The Best One Yet - ⚡ “1st Pod in a Nuclear Reactor” — Inside Oklo’s Cancer-Fighting, Waste-Recycling Reactor

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

You read that right: The first podcast we’re aware of recorded inside a nuclear reactor.Yetis, the team at Oklo are fans of the show - And they paid to fly us down to Texas to visit their Nuclear Reactor and sponsor this episode. We sat down with their co-founder and CEO Jake DeWitte literally feet from a silo with splitting atoms so we could explore this wild new technology. And we interviewed Jake just like we would any CEO.Because they’re building the most unique nuclear reactor in history: It’s tiny, tidy, and sexy. This next-gen nuclear power company runs on recycled fuel, it fits beside a data center, and it’s designed to look like a luxurious ski chalet.Oklo was invested in early by Sam Altman (who became the Chairman) and is one of the few publicly-traded nuclear brands. And we say “brand” because they’re building a lifestyle brand - The Lululemon of Nuclear. Their vision is handful of nuclear company towns, where you work, live, eat, date, and play, all powered by a safe local nuclear reactor. And in addition to carbon-free electricity running on recycled uranium, they (no big deal) generate isotopes that can cure cancer.Jake will tell us how they pulled off a nuclear breakthrough worthy of a 2nd Oppenheimer movie. And why the financials of a pre-revenue company justify the $8B valuation Wall Street’s given it. Plus, you’ll discover why a reactor glows blue, why he'd drink the water, and the one thing he disagrees with Sam Altman about.$OKLOJack’s grad school essay on nuclear: More Nuclear Power NowYetis and Besties, this one's a field trip.CHAPTERS Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yeti's Nick and Jack here from the T-Boy Studio. This is our best interview yet, by far. And not just because we're the first podcast to record inside of a nuclear reactor. And we survived to tell the tale. The way this interview came to be is also really interesting. Oh, totally, because the team at Oakland Nuclear, they're fans of the show. So they flew us down to Texas to visit their record-setting nuclear reactor, and they sponsored this episode to do it.

We sat down with their co-founder and CEO in the reactor to explore this wild new technology and covered Oaklo just like we would to any other company. We actually had a whole camera crew with us the whole time. It's our most visual episode yet, so you can watch it on YouTube or Apple if you can't.

But in the meantime, Jack, should we put on our lab coats, turn the key, flip the switch, press the button. Actually, do we both need to turn the key? I think we need two to turn the key, right? I've turned my key.

Your turn to turn your turn to her is three, two, one, now. Two feet behind us, Adams are getting split. This is the first podcast ever recorded inside a nuclear reactor. And we're going to interview the guy who did it in record time. Because 11 months ago, this was all prairie dust.

But now, it's the smallest, tidiest, sexiest nuclear reactor you've ever seen. And it's built by a publicly traded company that you can trade. We'll tell you how Oaklow pulled it off. And now, this place doesn't create nuclear waste. It eliminates it. By the end of this episode, nuclear will be officially uncanceled.

Yeties, put down the Stanley Mugs and pick up the Geiger Counties. Because today's guest is bringing back the most canceled technology in America, nuclear power. We're hanging with Jacob DeWitt, the MIT-educated co-founder and CEO of Oklo. And former Florida Gator football player. Walk-on football player. And right now, we are live at Oklo's brand new nuclear reactor in Lockhart, Texas.

Oklo is an $8 billion publicly traded stock. That's one lift, but we'd call it the first ever nuclear brand. Not just because the power plants look like luxury ski showers. Architectural Digest. Did Frank Lloyd Wright do the blueprints of this thing? And Nick, Oaklow is not just powering the U.S. military. Their profit puppy is artificial intelligence. Because they've got to deal with Zuck,

fueling a metadata center with nuclear juice. And a relationship with Sam Altman, an early Oklahoma investor and former chairman of the board. But today, Jake's going to reveal why nuclear is having a moment and why his reactors are different. And how nuclear is not going to cause a catastrophe, but could actually cure cancer. So if we're having a nuclear renaissance,

then Jake is Leonardo da Vinciutto. And this facility is his Mona Lisa. So please welcome the Sultan of Splitting Adams, the chairman of chain reactions, the missionary of visionary. He didn't choose the nuke life. The nuke life chose him. Our guest today is Jake DeWitt, the co-founder and CEO of Ocklow. And today is interview with Jake next to his nuclear reactor is the best one yet.

It's a team boy. They work. There we go. That's really good. That's legit. I'll be with you. The door actually said U.S. Department. of energy as we walked in?

It did. So it's our nuclear reactor. We actually, to show our passports to get it. Yeah, we do. Did you too? I did when I had to get facility access. And you own the place.

Yeah. It's protocols. So Jake, you have the hottest meat cute ever. Literally radioactive. It's radioactive. Because you're co-founder of this nuclear startup is also your wife. You met her at MIT and then you bonded like hydrogen and oxygen. Yeah, the electrons were firing.

But the reason we're here today is because of a tiny pellet, the size of a pencil eraser, that when you saw as a kid basically set the path for the rest of your life. Because that little pellet of fuel energy was equivalent to a ton of coal or 149 gallons of oil, a year's worth of household electricity in a tiny pellet, and it's all thanks to the possibility of nuclear energy. You saw that when you were a kid, you got excited then and it got us excited now. Well, the story of that pellet is the incredible energy density in the nucleus. That's the thing, right?

