Motley Fool Money - Sam Altman’s Nuclear Bet

Episode Date: August 24, 2024

You probably know Sam Altman’s AI organization, but he’s also the chairman of Oklo, an advanced nuclear technology company. Ricky Mulvey caught up with Oklo’s CEO, Jake DeWitte, for a conversation about: - Why the buildout of nuclear energy stagnated and why that could change. - How Oklo is using old technology to develop new reactors. - A recycled energy source that could fuel the entire United States. Companies mentioned: OKLO Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Jake DeWitte Producer: Mary Long Engineers: Tim Sparks, Kyle Carrutherso Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The history of nuclear power, right? Nuclear power has produced the significant majority of clean energy in this country for decades. All the waste generated there from a volume perspective would fit inside of a super Walmart for context, right? That said, from a recycling perspective, there's enough energy content and all that material to power the entire United States using fast reactors like we're developing and the recycling process here for over 150 years. So like pretty awesome fuel reserve. I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Jake DeWitt, CEO of Oaklo, an advanced nuclear technology company. In this conversation, we discuss where nuclear energy could go in the next five to 10 years.

The key problem that nuclear energy solves that other renewable energies don't, and how small modular reactors could fuel data centers, which is something that Oklo's chair, Sam Altman, might just be interested in. Jake DeWitt is the CEO of Oklo, an advanced nuclear technology company working on fast reactors, a little bit more advanced than what we do in podcasting land. I appreciate you joining us for an interview here on Motley Full money. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So this is the first time we've talked about Oaklo, and I think it's good to set the table. How did you become interested in nuclear energy?

Yeah, so I grew up in New Mexico, born and raised around this stuff, got the chance to learn about and kind of get exposed to nuclear technology from the time I was a little kid and frankly fell in love with it at a very young age. So it's been something that since I was a little kid, I've been pretty fascinated by this thing that feels like science fiction, but it's actually real. So yeah, something that I've basically been working on since I got hired in in high school into the national lab system and then just kind of continued working from there. Nuclear energy is one of those things that I almost see parallel to space travel, where there were tremendous advances of it in the mid-20th century and then almost nothing since then in terms

of like full-scale, not the technology, but full-scale reactors coming online. No, yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where there is a similarity. I mean, there's some similarities about all this innovation and development that was happening at similar times. I mean, it's funny, we've got some folks that We have joined the team that worked in space and aerospace before. And a lot of them come over and like, man, some of the similarities are so strong. And it's true. I think nuclear maybe was doing some of those things a couple, maybe a decade ahead of where aerospace was in terms of some of the work that went into it. A lot of brilliant people working on developing the technology, exploring it back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, set the stage for that initial surge of buildouts that kind of started in the 60s and spanned, you know, really frankly all the way until the 80s.

But then you've had this pretty big throttling back, you know, sort of in the, in the, the late 70s, 80s, amidst, you know, kind of a, I would say an overbuilt amount of capacity, high interest rates, sort of a combination of different things that just ultimately slowed some of those projects as well as, unfortunately, you know, I think some of the opposition at the time was largely uninformed about the benefits and ended up, you know, actually causing a massive amount of carbon dependency that otherwise I think they today would regret having done. So now we're kind of in a spot where we're seeing a lot of people pick up this technology, you pick up on sort of the wonderful work done before, especially on these next generation systems that have

all this huge amount of potential promise to be able to now take those to market. So you're seeing this kind of flourishing new era of nuclear innovation that's really been, you know, I would say starting in the last decade or so and we're really in these interesting kind of ramp up phases now. Still very, very early in that process, though. Yeah. In a recent shareholder letter, you basically said there's still outdated paradigms in nuclear energy, even while the technology has progressed. What are the outdated paradigms that you're dealing with in 2024. Yeah, we see like, you know, there's kind of some stagnation that really happened in the industry for a long time.

And now we're in a spot where, you know, you can kind of rethink some of those old ways of doing things and thinking about things, including on the business model, including on how you go to market, like all these kinds of factors that come together. So just real quick, like what you're actually selling, right? What do people want? They want the power. So maybe focus on making it easy to buy that as opposed to the highly frictional sort of 1970s era model of trying to design the reactor to a set point to then sell that design off

to utility who would then ultimately build and operate it. That can still work in some cases, but we've seen a huge shift in the power markets so that it's time to, we should be responding to where the market's moving to. And that's one of the core sort of feces around how we started the company and are building it forward. Additionally, around size, around technical and design approaches, a lot of this work, a lot of these advanced technologies have a long history of R&D behind them and the specific one we're working on, I would say is a mature ready to go-to-market technology. And kind of one of the paradigms from before was a research and development mindset. So there's always more research and development to do on everything. But the technology's

