idaho, right? This is like a dream. But when we got to talking about the setup process,

everyone kind of was like, oh, that sounds rough. They're talking about multiple Home Depot trips. They didn't know if they had to cut down trees on their property. Like they couldn't get a poll long enough. And so, you know, what- It was simplifying people's understanding of all would mean. People kind of didn't realize how much the setup was so painful. Yes.

And it led to basically this kind of, cross-functional SWAT team that was dedicated to mounting options to be sold alongside the dish. And like if you hadn't- First party or third party? We did it ourselves actually. We said it's important that we have a good experience for that because actually it's a, it is a big part of the experience. And so spent up a whole team, like a lot of attention was given to mounting, which is like whoever would have fought. And I think, you know, customers again, they're just like they are the reason you start a business.

And what going, you know, just bringing this back to Ontario, I mean, the reason we started Antares was to say, like, the government, particularly the military, needs more energy resilience, especially for critical infrastructure. We just do so much more now in the cloud with satellites. Our missile defense sites are sitting there, like, being powered by diesel generators still. Like, shouldn't we upgrade that? Okay, so I'll buy it. What is Antares?

Sure, sure. We're building microreactors, so small nuclear reactors. And we are building in particular for critical infrastructure, largely for the military. although we do think that as costs come down, there will be an interesting commercial market too. But basically anywhere where you're off-grid, for sure, or you just want resilience behind the grid as it exists today, you know, cyber attacks or whatever the grid goes down,

you want backup power. It's a really great option. Okay. And if one megawatt is a small neighborhood, if one gigawatt is like a big nuclear power plant, like in The Simpsons, you know, what are your SMRs? Sure, yeah. There's basically three classes size.

you have the really small ones are the microreactors, and we're actually one of the smallest of those. So we're even sub one megawatt. We're kind of in the hundreds of kilowat scale. You can think of that as like hundreds of houses worth of electricity. Then you have the SMRs, which is kind of this middle ground bucket, which is an interesting kind of neither here nor there,

but potentially interesting, I'm sure we'll get into, kind of in the hundreds of megawatts or even 50 megawatts, and then you have the gigawatts, guess, 1,000 megawatts. And that's what the current power plants are today. Okay, so you're a sub a megawatt. So we're super small. I see. Okay.

kind of similar nuclear reactor size to, we'll be on a submarine or something like that. Smaller than that even. Those are like megawatt scale. So we're like, think about, like, we're the size of a car reactor. Think about replacing a diesel generator that's used to power, again, something that would be on the order of 200 to 300 homes of electricity. So it's quite small. Yes. And so a big part of your focus is providing power in places where you really need that reliability. Like you're talking about replacing diesel generators. Is that kind of the design is that under for you? Yeah, and anywhere where you're going to enable a capability, a mission capability, that wouldn't

really be possible otherwise. So there's actually some really interesting space applications, potentially underwater applications. As you move away from like few, what they call exquisite systems to attritable systems, this is where a really small reactor could come in very handy for, you know, the submarines are obviously multi-megawatt powered powered systems, but these could be kilowat-powered, smaller systems underwater. But yes, anywhere where you're off-grid, where today you're relying on what they call, like, the fuel supply chain of, like, bringing in fuel via helicopter or barge repeatedly, and that being a vulnerability, like, this is a great option. So you're the Starlink of electricity.

Kind of. We're actually, like, perfectly paired. And I wish we could offer a consumer product that's not on our roadmap right now. But maybe one day, like, you know, backpack-sized nuclear reactor. Why, like, I presume we kind of can't be on your roadmap, but why not? that selling to the government is much easier than selling to something. There's so many reasons. I think that you always want to try to get your beachhead where it's like the easiest to achieve, right?

And so we believe, I believe that, you know, premium power is where you need to go with nuclear. And there's sort of like two places for that. One is what we're doing with Antares, which is go to the military, help them with mission critical need, where they're not cost sensitive, where they already pay more for power. Yes. And go there and support them with this next gen, better version. version of resilient power. Or you go and you sell what we're seeing now, I think, which is really interesting with the hyperscalers is they have carbon commitments. They want clean, firm,

they want 24-7 power. They're actually willing to pay above market rates for that, and they will pay above market rates. So this premium power thing is a really interesting dynamic where nuclear is kind of well-positioned. What are the underwater applications? Well, it's really just think many submarines. Oh, okay. Yeah, just really small systems, like, you know, what drones are to maybe like larger missiles. That's kind of the equivalent. It's not super far along just yet. Got it. Okay.