Literally, when you think about splitting an atom, you're getting tens of millions, I mean, millions of times more energy out than when you combust a molecule, like a hydrocarbon. That's insane, right? But that's what people got so excited about when they discovered what was actually going on in the nucleus back in the early days of nuclear physics. So when you can harness that, you completely change how we think about energy. Like the delta in terms of like the energy density on a per reaction basis of tens of millions, it's like, you know, almost 50 million times. It's like the difference between Usain Bolt sprinting and the speed of light, right?

It's an insane paradigm shift. Well, you grew up in New Mexico and happens to be the location, the setting of Christopher Nolan's Robert Oppenheimer movie. Tell us about your traveling fascination. So I grew up around nuclear because of that, right? You grew up in New Mexico, you're around nuclear because of the legacy from the Manhattan Project. It's the lore. And there's a lot of nuclear museums.

And so as a kid, I would go to them, especially what was the National Atomic History Museum, is now the National Nuclear Science Museum, and fell in love with it. Like, it seemed like science fiction, but was real life. And when I realized that New Mexico got about one-fourth of its power from the power plant in Arizona, I was like, that's so cool. That means one in every four seconds, that's not exactly that works, right?

But if you just discretize it, it's like, wow, like a quarter of the electricity. So if I had four light bulbs a lot in my room, one is being driven by a reactor, so I was obsessed with it. because it seemed like science fiction but real. So I knew I wanted to work on it from the time I was very little. Really? Yeah. It's just like, it felt like, okay, really cool, but also felt like it was the future.

Probably just because I think as a little boy, I was like, I just was like, oh, that's what's next. Like, technology's cool. It's what's next. So, like, actually, if you guys remember the game, Sim City 2000. Totally. Yeah. So I used to play that, and I got really frustrated because they treated nuclear power poorly. They treated like it as a negative.

Oh, in the game, like nuclear was a liability. The nuclear plant was a big one. It was like four by four. In Sim City. Yeah. But it was like brown. It was kind of like dirty. It wasn't pretty.

It wasn't great. It was kind of opposite. It was a negative thing. And so I was like, I don't like, so I used to write them letters being like, you treat it inaccurately. Lovell never responded. This New Mexico kid writing in again. And like, I would write even in my like English class or my literature class or history class or history history, any chance there was a reasonable freedom to write something. I would often write about nuclear power in elementary school, middle school through high school.

Any poems? I need to go look. Nuclear is a new language for most of us. Yes. But what is a nuclear reactor? Because we're next to this right now. We're sitting and recording this interview live next to one. So what are the key terms that you've got to know if you're a Yeti or a Bessidy or a listener out there

from the Nuclear Dictionary to impress an atomic scientist on a first date? Okay. So you want to understand what a chain reaction is. Okay. You want to understand what going critical is. All right. So you get fuel with the right concentration of elements in it, put it in the right configuration so that when the atoms split, they release neutrons two or three times.

That's just have two or three neutrons on average every time you split an atom. All right. Then what you want is those neutrons to go on and split other atoms and propagate, right? So one atom splits, two or three neutrons get out. One of those neutrons goes causes a fission. And then one of those neutrons from that go on, cause a fission. And if you balance that evenly, so the same number from one cycle to the next to the next, that's called being a critical reactor.

And if the number is going up, it's supercritical. So it's increasing in power. And if it's going down, it's subcritical. just not on. So that's what a nuclear reactor fundamentally is. And when you're splitting the atom, what you're doing is not just producing neutrons, you're producing a bunch of literally kinetic energy

that's manifest as heat. Because those atoms as they split, the resultant, the daughter atoms are going, they have a lot of energy. But they deposit all that. They basically slow down in the lattice, the crystal like molecular atomic atus they're in, lattice they're in and just deposit their energy. And that heat is then transformed into steam?

Is then turned, yeah. So most reactors, you're going to transfer that heat, by some kind of coolant, and then that coolant goes and does something useful for you. That liquid metal flows out of the reactor, goes and ultimately transfers its heat to basically a boiler and boils steam, and that steam spins a turbine. And that turbine eventually creates the electricity energy that powers our homes. Turban basically spins as the steam expands in it, and then rotates a bunch of magnets inside of the magnets in a generator, and that's how you get electricity.

So if we were going to use the analogy we had from our interview before, this is the pot of boiling pasta water. This is what would be bubbling. So down in the bottom there, you have fuel. You can kind of get a glimpse. You see on the top, you see those pattern of where those positions are that like plus shape? So these, those are each positions where there's fuel elements. And those fuel elements is an array

basically of 17 fuel pins by 17 fuel pins, so square. And those fuel pins about the size of my pinky, about 12 feet tall. And they're arranged in that pattern, and that's the fuel. And so what is is zirconium tubes with uranium fuel, uranium dioxide pellets that stack that length. And then what you could do is you can put materials alongside of that in different positions and absorb the neutrons. But the three differentiators we really see with Oaklow is tiny, sexy, and tidy.

Tiny, sexy, and tidy. Because your reactors are relatively small. They're built to look beautiful from the outside. And it looks nothing like the nuclear power plants from Homer Simpson. And your fast reactor technology eliminates nuclear waste by recycling old fuel. Yeah, there's the tidy part. So I'm sure you've got a lot to say about all that. How are you taking a 70-year-old, incredibly regulated and complex model

and turning it all upside down? It started that way. So that's the cool thing, right? Like the very first reactor that made electricity in the United States is very similar to what we're building in Idaho for the power side. It uses liquid metal as the coolant. That's great at making it tiny. Why?