effectively been demonstrated and ready to actually be taking commercial. So instead of then moving to the next stages of research and development, let's productize it. So a mindset about that, a go-to-market strategy that's not reliant on starting with, you know, just needing a ton of government money, but rather something that's built towards, you know, finding a market fit, something small enough where we don't need to raise billions of dollars, but rather we could just do it with capital we can raise between the private and public markets, which now we've done. So now we can go build that plant and then start to scale from there. And then also, you know, different ways in which you can partner with the government instead of just going in with your

hands out asking for money, but rather find strategic partnerships with them about using fuel and their land and their expertise and their data, all things we've done, all of which help radically change how much it costs to take new technologies to market in a very face. favorable way and accelerate that to happen faster. Yeah, there's a lot there with licensing, going to market, fundraising. I want to focus on the product. And that for your company is the EBR2 reactor. For those who aren't nuclear scientists, what's the history of this reactor?

And why are you excited to bring this one to market? It's a fascinating history. So it's a liquid sodium cooled fast reactor. It means we use liquid metallic sodium as the coolant. That's because it's a really good coolant, really good at moving a lot of heat, and it's able to do that operate at high temperatures without being pressurized while also being compatible with commonly available materials. So that means you can design a system that's quite cost competitive because it's simple, it's efficient, and it leverages existing supply chains from other industries that are made in bulk already. So you already get significant economies of scale of production for your supply chain, rather than a lot of times what nuclear does, which is a very bespoke, non-recurring,

kind of unique product or component design approach on design that then leads to high costs. So this allows us to tap into things that are already producing at large scales and also kind of make up a word deb bottleneck some of those constraints that might otherwise exist. But that technology was stuff that was developed for decades. So across the world, society has built more than 25 of these kinds of reactors. We've gained over 400 combined years, reactor years of operational experience. And notably in the U.S., we successfully demonstrated this in meaningful ways at two plants, one in Washington State called FTF or the Fast Flux Test Facility,

and another in Idaho, EBR2, which, as you said, is the one we specifically build off of. That plant produced just under 20 megawatts of electric power, ran for 30 years, sold that power to the grid commercially, demonstrated fantastic operational characteristics, showed it could recycle fuel, as well as demonstrated these incredible and inherent safety features where just the natural physics of the system keep itself stabilizing and self-cooling. So you're not relying on external systems. You don't need these backup systems. You don't need operator intervention. Just gravity, thermal conduction, thermal convection, thermal expansion. Those phenomena actually drive the system to be, you know, shut itself down,

keep itself cool, all in a way that then leads to system simplification and significant economic benefits. All awesome things on paper, all done already. So now we just want to pick, you know, what we focused on doing was picking that mantle up to carry it forward. And that's really great because now we're building on something that we know was done before. And where industry has approached this in the past has taken it and scaled it up quite a bit bigger. So 300 megawatts or larger, which can be done, but sometimes that introduces some different complexities and also just increases the total amount of capital needed. We intentionally stayed at a size range right in that envelope, right?

So we're starting at 15 megawatts. So we look very, very similar to that plant on purpose. So that means we can take that experience directly apply, it, get to market quicker, and then learn and grow from there more quickly with actual revenue generating products that are serving sitting markets and then allow us to scale that up forward from there. That said, like, you know, it's a deep technology base across the board about how these systems operate. And, you know, it's actually fantastic that we can leverage that and avoid having long R&D

programs needed to get these things out to market. Who's the customer for that then for a 15 megawatt power plant? Yeah, it's a whole range of folks. You know, we see support in the data center markets. We see support, which obviously gets. a lot of attention today. You see a lot of support of it for industrials, for defense purposes. And part of the reason is because you're not just really building one. You're often going to be building more. And it's the same story on the 50 megawatts side. It just kind of expands that for

some of the larger scale facilities that maybe grow a bit larger over time. But one of the features for us is we don't want to just build one plant that services maybe a 50 or 100 megawatt facility. We'd rather build several and build it up in phases because oftentimes we're talking about building, and a lot of our customers are talking about building new facilities to be powered by us building a new reactor. That means you're going to want to ramp up with them as they ramp up because it's not very common that an industrial facility turns on at its full capacity as soon as you finish building it. It kind of ramps into that. Data centers for particular, they might have a campus that at the end of the day might use a couple hundred megawatts of power, but might be