What does the path look like between now and producing power for the military, I guess, first in a pilot environment and then kind of at scale outside of a pilot environment? Yeah. Well, you know, it's always one of the next milestones that you can do to prove your technical ability and, again, raise more capital to keep going with your company. I think the biggest risk often to harbor companies is you don't get far enough along technically to merit additional investment. So we're thinking a lot about our milestones for reactor development. And so next year, a criticality test is kind of the first milestone.

By end of 27, we want to have our first demonstration unit demonstrated. And what's really exciting is there's just so much good policy happening right now from the DOE and elsewhere that is supporting reactor tests. and pilot programs. And so there's just like so much happening where they're opening up federal land. They're removing, starting to remove some of those like NEPA type regulations that really just hold everything up.

So there is a clearer path now than there really ever has been for reactor builds. Oh, we'll get to the regulatory side. I have a lot of questions, Bush. What is your criticality test in 2026? What does that mean? Yeah, it means that you're testing that you can actually start your reactions.

So, like, you've figured out the right amount of kind of, like, moderator to fuel, and you start going critical. You don't have it, like, continue on for a while. You don't typically have a power conversion system that's actually taking the raw energy and turning it into electricity. So it's just one of those, like, initial tests. Like, can you start to put all your pieces together? And when do you, you know, the fusion guys are all focused on this, you know, producing more power than you put in? that's different, that's a fusion thing. But yeah, when do you actually produce power in that?

Yeah, producing power will be like your first reactor test. It's like, can you do the whole shebang? Like, you can get this thing up and running. It's producing power. And that's what we're aiming to do by the end of 2027. Oh, wow. That's like pretty soon. Yeah.

What does the market look like for these small reactors? Who are you going to compete with? Well, the market for microreactors is one of these ones where it's like, well, there are no microactors today on the market to just like buy and use. Yes. So what do you think they're going to be? right? And so I think the first and foremost, it's going to be the most critical assets where you just cannot have them go down, which is why the defense is the perfect first market for it. And so it's going to be all of your critical infrastructure on every single base that there is. Obviously, you'll start with the most critical of critical missile defense sites and off grid locations, things like that. And that's kind of defense. Then as you think about commercial, basically you have to see where the cost curves gets you to. Like how cheap can it get? This is just like space, right? It's like those first expensive launches into space, like that better have been a really important thing you were putting

up there, right? But now that launch costs has come down, you can start to be like, oh, what else could we do? We can do some more stuff that's like maybe not so emission critical. I think we'll see the same thing in the commercial industries. Oil and gas has a lot of areas where they, again, use diesel generators to do things like compressed natural gas along their pipelines. And they actually have carbon commitments, which are really interesting, that they're like sort of thinking about ironically, right? Can they move towards some more renewable or nuclear type resources? So I think there's going to be some commercial applications there to mining, for example, too, like anything that's just like off-grid, hard to power today, really hard to get fuel into,

it's a perfect market. Yes. You're probably following in the U.S. military, there's all these controversies right now with people talking about fuel quality and fuel contamination issues in Asia, I think it is. But yeah, presumably places where we are worried about fuel availability at all times and ensuring that you constantly have access to fuel, that is the place where there will be the most pull for these solutions? Yes. That's where generators work worse. Yes, yes.

And, you know, there's a famous, there's a famous defense quote. I think it's unleash us from the tether of fuel, which means just like, gosh, the logistics supply chain has been such just a challenge. I mean, it was 50% of the, I think, the Afghanistan casualties were from just logistics. And so, you know, having situations where you can kind of reduce that. risk. Yes. It helps, and it's a great kind of market fit. Yes. What, you're seeing this new market for these small reactors today. Why not? Like, why, because we've had nuclear efficient technology for a long time. Yeah, why hasn't it been done? Gosh, there's so many reasons.

I think we ended up, I think there was just a macro, really negative climate around nuclear in general. So it impacted anything small as well coming out of the 70s. And so you had macro forces related to just like inflation, kind of just cost of capital, people stopped building, which coincided with the environmental movement, which was extremely anti-nuclear. They actually sort of conflated nuclear weapons testing even with, it was just like no nukes, with energy. It's like, oh, that's actually pretty different. So a lot of things converge in the 70s, and then by the 80s, we stopped building a nuclear. Okay, so you just viewed as a part of the general anti-nuclear swing, and that's also led to, you know, the cessation.

of construction of new nuclear plants in the US and everything like this, just your corner of the market also got caught up in that, and that's why we haven't ended up with them. Were there ever products available at this size range? There were, but they were pretty few and far between, mostly test reactors, small things built. We actually put one reactor into space in the 1960s to test that out.