Liquid metals are really good at removing heat. You know, basically there's a thing called a heat transfer coefficient. And the higher that is, the better you can remove heat. from a small volume. Liquid metals are so good at it. We all know this kind of because, right, air is something, humans are really used to air in water as our heat transfer media, right? If you get into air, that sounds really silly if you get into air. If you're walking around in the air, it's at a certain temperature

and it's kind of warm, but then you go to water and it's the same temperature, it feels very different. Right. Because of the heat transfer of water, water's way better at removing heat. Well, liquid metals- That's why a hot tub feels so much hotter than 90-90-degree hot 102-degree hot-top feels way harder than 102-degree air way better it's just right it's way different and that's because that heat transfers so you're depositing way more energy from the water

or it's removing way more energy from you um well liquid metals are even better than water at transferring heat what that means is you can make things a bit smaller as a result on top of that liquid metal doesn't boil at like the low temperatures relatively speaking that water does that means you don't have to pressurize it which means the componentry is smaller so all that that translates to doing something that aligns itself to be a bit smaller, and it means that when you think about what it looks like to design and build a reactor, you don't have the same physics driving you to a much bigger design. And you can do more with less. You can be smaller with it. So that's part of the dynamic of why that can be done that way.

So I'm hearing a lot of like, this is better, the way we did it in the first place, but it still is new somehow. Yeah. What happened was we as a society saw the potential in splitting atoms and harnessing the energy from them. But what we saw with these reactors is different types of fuels and coolants enable you do different things. But what are we as a society and a species? Our industrial base in the 1950s when we were really going on the first steps of this technological adventure were rooted in boiling water and managing water because that's how steam power plants work. We know it super well. We didn't know liquid metals as well. The world's changed a lot because we've advanced this technology and other technologies that help this so that what happened

with some of those first reactors showed, hey, it can work. They weren't working as well as the potential was because we had to work through things. But this culminated through multiple iterations of this technology sponsored by federal research in the U.S. as well as other countries into really sort of the last generation of these builds. Notably in the U.S., there are two reactors I always like to talk about. It's called the EBR2 reactor, or experimental breeder reactor two, and then the fast flux test facility, or FFTF. Both of those reactors were built between 60s and 80s and, well, One was built in 60s and was built in the 80s. And what was really cool about it

is some really neat things came out of that. We learned that they could run really well, that they could do these incredible things on safety. They could do these incredible things operationally in terms of reliability and availability. They could do these great things as well on recycling fuel. And so at the end of the day, it was like, hey, this stuff makes a ton of sense.

What was new about us was realizing that that had been done and modernizing it in a couple different ways. There's one interesting part about this whole history too. All this stuff was done, but all of it was archived in paper. and it wasn't digitized. So basically, we're in the nuclear 2.0 era,

and we'll get to why there was such a long gap between nuclear 1.0 and 2.0. Now a quick word from our sponsor. But this facility that we're sitting in, it is a nuclear reactor. It is. And one year ago, it was a field of grass and shrubs. Now it's the first ever nuclear reactor

built on private land with private resources in just 11 months. How did you pull it off so fast? and did Christopher Nolan write the screenplay for it? Not yet. Sequel. I think what we saw was, you know, we originally found this awesome place

where we're at in Prototown. When Caroline and I had known this guy, Josh, who started this effort to kind of build a new American city and back years ago. And he was looking at a place that this is just cool. We're into that. And then he found this spot specifically with a lot of support from the community

to try to be a place where you'd come build hard infrastructure tech, not just hard tech, but also hard tech. It's just a place where you can build easier and faster. So we said, hey, let's go build some training facilities here. Because there's a company at that time, so it's circa 2024. Okay. We're pre-public, and it opened a different regulatory lane that existed, but just hadn't been used, directly the government to use it.

And that allowed us to say, hey, what if instead of building a training facility, we actually build a reactor here with the goal of turning it on, like, unless in a year? Yeah. And to sprinkle on some quick context here. Please, Jack. One of the big reasons nuclear 1.0 ended, and we'll get to this more in detail in a second, but it's because it took so long to build nuclear power. We're talking something that was supposed to be five years became 20 years.

Magentate. Do you have any idea how angry the investors are if it's supposed to be five years and it's 20? Yeah, my money can do. This reactor was built in 11 months. So this reactor behind us achieved criticality. Yeah, and I do want to, remember Jake mentioned that in our speed-dating nuclear dictionary? earlier, criticality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is criticality? Because that's the milestone you reached on August 6th. Just a month ago. Criticality is when a

reactor really becomes a reactor. It's when it turns on and is self-sustaining. In other words, the neutrons released from fission go on to produce other fission events that produce other neutrons in a self-sustaining way. That's when it's actually on. And so for an electric generating facility, that's when it could stay hot indefinitely. Yeah, and basically until it depletes the fuel. But yeah, so that's when you turn the reactor on. Before that, before you're critical, it's not on yet. And what was cool and why we were able to do this so fast was partly the partnership here with Prototown and also the team we brought in to help build this with the mindset of design, build, and iterate. Because the permitting process in the

past, why, one of the reasons it took so long to build nuclear was we did a really silly thing in the policy space where we said, okay, you have to do a ton of permitting paperwork and licensing work before you can build anything, which was basically saying you have to do all this nuclear value, like you have to do all this nuclear safety work and hazard analysis and all this other stuff before you can build anything. I get why you need to do that before you load the actual nuclear material. That makes perfect since you should have to do that. But if you're just building a building that has no real hazard, why do you have to do all that work?