building out an initial blocks that start between 10 and 20 or maybe 30 to 50 megawatts as they grow into that. And some of that kind of might phase out over two, three, five years depending on their plan and how quickly that market's going to grow. So our ability to match with them is really important. But even perhaps more important is the ability to then not have a bunch of stranded capacity to achieve that for us and also deliver them the reliability and resilience they need. It's much better to have an in plus one dynamic. So just to use an analogy, if they needed, let's just say, 60 megawatts, you'd probably build them 75 megawatts because that means you can actually have that extra reactor on hand. So if you take one of the others offline for service,

you're still producing that power for them, which is really important to have that, you know, basically as pretty much all the time as they need it and that they can have it. And just so I'm setting the table for listeners, please correct me. I'm probably wrong. One megawatt is a little less than like the energy usage of two like regular homes over the course of a month. Yeah. So a megawatt is a pretty good, you know, a proxy for a, about 700 to 1,000 homes is what they use. 700 to 1,000 homes. I was doing my math very wrong.

This is embarrassing when we were talking to a nuclear scientist. No, but what you were not too far off of was a megawatt hour, right? So a megawatt hour production of energy. Yes. That's where I was going. Okay. And a megawatt hour, you're pretty close. That's pretty close.

It's like depending on where you live in size of home, you know, two to five homes, use that kind of energy in a month is one megawatt hour. Yep. And when you mentioned data centers, I think it's worth mentioning that the chair of your company is Sam Altman. So I'm sure he might have an interest in getting some of the nuclear energy going for a lot of these data centers to run these huge AI models that are sucking up a lot of electricity. Right.

I mean, that's a great connection to have, obviously. Sam's been a great board chair since more or less, you know, shortly after the company was formed and a friend and a mentor before that. So, yeah, it's wild to see how quickly that's kind of like how, I mean, just the pace of growth on the AI side and what that's going to lead to in the pace of energy demand. It's a great place to be in the energies providing business, I should say. I want to keep talking about the science for a little bit because you mentioned the benefits of liquid sodium.

A lot of the reactors or traditional reactors, they use water as a coolant. So why is that a problem when you're looking at these small modular reactors? Yeah, water is an awesome technology. I mean, water cooled reactors work really well. We know how to do them. They're great technology. The reason we went with sodium was we were taking kind of a blank sheet approach about what had the best generalized economic potential and scalability baked into it.

And one of the things we saw was actually starting with something new allowed us to sort of rethink some of the supply chain constraints because of what you can do with sodium rather than needing high pressure water. Because water-cooled reactors are running at high pressure. That's perfectly manageable, but you need pressurized components to handle that. And then that comes at higher costs for those components. So there's kind of a cost, a significant cost benefit that manifests as we think of it in a cost floor.

So, like, kind of the, you think, you know, as we look at it, sodium reactors can be made just simpler and therefore cheaper at the end of the day. But additionally, it gets into the fuel side. One of the really important things about being a fast reactor is what you can do to unlock, like, sort of the broad amount, the huge amount of energy and the fuel, that's a really inarticulate way of saying, basically, you need fast neutrons to get access to all that energy. Because today's reactors, they only really use about 1% of the energy content of the actual ore

that's taken out of the ground in terms of, like, what's available. Whereas a fast reactor, you can get over 90% of that energy out over time. So you're talking about a massive resource extension. What that translates to is if you just do sort of the math on this, fast reactors and recycling have the potential to you're using known reserves of heavy metals that we have approaches on how you can actually pull us and mine those and extract those, harvest them from the oceans. You can power the planet for a few billion years. That's like, you know, that's the lifetime of the planet, right? more or less. So that's a great place to be when you're thinking about how do you set up a technology that basically has enduring sort of competitive advantages, something that has effectively near-limitless

supply chain of fuel while also being sustainable and not having, you know, carbon emissions. It's a pretty great place to be. And you just can't get that kind of resource extendability out of light water reactors. So that was why we liked this approach and where we see this going forward. What's the harder problem for you to solve as a CEO right now? Is it the physics and the technology of how to build these things, or is it getting regulatory approval? You know, I think it's mostly the regulatory side, but I would say that's like there's other factors that tie into this, right? As we went into this, we, hey, this is system we know works. So they've literally built and operated these things before. So we know how to do that.