Did it work? Yeah, for a bit. I mean, a few months. It was like, let's try to do some systems in space with power. It's important to have power. in space and I think that's a whole other frontier. Obviously, the US did have this long-running anti-nuclear bent where I grew up in Ireland. Similarly, yeah, there was the exact same thing and Ireland was very paranoid about a particular

British nuclear power plant. Sellefield that was just across the channel from our... Yeah. Does Ireland have? I don't actually know. Does Ireland have nuclear? Ireland has no nuclear power. Yeah.

And the UK does France, does. Ireland does not. And I believe it's banned. And so it can't, per the country. current rules. There's actually many states in the US that have bands as well, but they've just been falling left and right. It's so cool to see. Well, I was going to ask this. The vibe has really shifted over the past 10 to 15 years. Yeah. Why? Honestly, it reminds me of gay marriage. I mean, and if you look at the polling, the- It came from the youth, right? It definitely comes

from youth, for sure, but it's like, it just kind of, you know, enough things add up and it just swings and no one ever looks back to the thing. That's how it feels. The, like, percentage point change we've seen the last five to ten years is almost 20 points. I mean it's like 17 points or something. So it's 60 plus percent of people support nuclear. It's actually almost surprising. It's that low in some ways. But yeah, I mean, it's just huge public sentiment shift. And I think the kind of the old hippie nuclear testing or nuclear weapons testing folks are kind of dying out. Yeah. What is wild, though, is I did a little kind of activism related to Diablo Canyon power plant here in California, which was slated to be shut down this year. Sure. Yeah. And just,

So just a few years ago, Newsom had to kind of begrudgingly say, like, oh, you know what, we probably should keep this thing on. We can't afford to have the power going out. But I listened in on some hearings. They actually gave some testimony there. And it was so funny to me, the biggest organization that showed up against Diablo Canyon was called Mothers for Peace. And it's like, do you understand the irony of your name? This organization was that old that was related to the nuclear Cold War, right?

And it's like, gosh, we've moved on. We were joking because I sort of am part of this, Mothers for Nuclear. organization that's like just like tongue-in-cheek bit on that. Our mothers against their mothers. Yeah, armes against their mothers. And it's just funny how old school a lot of that opposition is. Yeah, so I guess as a science advances one death at a time dynamic going on here, whereas the memory of the 1960s and, you know, peak nuclear confrontation and, you know, three mile island, all these things, as all that fades, maybe it creates an environment

where people can be more supportive than nuclear. Absolutely. What was your activism around Diablo Canyon? That was just exactly that. It was like, let's make sure that this actually passes and we don't shut it down. But there was a lot of people just calling and saying, hey, listen, nuclear is super safe.

It's carbon-free. Like, a sense of in California, we care about these things. Like, let's support this, let's not, let's overturn whatever legislation was done 10 years ago that said we should shut this thing down. And it did pass. So now we do still have it open.

Everyone on Progress Twitter likes to complain about the NRC. And but for the NRC, we would be living in, you know, that Jetson's vision of the future and everyone would have their, you know, nuclear-powered car that they used to drive to their nuclear-powered office. Right, right, right.

Is that true? How good or bad is the current regulatory environment? How much is that changing? Yeah, yeah. I think it's an overestimated headwind, certainly today. I think if you go back five years ago, 10 years ago, for sure,

I mean, they hadn't licensed anything in decades. Yes. There had been nothing new. But I can't even tell you how much has changed in the last few years. It's kind of remarkable. And it's been across both the Biden and the Trump administration, which is amazing to see. I mean, the legislation around nuclear passes like, you know, 95 to 5 type of thing, right? It's like really, really strong bipartisan.

What was interesting to see is it started with Biden, a bunch of legislation related to modernizing and reforming the NRC. The biggest thing they did was they changed the Band-Aid. of the NRC, and they said, you are no longer focused just on safety, because what's the safest number of nuclear reactors to license zero? So they expanded that, you know, you must consider the full environment, the full like civilization, that's great. And then just change things around, like, the advanced reactor pathway, removing some of the barriers. And then it's continued on with Trump. And in fact, he's sort of added even some more teeth and specificity. So right now, they've changed it to, you have 18 months to get your answer.

from the NRC. License or no license. Do you pass or not? And so like there is... And what happens if they exceed the 18-month window? You know, probably it's in the details somewhere, but the point is that like, A, that these have been like declared, that like timeliness is important. There's also been some leadership change, which is just more reform-oriented, which is great. And there's just a huge microscope on it, right? Like everyone's watching. Like everyone knows who's now who's submitting their paperwork and what's going to come out the other side. Another thing that happened with some of these Trump executive orders is the DOE pathways, Department of Energy pathways, have been also unopened and unblocked for test reactors. And so actually, in Terry's is part of this new test reactor program, which allows the DOE, alongside usually like Idaho National Lab, to be sort of your regulator as you're testing your first reactors so that you don't have to spend all this time up front with the NRC for something that you're just still innovating on, right, and iterating on. And so that's a really really. nice, I think, like first step before you go through the NRC.