That loads so much front-end time and investment. Yeah. Could be doing both. Could do it parallel. Total mojo killer. That's what's changed. That's what's recently changed in why we're in a new era and why we could build this in parallel to the permitting.

We were ready. The facility was built for a while before we got the go-ahead to load the fuel. That's how it should be. Yeah, and if it didn't work out or you didn't get the permit, it could have been converted to something else. Yeah, we could use it as a test facility. It was worth being risk on for that. And the other thing was we said, okay, we got to build, learn, and iterate from this.

And the other big thing in nuclear that's hard, because it's been so hard to build and we haven't built, the culture in the industry is pervasively stuck in analysis. It's slow, yeah. And we're breaking out of that. But what does that mean? You're not going to design and build the perfect reactor the first time, which is how nuclear, you know, the industry has kind of taught itself. Now it's like, no, no, no, you're going to build and turn one on, and that's awesome

because you're going to learn from it and make the next. one better, and the next one better, and the next one better. And it's changed that's cost paradigm and the time paradigm. Jake sounds like someone who got a lot of reps in in the wait room. Get in the reps in. And the reason for this paradigm shift in regulatory, it's kind of a combination of, first of all, climate change. Like we need carbon-free electricity.

Second, energy independence. And third, the data center AI build-out. I think so. There's just all these things that compound themselves that electrification drives people to use more power. On top of that, we have really. Re-industrialization happening in this country. We outsourced so much manufacturing and therefore power demand out of this country for so long and now it's coming back in and we need the baseload, that 24-7 power,

that nuclear is really good at doing, right, back. And then on top of that, AI, couple that whole layer with something we want to actually do sustainably so that we can kind of, you know, endure living on this planet. Very, very, very important. Nuclear is the answer for all that. And something people have been shy in this industry is to call it a silver bullet. I'll stand up and say, fast reactors and recycling, like what we're doing are effectively, They're a silver bullet for climate and energy abundance. But this plant generates isotopes, not electricity, the one we're in right now. So the best analogy we could think to explain what this nuclear reactor six feet behind Jack is doing. Jack, why do you bring up the analogy?

Don't fall in. So this proved to yourself that you could do it. You learned how to do it, and you showed the world you could do it. The analogy we thought of was 2008, the Falcon 1 rocket launching into orbit. by SpaceX. By Elon. That wasn't a money generating product, but they showed that they could send a rocket into space as a private company.

And it paved the way for the Falcon 9, which has done so much work, sending stuff into orbit. It's a very good analogy. Okay. It's accurate. I think for a couple of reasons, too, when I was growing up in this space, because I fell love of a nuclear as a kid, I worked on it, like, in high school. And I remember all these mentors and folks I worked with, you know, as a young kid growing up,

always more or less said, I mean, people literally told me several times, multiple people that building a nuclear reactor is one of the, is like one of the hardest things you can do on Earth. It's one of the hardest things for people to do. And that never made sense to me because the physics, we know, we know how to manage this stuff. Yeah. Like, it was all because we just kept self-imposing both, you know,

as an industry as well as regulatory stuff and all those things, really hard things. So it was really, really hard. So proving you could do it is unbelievably important because it starts to shatter the paradigm. Okay, but one of the main reasons for all of those red tape and concerns is something that we should also reference, which, you know, Jack and I are former Wall Street guys,

so we jumped into your SPAC paperwork from when you guys went public. We did notice you said the word disaster four times in the paperwork. And being two guys sitting next to your reactor right now, I wish it was zero times. But is this technology safe? Absolutely. Look at objective facts.

Nuclear technology is one of, if not, the safest form of energy. In the most brutal but distilled metrics for that, I don't love it, but it's clear. is it has among the lowest deaths per megawatt hour of all energy sources. Like it's right up there around with solar. It might even be better depending on how you account for some of this stuff. It is incredibly safe.

Why? Because we learned that it was dangerous early on. And we as an industry and as a society built rules, regulations, and operating practices and procedures that manage that. Well, if you cool and control it, it makes the containing part a lot easier. So if you build a reactor that's self-controlling and self-cooling based on physics, not systems, not operator intervention, change the paradigm of how you think about safety. This is something that human society figured

out how to do. And this reactor is an example of it. The reactor in Idaho Falls that we're building that builds off of its predecessor proved it out. On April 3rd, 1986, this reactor in Idaho called EBR2 was literally running at full power. They locked these control rods are, control rods that are the things that would go in the reactor and shut it down. They locked them out of the reactor so they could not go in. And then they turned off the pumps. Is it a test? Like a stress test? Huge stress test. unbelievably challenging stress. Did people know, was this public? It felt like a danger

stress test. They actually knew how well this was going to work and they had a whole audience for it. It was like a performance. This was unprecedented. And what happened was the reactor had the following things happen. When I say self-controlling, self-cooling, what does that mean? It means that as it heats up, various phenomena come to play to cause a reactor to shut down and that means it's not going anymore. But you still have to manage a heat because in a nuclear reactor, when you

turn it off, it's still making heat because the decay products still are around. So yes, it has incredible safety to the point that it's amazing what the system did. And that was just the morning. Then they shut the reactor. They fully shut it down after it shut itself down naturally

and was just fine. Went to lunch, came back, turned it on, and did what happened basically at Fukushima, but way worse. Because at Fukushima, the reactor was shut down.