Obviously, you've got to build it. So that's a challenge. You want to build the right engineering team. You want to find the right partners to do that. That's important and find ways to, like, capital-efficient ways of sort of leveraging partners and building partners up. So like our partnership with Siemens we announced and we just expanded upon is kind of an example of how we do that. So doing that in efficient ways is pretty challenging, but like we're finding ways to do it, which is cool. Since those things, since the science is known and we built these things in the past,

you just want to find the rights and the most efficient partnerships and effective partnerships, which takes a lot of work. Those things are kind of things you can approach in. Then the regulatory side, it has its own challenges for sure. The regulator is a very capable regulator, and I'm not saying that to say, oh, you know, you got to see that. No, no, no. They license things. They have a long history of licensing and permitting things. So that said, they have room to, you know, improve and continue to find ways to modernize and get more efficient. I think is a consistent theme you hear in industry. We've been pleased with our engagement with ups and downs for sure. But generally speaking, it takes time and to like kind of familiarize design, socialize it and then make progress. Ideally, that will continue to accelerate. But at this point, we've been working with them. since 2016 in formal pre-application. We're the only of the non-light water reactor companies who've been engaged that long.

We're the first to kind of start doing that. So now, you know, we're coming up on submitting an application to, for that plant in Idaho, you know, that we've spent a lot of time to prepare the NRC and prepare ourselves to get into. I think the challenge, though, then is just managing some of those paradigms, and I'll argue outdated paradigms around how we think about licensing these plants, some of which you have to just deal with. But ideally, you create a platform and a springboard to show,

okay, you can do it that way, but look at the better ways you can do it so that it gets better, not just for us, but for everybody. And that's one of the things we try to do in our first application was be very forward-leaning. I think we were in a pretty good spot, but we got ahead of our skis a little bit because of the problems the pandemic introduced. Otherwise, I think we would have been kind of more successful there, but we still made a lot of progress doing some pretty radical things, one might say. And I think that was successful for everybody because it kind of pushed the envelope in some areas. And now we know kind of where to go back in successfully based on the engagement we've had in the last two years, two and a half years at this

You're saying the Aurora powerhouse, which is going to use the EVR2 reactor, is going to get rolling in Idaho sometime in 2027. What needs to happen in the next three years for that to start generating energy and have all the approvals you need to get rolling? So we've got the site use permit for that from the Department of Energy to build there. We've got fuel that was competitively awarded to us to fuel that plant, which is awesome. We've got the site. We've got the fuel. We've got a lot of regulatory traction in history. We still got to get a permit, though, and our licensing approach is different, right?

At the end of the day, you have to, if you're going to build a plant that produces power commercially, you have to have a commercial operating license. So because of our business model, where we own and operate and sell the power, and we're not just trying to charge licensing fees for people to build the plants from us and get people to basically buy our designs, you know, we're going straight to the all-in license. So the one-stop combined license approach to get the license to build and operate this plan. And so, you know, we anticipate submitting that application next year, so in 2025. The NRC generally has looked at a 24-month review time frame.

The Advance Act that just passed provides some, you know, recommendations that these reviews should be done in less than 25 months. And then that positions us so that at that point, you know, we can also, and in parallel pursue, generally speaking, the ability to start building this plant, some parts of it, as we've seen some other companies do in the past. and then just in the spot where once we get the license, we can complete the construction. You know, we look at about a 12-month build time. So if you parallelize some of that and we get a license in 2027, then, then you're kind of, you've got the remaining window to do the rest of the construction that you need to have the license to do and load the fuel and start the plant up so that we can start producing power then. We're also, you know, relying on the government, obviously part of the partnership with the fuel, they're producing this fuel as we speak. We're going to be fabricating it into our fuel elements. But assuming all that kind of goes successfully at pace, that's how some of those timelines can match. up. That said, there's always risk in those things, right? Like, there's always some risk in those

things. So we've been trying to move as quickly as we, you know, reasonably can. But as we look at it, sort of even the contingency plans where if things maybe take longer or slip on those schedules, we should still be able to start, you know, building that plant 2027, but then, you know, start producing power maybe in 2028 if those things line up. So I get that question a lot. So that's why kind of just jump in front of it, which is like, well, okay, all these things kind of, what happens if there's slack in the system? Where does that push it? And that's kind of how we see it lining up. I think right now we see a line of sight for how this all lines up for 2027 for the things we can control, things we can't control, still support that. But it's not impossible that as things happen, you know, how we've built contingency planning, you know, as we get out and have that plan operation at that point onward.