Wait, so let me make sure I'm giving this rise. There is now a Trump era change where we essentially, for the first time ever, have a second nuclear regulator where you can go the NRC path, but also there's a regulatory sandbox where you can start by working with the DOE and get up and running there. How big is the sandbox? I mean, you know, the DOE has always been a path. There actually technically has always been a path within the military because they license their own reactors with submarine.

So it's always kind of been there, but, you know, hard to navigate, not well staff, not well known about. And now it's kind of like everyone's watching. Let's go, let's go DOE. Let's go, you know, I&L, Idaho National Lab, and let's make these things happen. So there's just been a lot of, like, stated, like, you must enable this thing. And, like, now here's some, it's actually a zero dollar program, but it gives you unlimited access to staff and all these other things. And the point is, like, everyone's watching to see how fast you can get one of these reactors through. So are you guys going the DoE route first?

Yep, we are. And the DoD route. I mean, to say, like, you know, the Army is now also able to license its own reactors, alongside the Navy, which already does. So that will absolutely be our first stop. The NRC really only license, sorry, regulates civilian electricity, so civilian power. So we actually don't need to even go there yet. I see.

So you could be selling a lot of reactors and never go through the NRC. Well, we'll basically do our test reactors with. the DOE, alongside the DOD, who can now, who has the jurisdiction to regulate, which is great. I don't know. Yeah. So this is the rare bipartisan issue. It's a true, kind of a gem. I can paint three clean energy futures.

One is the solar and kind of regular renewables for you, you know, Casey Hanmer was just on this podcast. And solar will get very cheap. Batteries will get cheap enough, such that you can go. all in on solar and batteries, maybe some other renewables in the mix, but there you go. Nothing will be able to cost compete with that. That's one vision. Another is that we will rediscover nuclear fission and we'll figure out the spend fuel and everything like that and we'll just do what we used to do, which is build nuclear power plants at larger scale and that delivers us enough clean energy. A third view is that fusion will work and we'll actually have nuclear fusion

as useful, meaningful scale of the grid. Between those scenarios, how would you handicap them? I think it's, you know, I'm going to leave Fusion out because I'm not enough of an expert to know when and how that will happen. I would love for that to happen. How exciting, right? Okay.

Between the first two, you know, we do a lot of market manipulation of our energy markets, and there's a little bit of, like, flavor of the administration that does happen, especially between renewables and oil and gas, right? Nuclear has been a little bit actually, you know, immune to that. Yes. But so there hasn't really been almost a true market for this stuff.

Like the Renovals have been heavily subsidized for a while. And nuclear has not been. That did change in 2022 with the IRA. There's now production tax credits for nuclear, which has a lot of ripple effects. But I think we're going to see a lot more progress with solar and batteries in particular. There is a reason, however,

that the hyperscalers who are committed to their climate targets are not just going for, you know, solar farms, right? Like, why are they even thinking about nuclear if solar is so cheap? And it's because actually to get true 100% 24-7 coverage, the battery or the excess build-out is massive. It is really expensive. It's like basically on power with nuclear costs. So we're not there yet.

That's one thing to say. The other is that the cost of solar, you know, at the panel level is dirt cheap, right? And installing it, dirt cheap. But to actually integrate it, build the transmission, and then the added grid complexity where you need now these peakers, gas plants to run when the clouds come and that kind of thing. Like that actually has a ton of cost and it's sort of hidden cost. I think it's underappreciated certainly by like the solar maxies out there. It's real. And so I think we're always going to, we're always going to want to have multiple sources of energy, right? It's like diversity is good. It's like if one thing, if natural

gas prices are through the roof, like, hey, we have these other things. We have this baseload nuclear which has been just like so stable for us. And I think we're going to want to have. have everything. I actually don't think there's going to be a world that's going to be like, you know, 100% nuclear. But is there, is a diversity of energy sources valuable because, you know, the solar maximists would say, no, it's fine, solar will just take everything. And wouldn't the nuclear maximalists say, just we can have a lot of, you know, we figure out how to at scale or produce nuclear power plants and why do you need that gas? Why do you need anything else?

It's a good, it's a good push. If you are able to own through and through your whole supply chain, you make the panels, you mine and process the minerals, which we have like zero interest in doing as Americans. Like all that dirty work is done in China and elsewhere. If you really did all that yourself, then I could say, okay, you own it, you can do it. Right now, at least you have, hey, if your natural gas pipelines get shut down, actually it's not a problem for us, right? We're like not even an importer anymore.

We're actually good. This is actually the reason that, do you know what percentage of France's electricity is from nuclear? It's declining, right? but historically it's been around 70%. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know the U.S.? nuclear?