Yeah, in the afternoon. Really stressful already. They just put it through something just as hard. And it was just fine. And it's because it's a quote-unquote fast reactor. Well, you can design a lot of reactors

that have these features. It's just really about having a modern reactor that's passively and inherently safe. The analogies you gave at the beginning about the eraser, that's with today's reactors that use 5% of the fuel in a single pass. With recycling, you can use almost... And then they throw it away. Yeah. And with recycling, you can extract all of that unused fuel almost. So you get almost 90, 95 or more percent back. So now instead of that being worth 147 barrels, it's worth thousands. We're all crunching the math and not getting

I expected the PhD would get there. So Jake, all three of us are standing over a nuclear reactor. Yep, we sure are. Should we be worried for our health? Not at all. Not at all. So first of all, the water is really good at shielding radiation. So there's a radiation really getting up here.

You're fine. So yeah, it's pretty cool actually. They kept telling us that we're safe. I would literally, like I would swim in it, live and sleep it, and do everything else. Like, damn. I would drink the water. I know it's fine, I know it's safe, I would do it. Like, it's just, you know, there's reasons I guess I can't yet live in a rubber reactor.

But one day. What's the biggest, you know, on that front, like the question Jack's asking, what's like the biggest misconception question you get when you're at dinner of people and you say, hey, I'm Jake. I run an $8 billion nuclear company. I definitely try to be more low-key. No, people ask what I do. It's like, oh, I work in nuclear.

And people are always, like, curious about, well, what do you, like, Like, you know, what about the safety? What about the waist? Those are usually the things. And, you know, oftentimes it's like, well, you're that close to stuff. It's like, guys, I've been really close to a lot of things that are very radioactive, but in managed, controlled ways. And I know how to, like, I know the physics and the science, but also importantly, we know

the protocols and mechanisms to make it so that you're not actually at risk. You get more radiation living next to a coal plant than a nuclear plant. Really? Because coal is actually radioactive. It has all sorts of small amounts of materials that are radioactive. And we just pump that out the stacks and it goes everywhere. And so people get more. radiation that way than they do. And they don't monitor it.

Actually, the other analogy I like is what, when it comes to the broader trend, when we like stand back a bit to see where nuclear has gone up and down, Jack thinks fashion, Jack thinks bell bottoms, right Jack? So, bell bottoms, hot in the 60s. Yeah. Lame for a long time after that. Hot again today. Yeah. Yeah. So that's nuclear 1.0 versus 2.0. So from 1950 to 1990, that's the nuclear 1.0 air. 40 years. We built 100 nuclear reactors, all producing carbon-free electricity. That was the 1970-swing-in Bell-Bottoms era. We had one incident where nobody died.

Right. Now, the 40 years since then, we have built three reactors. Bell-bottoms were out. Up until this year, when there's been a renaissance, Nuclear 2.0. So our big question here, nuclear, it's one of the incredible inventions of humankind. Why did it get canceled? Yeah. I think you had a confluence of different factors that happen.

with it. One, it's hard to overstate this, right? Like, generationally, we have a different mindset about how we think about interacting with information. Sounds really silly. The internet changes everything. People can go online and research things on their own with a lot of information of their disposal. Think about what we can do. Think what you can do right now. During the 70s and 80s and 90s, that wasn't available. And so what happened was misinformation, disinformation, confusion, fear, and uncertainty drove how people perceive certain things. And when you combine various factors that were sort of in a little bit of an anti-development area, right, going on, confluence, inappropriately so with nuclear weapons, like all this stuff going on.

It created this environment where fear and uncertainty, misinformation and disinformation, could spread unmitigated. And that caused a lot of people to be afraid. And it was hard to get information to dispute that. Look at our generation for a couple of reasons that are different. I say our generation. I mean, generations today. Yeah.

They're curious by something. They go look it up, right? And they find the facts. And I've seen this so many times anecdotally with people go in and say, hey, nuclear is really cool. Sorry, you don't know much about it. They hear about it. They're like, this sounds interesting.

They go into it and like, wow, this is really cool. Wow, this is really safe. Wow, this is great. Why haven't we done this so much before? What happened, right? And, like, that is part of what's changed the world because the objective facts are on nuclear side. That's enabled a lot of this change to happen,

and it wasn't there for why these elements festered, but also a couple other factors. And it gets, this gets borderline to the conspiratorial side, but the facts are out there. Look, there were advocating interests in it and various other sources of energy that went against nuclear. They paid for anti-nuclear advertisements. Gas, fossil fuels. Right.

Yeah. On top of that, you had foreign interests that were not interested in the U.S. having energy superabundance. Right. They were not able to keep up. So they advocated for things against it. They've sowed doubt and fear and uncertainty and all those things. And again, then you add to that some poor dynamics that the industry didn't necessarily do a great job of, getting in front of some of these elements

when you were kind of going through this rise of the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s where people didn't stand up and tout the benefits strongly. That was a factor. And I feel when you look at the data, it's a dark analogy, but it's kind of like how people are more concerned about, when it comes to the danger concerns, people are more concerned about a plane crash

than a car crash, even though the data clearly shows the car crashes are more dangerous. Which leads to this wild fact that should end any argument about nuclear safety. And Jack's saying he wrote a term paper in business in policy school about nuclear. I didn't know that. Yeah.