And we've raised the capital we need to get all the way through even with those contingencies. So we feel like we're in a pretty good spot to just be focused on execution. You're also looking to use essentially recycled nuclear material as a power source. I don't think this hasn't been done before at a commercial scale, right? Not yes and no. I mean, the French do do it. They do it with an older technology, but they do do it actively. The U.S. has done elements around it and tests and things historically in the commercial side.

But the approaches we're doing in the modernized size and what we're taking here, yeah, is going to be different from those. That said, like the recycling technology we're taking forward. It's demonstrated to EBR2. It's going on. And today it's operating as we speak today at and buy Idaho National Laboratory. And then it's actually producing the fuel we're used for our first plant. And then we're partnered with Idaho and Argon and other groups to sort of work on how do we take that technology into commercialized use.

But yeah, that's one of the really exciting things for us for expanding and extending fuel resources while also opening the door for fuel cost reduction. What's it look like getting this recycled material? Are you getting a jackhammer into Yucca Mountain to grab some of that uranium that's stored there? What's the supply chain on that look like? Yeah, well, actually, all they use fuel today is sitting on the sites of the nuclear power plants. There's nothing ever been shipped to. I shouldn't say nothing that's never been. But there's no fuel being at Yucca Mountain.

So it's all on site at the existing, at the power plants where they generated it. So the plan there is, you know, is working with the owners of that material and finding pathways by which we can then transfer it to then our facility once it's built and operated so that we are, you know, recycling it. There are a number of sites that have decommissioned plants that, you know, are just left with these dry canisters holding this material and that's all that's left. They very much want to get that off site. So yeah, so you go through a process of loading those into transportation canisters and having those moved. You know, we have a lot of experience about how you move this kind of material. So at the end of the day, like, you just want to find the right

folks who are going to be kind of constructive partners. And there's a lot of people who want to find a way to get this stuff off their, off their sites. Not only that, like, it's managed and it's because you know, you just don't, like the history of nuclear power, right? Nuclear power has produced the significant majority of clean energy in this country for decades. All the waste generated there from a volume perspective would fit inside of a super Walmart for context, right? That said, from a recycling perspective, there's enough energy content and all that material to power the entire United States using fast reactors like we're developing and the recycling process here for over 150 years.

So like pretty awesome fuel reserve, but it also means like it's not very, you know, it doesn't take a lot of space, but, you know, these groups would like to get it offsite. So that's what we're, you know, we have conversations about that. It's a little early for us to form any significant partnerships there yet, but we are engaging with different utilities who are interested in this and different groups that have this material on site. Just because, yeah, you know, as we kind of execute on this plan, we're, that's one of the key things we're going to need

and we're excited to be partnering with groups to take it off their hands. I imagine you can't just stick it in a pickup truck. How do you move that stuff? Yeah, so they have these specially designed canisters that move it by rail or by truck that are certified and, you know, they've used and they have around there. So just work with those with that existing infrastructure. I want to be mindful of your time. A couple of wrap-up questions. What's your dream about where nuclear is five to ten years from now, or even 20? Go as long as you want, where nuclear is cooking in the way you like to see it.

I mean, you know, like I think we'll be in a massive scale up and scale out of nuclear technology as a whole. The market opportunity is so massive. There's going to be room for a lot of us. I think it's not unreasonable to think that we could be in a spot where you see something like a thousand plants being developed around the world at that time with hundreds already built and operating, including the ones we already have, globally speaking, as we think about where we could be in the sort of 10 to 20 year timeframe. It was supported by recycling infrastructure going on in the United States where we can take use fuel. We can take this stuff that people have a lot of concern about because it's this radioactive material. it takes a long time to go away, and you can recycle it. The thing about used fuel is it's 95% unused fuel. Well, 90 to 95% unused fuel.

So you can take that material and then obviously, well, I shouldn't say obviously if you can use it as fuel for a reactor like ours, that's an awesome thing to do. It reduces fuel volumes. It reduces waste like decay times and half-lives. So all in all, like that's a huge benefit. And it extends resources and reduces fuel costs. So like all in all, when you're talking about the scale deployment there, supported by recycling, you've totally changed this paradigm.

And accordingly, we see meaningful benefits to consumer power bills. We see meaningful electrification transition happening. It's just say electrification transitions happening. So, yeah, I mean, that's what I think we could be in the stage of. And it's a very exciting time and very still early kind of in the dawn of this. There's a pessimist in me that sees the growth of solar and wind energy. That was supposed to bring down electricity costs. I look at states like California, and that absolutely has not happened.