Oh, it's small. It's 5, 10%. It's actually more. Really? 18. Oh, okay. And everyone thinks it's below 5% or 10%. It's like when I got into this,

I thought it was like 2%. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, my point is that France made a very, very deliberate decision to actually go to 70%, if not more at the time in the 70s because I had no carbon resources, right? So they didn't have the ability to say, oh, we'll just dig in our backyard and we'll be fine.

Yes. And actually uranium, while it does require, you know, digging out of the ground or whatever, it's so much easier to store. It's a million times as dense as coal, right? So it's a lot easier to work with. And, you know, the reason people get uptight about oil and gas supply is that it's, like, not easy to store. And if it's not easier for you to come by, like, you better well have, like, good geopolitical

relationships. Yes, yes. So anyway, this world and where it's headed, I think it's still going to involve multiple sources. Julius' work involves managing a lot of risk, unsolved physics, complex engineering and a lot of regulatory scrutiny. Managing risk for an internet retailer shouldn't be that complex, but sometimes it can feel like it. Internet fraudsters now operate on industrial scales. They attack strategically when you're sleeping, and they use AI to sharpen their attacks now. Stripes' defense against fraud comes from its scale. When a payment happens on your site, there's a 92% chance we've seen

that exact card before, so it's easier for us to spot misuse. And we recently expanded radar to block other kinds of fraud, like free trial abuse, promotion abuse, and refund abuse. Stripe now processes trillions of dollars of payments each year, and every transaction of the Stripe Network makes the next one safer for everyone, so you can focus on your product and not in developing a world-class counter-fraud division. To let Radar handle the fraud so you can get back to building your product, go to stripe.com slash radar. Tell me about the supply chain for nuclear fuels. Yeah, I mean, so you, you know, you dig uranium out of the ground and then you need to convert it to a gaseous state so that you can enrich it and have the you kind of like put in a centrifuges like this and the heavier isotopes go out and the lighter ones stay in and you can pick those out and make those into your fuel. The mining part has been something that we've hardly kept alive. I mean there was at one point like a couple of mining operations going in the US where the last 10 years or so it's been like 1% of nuclear fuel used in the US was actually domestically mined. And now we're not the last

uranium mines in the U.S. They're like places like where you would think, Texas, Wyoming, those sorts of places. In the Western states, yeah. And but we're now, we now again, like everything else, have said, okay, wake up, let's actually reshore some of the stuff. So we're starting to see more uranium mining. Conversion and enrichment is still largely done overseas.

And yeah, we're still buying like almost 50% of our uranium from Russia and kind of ex-Soviet states. So I think it is important that we're thinking about, like, how do we have farm more of a domestic supply chain. We have the ability to do it. We have the uranium. And actually, there's a little bit of Silicon Valley DNA entering the space with General Matter, which is Scott Nolan's company out of Founders Fund. So he's getting into the enrichment space. And so I think... And they're a uranium enrichment company? They are an uranium enrichment company,

which is like real picks and shovels for a real hard, you know, Adams business to do that. But I think it's, you know, it's really meaningful work. I think it's really important. Do you care more about the mining, the enrichment happening in the U.S., or just there has to be an independent supply chain for the whole thing? I think you just want diversity. You know, you don't want everything from one place. And I think we do want to have capability. So I think all of it should be at least partially done here and with our allies. How did you end up starting in tariffs?

Gosh, I mean... Like most people do not happen upon this kind of idea. You don't really happen upon it. I was working at SpaceX at the time when I first started reading about nuclear. And it was when I was actually working on getting Starlings into Ukraine. So after the Russia invaded Ukraine. And I just started reading more about the conflict there, probably more than I normally would have, because I was actually speaking with Ukrainians and thinking about what was going on there.

When I was a history major, so I think there was just a little bit of like, oh, geopolitics, resources are important. Russia has a lot of resources. You know, randomly my cousin is the CEO of a glass factory making like literally glasses like this. And he's like, we're going bankrupt because of energy prices. And you're like, golly, what is going on? And then I read about Germany and the nuclear power plants. They were shutting off to turn on coal in a place that was like green party crazy, right?

So I was like, what could be so compelling that someone would do something, you know, so counter to their own good, right, as a country, as a nation? And I had the time, again, I knew nothing about nuclear. I didn't know the difference in fish and infusion, honestly, at the time. I certainly didn't know that it was a pretty big part of our grid and other things, but it just was one of those completely under-celebrated, under-championed by anyone. The climate tech people really weren't into it either. And so it just kind of got me curious about it. And then just started reading more, wrote a piece that I posted on Twitter.