At the University of Michigan, yeah. Got published. It did? Yeah, it's got like 100 views. Nice. Maybe you get a lot more now. It's one of the few things that I have not co-authored with Jack. It needs a razzle-vazzle.

We'll actually put a link to that paper in this show. Yes, you should. More people die every day from fossil fuels than have ever died in the history of nuclear power. It's a great stat. We need to repeat the stat. It's a hero stat. More people died yesterday from natural. gas, oil, and coal, mostly through recitatory illness, then in the 70-plus year history of nuclear

energy, more people have died from bell bottoms. So personally, I got super into nuclear because I'm, I get the abstract fear of a nuclear disaster. Yeah. That's incredibly scary. But we have a very real thing happening right now called climate change. In my opinion, nuclear is a must have to stop the world from warming. And it's all about timing, too.

One of the cool things about Jack and I having the show is that you came of age, this nuclear renaissance moment, when we were launching the podcast 10 years ago. And so we've been able to follow this moment and cover it on the show the last few years. Like, we've covered Oaklo two years ago last year when you went public, and now it actually tore the reactor with you. That is very cool. And yeah, I think the other thing, too, is like sometimes people get caught up in the climate discussion. People know air quality.

People know pollution and emissions. Those are real things. And the reality is, like, this is an important thing to mitigate and avoid that. And at the end of the day, it's climbing the energy density curve. Humankind has almost always done that. So it's the natural logical next step. I think that's what he said at his frat sorority social as well. It's the logical next step.

So we're going to get eventually Oaklo Nuclear Corps that are self-sustaining. and the nuclear reaction continues. And it goes as long as the fuel lasts, which could be years, right? Yeah. And it's going to be hot for all of those years. And the heat connects to a metal, connects to another metal,

warming water ultimately, creating steam, and then that steam turns a turbine, which generates electricity. Yeah. And that just goes on for years. Yeah. So you load the fuel, turn it on,

start making the power. Power causes, you know, flows through the system, ultimately manifest its theme, spinning a turbine, making electricity. And you can do that for several years before you then refuel a little bit of it, and then run it again. No smoke coming out of smokestacks. No CO2 being emitted and creating greenhouse gases.

All of the waste. There isn't any. Yeah. Everything is contained in the fuel. Everything's contained in the fuel. And how much monitoring does it require? Is it like 24-7 there's always someone having to look at what's happening? In a power plant, you do.

Now, funny thing that your team may not have told you, But when we were scouting out and preparing and researching this interview, we saw some imagery where this was lit up blue. And we said, can we light it up blue? Because that looks really cool. And we were told we can't. Yeah.

Why is that? All right, so. We actually don't know the answer. The reason is come back. Here's why. So right now, we wanted to get this set up commissioned, like turned on. Yeah.

And then we're going to go through the process of going and upgrading to make more power. Now when you start making more power, Yeah. You don't need to light it up blue. It'll light itself up blue. You're kidding. No.

So the reason we don't want to send the image like we're producing a much power making it blue. Because this is going to be a new too. Because it will actually go blue on its own. Now it has to run a certain power to do that. And the reason is this, this is a crazy factoid. Yeah. Even this is like second date night kind of. Yeah.

This is good. So you asked my favorite term. I said it's really chrinke of radiation. So this is that. This is the blue light that a reactor will do. In a reactor that's producing power, there's a lot of free electrons being produced by beta decay. What that means is you're converting neutrons to protons in doing so you release, you spit out an electron. And that electron is going so fast that it's actually going faster than photons go in water.

It's actually going faster than the speed of light in water. No, no. Speed of light in water is less than it is in a vacuum. It's not a universal constant. But it goes faster than the light in water. And the sonic boom equivalent for a particle going faster than light in the medium is blue light called charing coveration. So come back, see it when it's actually on doing that. But that's why we don't want to do it.

It's like it looks cool, but it sends off the signal like, oh, we're doing that. We want it to glow blue on its own. That is so wild. Oh, you got it. Oh, we will on different things. So I guess a big surprise I had is that whether it's coal, oil, and gas, or nuclear, each one of them just creates steam. which turns a turbine and creates electricity. It's just two of them have really dirty byproducts to get to that steam.

And nuclear has nothing. It's like half of a coal plant and half of a nuclear plant are actually the same thing. So I think the first two business lines are the silver bullets, the power generation and the fuel recycling. Right, but there is a supporting role character who we think is kind of a hero here. It's funny that this third leg of the stool is not described by you as a silver bullet because it could potentially I just haven't gotten there yet. We're talking about isotopes. We would say isotopes are the robin to nuclear energy's baton.

Yeah. We might have to update that because there's three. But this facility is producing isotopes. What the heck is an isotope? What are the isotopes that are going to be popping out of from six feet behind jack right now? Who plan to sell them to? And how will they be used?