In Colorado, I'm paying about 18 cents per kilowatt hour. It's a lot. Why should I be more optimistic about nuclear energy lowering my electricity bill, you know, 10, 20 years from now than these other technologies so far have not done? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a couple things. One is I think we were, I don't know, I think the story painted about renewables was and what I was going to do on the cost was honestly kind of consistently

not fully told. In other words, I think there were some significant aspects of it that were kind of underplayed or just maybe not shared and not talked about, which was the implications it puts onto the grid and what you have to do to firm up the power for an intermittent renewable source, right? Like, at the end of the day,

that might reduce the cost of the electricity. Solar has done a really good job of reducing costs of the cost of electrons, the kilowatt hours coming out of the panels, but the cost of actually making that those kilowatt hours usable and how we use electric energy adds a lot to the like grid level and system level costs throughout the system. And all of that has manifest in higher electric rates. It's a wild thing when you look at declining renewable charts or cost curves and then you

lay on top of it like what energy rates have done, which has gone up. There's it's not, and it's not only because of renewables, but the massive deployment and in some cases over deployment of renewables and the resulting stresses on the grid and all these other factors have created a non-constructive environment for price reductions. In other words, the actual cost was always going to be increasing cost. It was always going to increase the costs. It was just that we kind of focused on only one part of the story, which was the costs out of the panels, but not the actual cost delivered to customers.

Because again, the amount of backup power you have to build, the hardening of the grid, the expansion of the grid, the induced burdens and robustification. I'm kind of me, I don't know if that's a word, but I think you have to do to kind of, you know, build out transformers to accommodate all that. It drives costs higher. The reason at the end of the day for that is like because of intermittency, because of what's needed to actually deliver firm power because we as a society, you have power use changes over the day, but we do need that fixed baseline amount of power. And at the end of the day, you can also manage dispatchable power to fill in some of those gaps and then use renewables to backfill on top

of that. So if you actually optimize the system towards those kinds of goals of for cost, definitely they can help drive cost down. But you need to augment that with things that have significant cost benefits. And that's where nuclear has that in hand. Interestingly, one of the criticisms that nuclear's had is like some of the high costs of some of the recent builds. Well, I'm not surprised because we're doing some stuff for the first time in a while, but the cost curves are very promising for these to drop, largely because of the general economic efficiencies nuclear has. I think the most fundamental metric on economics for any energy source is the total amount of materials needed per megawatt hour of energy generated.

How many kilograms, right, of steel, copper, concrete, fuel, et cetera, you need per megawatt hour of electricity that you produce. Well, when you look at all energy sources, nuclear fission requires the least by far. So it should, as a result, have significant economic advantages and benefits. And as a result, when you're talking about developing and designing new technologies, with that kind of sort of, as I think of it, cost physics on your side, you're in a pretty good spot to be able to drive those costs down. The challenge and realizing that is making sure you have a sustained order book to help you get through those initial deployments and get into the benefits of volume procurement. One of the ways we tried to accelerate that is by being smaller.

That's one of the other benefits about being smaller is, you know, we've, in our earnings update, we shared, you know, we've aggregated basically 1,350 megawatts of letters of intent that are we're going through PPA negotiations and developing now. That's a large amount of, that's a lot of reactors, right? Like, depending on exactly how those projects shake up, probably something between 30, 35 or so reactors between the two different size ranges. At the end of the day, that provides a nice arc that provides us a lot of i guess i'd say leverage when we talk to suppliers should say look i'm not only ordering and buying for one plant but for like a roadmap clearly that points out to 30 35 today and maybe more on the back of that so it works pretty

favorably for how we see these things kind of coming together to to then as a result be able to to position us to drive costs accordingly lower which is which is what we feel like hey the cost physics are on our side so we should be in a good spot to actually do do that, as well as be producing a reliable, controllable output of energy so that it actually adds resiliency and stability to the grid, so it reduces, or doesn't, I should say, add to the grid straining costs that we all have to pay for in various ways. That's a really long answer, but it's, I think, a really important thing because you pointed out, like, a massive, massive thing that is a real factor. And I think a lot of people are being, you know, kind of seeing this and being like,

what the heck's going on here, you know, and with good reason. Like, it's a problem, and it's not okay that that happened that way. But now we're in a spot where I think we have sort of the right pieces in place to stabilize and ideally over time drop some of those rates. So kind of how I see it. That's why we got podcasts. You can give a long answer. We're talking about nuclear energy. You got to, that takes a second. Jake DeWitt is the CEO of Oaklo. Thanks for joining us on Motley Full Money. Appreciate your time and your insight. And it's a company that I'm looking forward to continuing to follow. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may

have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.