That's actually how I met Jordan, who was my co-founder. And he's the one who actually had the vision for microreactors for the military. And I just said, what a great beach had. like, again, premium power, great thesis to go to market with. I just really got into the topic. How does he arrive at that as a beachhead? I think, you know, you just say, like, where can you go, that you don't have to compete on that LCOE level against the cheap solar panels?

Where do you go where there's a real need and, you know, mission assurance for something critical to the military? Like, they will pay for that. This is also an area where, like, they, you know, they were obviously behind the Manhattan Project. They are here to help develop new technologies. And so, like, what a great partner to have when trying to do something like this. Has DARPA played with this stuff at all? Or has it come from?

It sounds like you're working with the main branches. Yeah. You know, we are not working with DARPA mostly because it's actually not as technically risky as you might even think. They prefer things further out the risk. Exactly. Like, we actually, in a funny way, like, it's not even really a tech problem. Totally. You know, I mean, it's hard.

It's hard to build these things. But it's not brand new. It's not novel in that way. That's interesting. Yeah. What lessons have you brought from your prior experience at SpaceX at Open Door to Building Empires? You know, one of the things I really took away from SpaceX was just like really getting

into it. It's a very confrontational culture. And it's not afraid to say like, screw your next meeting. Like, we need to keep talking about this. And I love that. Like, I want to bring that energy everywhere I go. It's like if you are unsure about something, if you're questioning something, you should probably, like, stop and, like, dig into it. And we had this thing called the Five WIs.

I don't know if you ever can't, like, use this. I'm familiar in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a, you know, one of these Silicon Valley little quips. But it's like that on steroids. And I think, like, the pausing to, like, probe super deeply, question things, like, really hash things out was a big takeo island. And like, wow, it's really effective at, like, getting to the right answer at making a decision, at changing course when you need to.

And so I've tried to bring some of that to Antares. You know, investors are hot and cold on hard tech, depending on when you're raising money and everything like this. You know, presumably you're, there's a J-curve in investing in Antares where there's definitely some R&D before you eventually start paying it back with revenues. Just how is the experience of raising money for this? It's going to get harder. I think it hasn't been hard to date only because there is interest and excitement around nuclear.

It's also just fewer dollars in the beginning. You're kind of like honeymoon phase of all of that. I think it will get harder. I think now the times are ticking, it's like, okay, let's see your next technical milestones. This criticality test, obviously the full reactor end of 2027. I think it will be challenging. and there are several reactor companies out there. So it's a bit of a race.

I think it's going to be fun. I wonder what Polymarket would have to say. Several reactor companies out there, even at the end of the market that you guys are going after. Yeah, everyone has their different niche, right? I think our niche is, again, the smallest, the most DOD-oriented.

There's a lot of microreactor companies or SMR. I'm doing this because it's like, are they SMR or microactors. Anyway, that are going after data centers and the data center build out, which is an amazing market. I mean, amazing. I think people will pay a lot more. Again, going back to the premium PowerPoint, they will pay more for power for this. Not exactly our target market.

Right. So your niche in the market, it seems like you guys have selected a part of the market where maybe this less competition. There are still some people going out to the military applications. There always are. I mean, if you have a good idea, there's going to be a few people working on it. How capital intensive is it going to be to get your product to market? Oh, in the hundreds of millions. Okay. Yep. I think what we, you know, and it depends on what you mean by to market, right?

So I think our big milestones, like, can you build a reactor, prove it, turn it on its producing power. Then I think you can think about interesting layers of capital in terms of pre-orders for your reactor. There's going to be my next question. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Bigger government grants. So we're kind of still in the like hundreds of thousands of million, single-digit millions of dollars of grants that we are, getting right now, but you're moving into the tens of millions of dollars, R&D grants,

and then you want to eventually move into that kind of like program of record, real dollars. There's a really interesting program right now that the Army has put out called the Janus program. Are you familiar with the COTS program that SpaceX used to bring, to kind of develop their first reactor? Not by name, but I'm familiar with the- Morseh orbital transport system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was like, it was like the innovation basically to say, like, let's try something

that's not cost plus, and let's actually do something that's milestone, based and, you know, well, basically we'll cut you if you don't hit the milestone and it's in its fixed contract. We're not going to do pay you for whatever. So anyway, the Army has taken that model a bit and I think used that as inspiration for this Janus program where they're saying we're going to fund up to kind of three to five companies to build their first prototype alongside us, kind of at a base. And then we will kind of choose a winner and we want to build five to ten reactors, if not more, on bases. And so they're like, the demand signal now is hot. And so this is great for our future fundraising for the industry in general. It's like very,

very good demand. A lot of ink gets filled on military U.S. defense contracting. What is your experience as someone who's attempting to sell the military being? I mean, people are actually kind of well aware that this cost plus model is not great. The question is like, well, what are the alternatives? Who's going to go do it? Anderill has been an amazing example of that. So I think a lot of us in hard tech really look to them as, you know, what we try to emulate. There are, every, every branch of the military has these innovative, you know, arms that tell you like, hey, we want to hear about your ideas. And they do, actually.