This is another part of the business that's radically misunderstood and underappreciated and also another isotope great date night kind of thingy, right? So, okay, isotopes. Basically, the elements on the periodic table, Let's choose hydrogen is a great one. We all know hydrogen. Hydrogen primarily is just one proton, orbited by an electron. But there's a flavor of hydrogen called deuterium, which is chemically the same as hydrogen,

but it has a neutron bound to that proton. And that's an isotope of hydrogen. So, and then there's another isotope of hydrogen called tritium, which has two neutrons bound to that proton, one electron. Chemically the same as hydrogen, pretty much. But that neutron that's now radioactive because it's imbalanced. Some are radioactive. so the decay and that radiation can be incredibly useful

because it allows you to treat medical conditions or image the body differently or diagnose things. Like with cancer? Like with cancer. Okay. So to me, I think of it like this. There's two major things about medical uses of isotopes that are really important. There's diagnostics and imaging.

That's critically important for diagnosing a lot of different conditions and we don't have enough of these isotopes at all. And it's completely transformative. If you catch some of these things early, they're treatable and it saves lives. Yeah. Then you have the capability. to load these things, almost like targeted cruise missiles to cancer cells,

load them onto ligands, some of these isotopes. And these molecular carriers are found to be almost only uptaken, or specifically uptaken by cancer cells. So if you load it with a ticking time bomb, which is what a radio isotope is, it gets taken up by the cell, and then that radio isstope decays in that cell, it obliterates that cell in nearby cells. It kills the cancer cell.

And importantly, unlike chemotherapy, which is killing your whole body, just hopefully slower than the cancer cells, this is really only killing the cancer cells because there's very little incidental radioactive decay in the rest of your body it's unbelievable it's the targeted therapies are insane what you can do with this wow and we don't have nearly enough of these things and they're becoming front-line treatments because of how effective they are so what this reactor behind us is all about yeah is making neutrons that can be absorbed by materials to turn those into these useful isotopes so these materials these isotopes they don't exist in nature they need to be formulated they need to

be synthesized. And to do that, they have to absorb neutrons. And reactors make a bunch of cheap neutrons that you can put these materials into next to the fuel. They'll absorb neutrons, turn into these materials. You pull them out, you separate them out, and then you can load them into therapeutics. Why hasn't this been done? It is being done. But what we did is we don't do enough of it, right? And so in the U.S., here's a couple things that happened, right? The U.S. really stepped back in nuclear things. Russia never really did. China's been growing into it. So they produce a bunch. We as a country lapsed in nuclear in a lot of different areas, and we just ceded the ability to do this. So now we can actually bring back supply. But what's interesting is

there's two factors here. One, these materials have incredible value now and they're undersupplied. And there's going to be price and margin cannibalization. Given the audience, I think it's a fun thing to say. If you ever see, like, what are the most valuable materials on the planet? Yeah. There's some social media posts out there. Like, a good number of those are all isotopes, including some that I think the last I saw, the going market rate would be about $400 trillion a kilogram. Yeah, more than caviar and more than gas. Like stupid numbers, right? You don't make kilograms, but these are the things you can make.

Now, the other thing, though, is, like, you can also start making materials and isotopes that we don't make at all that researchers see incredibly promising, but they can't get their hands on. It could open up entirely new drug discoveries and platforms, and then we're the ones producing. That's a great place to be. So China and Russia are producing these now? Yes, and then there's limited production capacity in the U.S. and the Western world. But we haven't been growing capacity, really, like a little bit here and there. And does Dana-Farber Cancer Institute become the customer?

I think a lot of people become partners, customers, like they become research partners, they become customers. I mean, right now, if you look at one of the best, I don't know if I say best, one of the highest selling cancer treatments is out of Novartis. It's called, I think it's called Plavicto, uses Letitium-177. It's an isotope that is being gobbled up

because it's becoming, it's very supply-limited and its use. And there's so many others that just aren't even being supplied enough so that they can't make the decisions to treat. Or they can't even do the research to see because they have so much promise, but there aren't, you can't even buy it because it's just not available. Now a quick word from our sponsor.

We want to talk about your origin story. Why is it called Oklahoma? Yeah. So there's a natural nuclear reactor that occurred in Africa, a country, Gabon, Africa, that we know of geologically. Most likely this occurred many, many places. This is the only one we've discovered a record of.

This is insane, but go on. Yeah. That is what, and it's called the Oakla region. And that's what we named the region. reactor off of an after because it was paying homage to the fact that like nuclear is natural it's been around and we literally had natural nuclear reactors on the earth so the history is really fascinating a long time ago uranium uranium you remember we talked about the beginning uranium 28 uranium 235 is the the naturally like best useful fuel directly it's at a very low enrichment because it decays faster than uranium 238 a long time ago it had a

higher concentration. So it's the natural level of the natural uranium was just enriched to a higher natural level. It was enough so that in enough concentration in certain rocks and ore, if water flowed in, it would start a nuclear reactor to start and happen, a chain reaction to happen and occur. And what happened at the oak layer reactor as far as we can tell is this was the case, water would flood in from the ocean because it was near coastal. It would flood it. The reactor would start. It would heat up and it would produce steam and it would basically produce a nuclear powered steam geyser. Wow. And then the steam would eject out. The reactor shut down because the water went away and then the water flow back in and it would start up again so it would run on and off and on and off and for a long time i mean i think people

generally think speaking think it took it lasted for hundreds of thousands of years um before finally like depleted itself and wouldn't run anymore and or the geology changed so yeah that's the name same you know the funny story about how they discovered this yeah is like the french were buying uranium from the region back when they were building on nuclear really successfully but they found that it came in somewhat denatured like it had been in a reactor And that immediately set off alarm bells, like, well, what's coming, where's this coming from? Some secret project. Yeah. So they went investigated and like, well, it did come from a reactor, just a long, long, long, long, long. Mother Nature's React. Yeah. Wild.