You can go talk to them. They're giving out grants for things. Like, I do think everyone wants the innovation. They are, you know, and in the day and age of, like, information everywhere, like, you can learn a lot quickly. They do want to work with startups. So I think, I think we'll only see more of it. But, you know, you have things like the government shutdown and, like, the pace of government

is slow. So, you know, you've got to just kind of, you know, be able to keep pushing those timelines, again, while not running out of money, to be able to sort of make it through that valley of death. What's been harder than you expected, building tires? Because presumably you expected it broadly to be hard. You expect there to be a lot of technical risks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Harder than expected. Oh, there's a couple things.

I mean, I think, gosh, recruiting is always hard. you're up against the SpaceX's of the world that have just a lot more credibility, right? When you're the no-name person at the very beginning, it can be hard. Yes. I think there's a lot of complexity, and even though I said, you know,

we're making so much progress in regulation, there's still red tape everywhere. Things cost more than they probably should. You know, we spend a lot of money paying the national labs to do things like clear out a pit so that we can test our reactor. And it's like, we're paying for that. And they're like, you know,

hundreds of things. thousand dollars here's the bill um so there's there's stuff that you're like gosh there's really a lot of expense everywhere um and it just slows things down and so i guess we were you know somewhat ready for that but it some of this stuff just seems silly and when you're building in software you just you know you don't have to worry about you're just sit there code and do your thing and go to go to go right to market um when you have to work with the real world you have to you know you have to kind of play their games a little bit and you have to um follow the process in some ways and there's there's not always a way kind of around it. Sometimes it's just through. You said there's still a lot of red tape,

despite the fact that, you know, there's been the first Biden era and then Trump era improvements. If you were in charge, I don't know energies are, or, you know, we'll give you a role with enough powers across all these departments. What would you change? What do you think the specific improvements we could make are? If I were fully in charge of energy, I would love to see the U.S. government be a buyer. I think that is just the... like actually the NASA was a buyer for SpaceX's eventual launch product. I think having the U.S. government be a customer for nuclear would be great. And so we have this a little bit with the DoD. There's a very interesting announcement that just came out a week or two ago that doesn't have

a ton of detail. But it's starting in this direction. I think it's very positive. I'm a small government person. I don't say this lightly, but I do think there are certain things when it's national security related and things like energy resilience, like there should be public. private partnership. Yes. But anyway, the announcement is that the US government now wants to spend $80 billion on nuclear development alongside Westinghouse. So they basically chosen the technology.

And I think that's actually a good thing because you don't want to, you want to be able to build one thing and then repeatedly build it so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time. You actually have kind of economies of scale, like the learning curve that you've got down from doing that. So I'm excited about that news. I think that's the type of policy I'd want to see more of. Yes.

And, you know, we'll see how it goes. I mean, this is the first, this is like the biggest ever commercial nuclear public-private partnership we've seen. And sorry, specifically, they're buying from Westinghouse, just a large amount of nuclear power? Well, it's a combination. So this is where I mean, like, the details are a little fuzzy, but they've announced 80 billion. They've announced Westinghouse as the partner of choice. Not all those dollars are going right to Westinghouse.

And that's a company that makes just the reactor itself. So there's money. that you would spend on a plant or licensing fees or whatever else that surrounds that. Yes. But I think it's really positive. I think it's, what it does is it's a catalyst for the whole industry, right? Like supply chain, workforce, like people are now paying attention, like, oh, there's real dollars to be made here. There's a huge, like, trillion-dollar asset under management company called Brookfield asset management.

And they've actually just gotten in the game as well in the last couple of weeks, I'm sure there was like talk, right? to take the VC summer plant that never got completed in South Carolina and actually finish it. And so, again, they now have some nice tailwinds with those new production subsidies. They are partnering with the local utility to, and again, a local utility doesn't have the risk appetite to do this themselves, right? Or the balance sheet to do this themselves. And so there's some really nice, I think, market signal you get when the government's saying, we're going to spend $80 billion on this. But I think, you know, it gets the rest of the industry moving.

As you guys were exploring and developing the early stages of your business plan, did you consider for a product that is as tightly regulated as this, did you consider doing any jurisdiction shopping where you develop a product that you sell in Singapore or the UAE or Prospera or, you know, some more favorable jurisdiction? You know, we really didn't. It felt like there was enough signal that we would be able to get through regulatory, right, and see some positive change. There was enough to basically demand signal within the U.S. And it's, I don't know, we take pride and also building for our country, right?

And it feels good to be developing something for our military and our allies. So, yeah, we didn't really shop it around too much. Yeah, yeah. And I guess the U.S. military is a large buyer in this case. Very large buyer. The largest buyer of non-commodity energy, if not all energy. How soon afterwards will you go to, like I presume you want to do civilian premium power use cases like, like you're saying, an oil rig seems like the obvious one that, ironically, that, you know, it would be hard to get gas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But can you be hard to get refined, you know, diesel or gasoline to an oil rig? Does that come right afterwards, or is that such a different bottle wax from a regular tree point view that maybe it's like 10 years later? I think it's, you know, you're developing concurrently. We are, you know, we're talking with oil and gas already. Just understanding them, right? What do you need? Yes. What do you think you'd pay?

You know, that sort of thing. So I would say it fast follows, right? A few years later. I think it's going to be such a nice proven ground. If we can make it through and test on a military base, for example, and get a first reactor live and get some revenue from that, then I think it's like open the aperture pretty broadly. Yes. Or what else is out there?

Does this movement towards? re-onshoring manufacturing in the US and various blockers people talk about to that between supply chain is difficult. And you've talked about in the fuel context, but also supply chain for manufacturing, talent, and the roles that people go into and finding talent in specific areas. I'm just curious, what has your experience been of building a hard tech company in the US? Supply chain is, yeah, the bottlenecks. that supply chain is challenging.

When you need to work with nuclear-grade material and no nuclear plants have really been built, it makes for a very limited number of suppliers, which means costs are higher. You know, options are just fewer. So, like, if they're not responding to your email, like, well, what are you going to do? There's only one other option.

I'm like, I don't know, they're busy or whatever. So those dynamics are really challenging. The graphite that I brought here is actually from a Japanese company, right? No one's even processing that stuff in the U.S. And so you're kind of, you're literally going all over the world for these supplies. So that's challenging. You know, talent is challenging in the sense that there are so many options for hard tech in the L.A. region, right? So you, you know, you need to have a compelling mission.

But nuclear is compelling. So it's a, it's been challenging, but not in some ways. Like, if you want to work at SpaceX and you love space stuff and you, you know, you want to be at that name brand place, we've lost you. But if you're interested in nuclear and being able to build from the very beginning, like, that's a compelling piece. It's the shackleton pitch, you know, of high risk of failure. Totally. And that's the pitch that you're making.

Yeah. I like that. What trends in nuclear should we be excited about right now? So the trend I'm excited about is bringing back online these recently shuttered plants because they don't take too much money to bring back online. And we've seen a couple big power purchase agreements where you have Google partnered with I think Nextera, or that, that, Iowa-based utility to bring on Dwayne Arnold, which was shut down about five years ago.

And then you have actually Three Mile Island, the site of the infamous accident. Oh, almost accident. Well, it was an accident, but it was not really a big deal. Like this much radiation came out. It was like this amount of a chest x-ray. Yes, completely overblown. Accident. That's being brought up back online, partnership between Microsoft and Constellation, I believe.

So that's kind of fun. I mean, you're seeing, like, let's go take these assets that are just sitting there that shouldn't have been turned off. Like, bring them back online, bring them back to life, tons of power coming out of them, and we need it yesterday, right? Yeah, I mean, it's so striking the big trend in the U.S. right now being that grid demand was flat for the longest time. Like, we were completely not adding power generation nor adding power transmission. and now because of data centers, essentially, we have this enormous boom that is just leading to things that maybe previously would have been competitive.

People can't get enough of anything, right? People can't get enough a new tier, they can't get enough of solar, they can't get enough of natural gas, and just everything is backlogged. It's really interesting. Even the natural gas per turbines are backlogged. Totally. I mean, most of the years.

Across all the manufacturers. You know, it is hard when something like this goes into one of these inflection points, And to your point, like, it was less than 1% year-of-year growth for 20-plus years. And now it's like people are like estimating 5% annual growth next year. Like, oh, my gosh. Last question. What kind of culture do you want to build at Ontario's?

Well, I think it's certainly one of excellence. And I think that means, you know, delivering quality product. How you get there. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get there. You can have the combative space-sex culture. You can have a less combative, maybe more, I don't know, writing culture. They didn't write that much stuff down in SpaceX. To me, that matters less, although I tend to be one for a working environment that is

energized, positive, preferably. But I think ultimately, like, I would be proud to be delivering on an excellent product that can be delivered to market soon, right? And we can all go use. But, okay, so you want the results-oriented culture that... Results speak for themselves in a lot of ways, yeah. Well, Julia, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.