But the big break is 2013. Yeah. Because, me, give or take a decade after you met Tim Tebow. While you were getting your Ph.D. at MIT, you met Sam Altman. He was about to become the head of Y Combinator. So what's the biggest thing you've learned from Sam Alman and what's something you totally disagree with him on? Wow. And he is listening and watching, we should point out.

Well, they just hit AGI, right? He already knew. His clone is watching. Okay, so... That's an interesting question. Okay, a lot of things that I learned, a ton. I think one of the... I'm going to kind of cheat and give you two answers.

One is, never stop swinging for the fences on everything you're doing. Like, don't let near-term stuff sacrifice the long term of what you're going to. Like, build through. Like, don't just, like, build and learn and build and learn, but don't stop. Don't optimize for what the thing in front of you is, but grow through it. In other words, what's Oaklo's vision, right? It's effectively unlocking the full power of the atom with fast reactors and recycling, all the cool things you can do with that in isotopes at full scale.

That is a terminal energy solution for the planet. There's enough energy content and known reserves of heavy metals with fast reactors and recycling that we can power the entire planet's energy needs for billion. for two plus billion years for basically the durable lifetime of the planet. Wow. We have a term without carbon emissions. We have a terminal energy climate solution. That's what we're trying to build at Oaklo.

So like don't lose side of that for everything here because guess what? I won't be alive for all of that mission to be realized. Physics is on our side. That's great. I think the other thing was like celebrate. That said, celebrate all the winds on the way because it's such a hard, long journey. Nice. So you kind of never reach that full in state in people's careers, much less alive.

So celebrate the little wins that matter so people know that there steps up the mountain. Okay, but what do you disagree with Sam Almanah? He was hoping you forgot. No, it's kind of hard. I mean, well, I think there was one area where, man, I'm not copping out. It's like he taught a lot. There were things we agreed with and disagreed with. I think there's some views that he's had about like incremental hard tech development

versus going all the way to where you want to get to on the first. But I think that was like 2014. That was 2013-14 error discussions. I almost guarantee you if we had that same conversation today, we'd probably be much more aligned because of, this sounds so weird to say, but what we've all done. The other thing is like, I think the other one that I would say we kind of disagreed with was how we lean into telling the story and how elements of it matter. Yeah. And not be too shy about some of the stuff. I think there was an over-optimant, like over-anticipation and over-thensibly

thinking about it's hard to tell the nuclear story. It's like, just tell the story. Yeah. Like, don't be afraid of it. You've got to tell the story. And I felt like there was kind of this, like, you know, you got to perfectly prepare the field before you can even say anything. It's like, no, it's going to be messy. You're not going to nail everything right. There's going to be people who hate it. There's going to be people who have different views. There's going to be people who disagree just like embrace that. So, Jake, one year after you met Sam, yeah, you graduated from MIT. He encouraged you to move out to California, where you applied and were accepted to Y Combinator, the famous incubator program, where they encouraged

you to swing for the fences. And Sam becomes an investor, eventually chairman of the board. But this was all eight years before OpenAI launched ChatGPT. And now everyone's talking about how do you fuel AI with nuclear? Was Sam telling you in 2014 that clean next generation nuclear reactors would power future AI? He wasn't saying that explicitly, but what he was saying very clearly was that he thinks the world is going to need unbelievably more amounts of energy and for a lot of reasons and that's why nuclear is such an important stable solution for it 2015 the AI story really starts to land and that's when it became pretty clear that like okay that's when Sam and Elon and others launch open AI yeah so now you're getting

to sell shovels to the AI gold rush, right? I mean, the AI development must be a tremendous godsend for your business. Oh, it's unbelievable. Like, I mean, it's accelerated all of our wildest dreams by 20 years or more. Because meta, Google, Amazon, Open AI, Anthropics, SpaceX, trillion-dollar companies, and they all desperately need electricity. Existentially need electricity. Are you even like, you know, 10 years ago you would have been cold calling them,

and now what is it like? Are they just sending people to you? I remember having conversations about data stuff. about data centers in like 2013, 14, 15. And people were like, oh, nuclear's too big for a lot of data center. But the world's changed, right? Everything's changed, obviously. Well, we've seen this in the stock price. You guys go public, 2024. Sam Altman resigns as chairman of the board a year later because Open AI wants to use Oakland nuclear facilities. And needs to avoid that conflict of interest. Exactly. The stock fell 54% on the first day of trading. Brutal. But then the surge?

A massive surge. In fact, Today, Okloo stock is five times higher than the day one closing price. And that's all without having really any revenue right now, even still today. I mean, it's kind of like the Jerry McGuire, show me the money. Yeah, let's talk to financials. Your latest earnings show $1.2 million in revenue with an $80 million quarter of loss. So you're basically a pre-revenue company still, and yet the company is worth $8 billion. So when will Oaklo start making money and why should someone invest now?

Yeah, well, I mean, we're reporting revenues, which is cool. Like, we're making some money, but this is like the piecemeal up to everything we're doing. Where does revenues come from are companies required to help us accelerate building power plants and building reactors for isotopes and other support infrastructure we need for fuel and fabrication work and recycling work. We expect that I still revenue generation hits kind of in the early part of next year, maybe hits a little sooner, depending on how some of the stuff plays out. And then on top of that, like power generation, we expect to start selling in 2028. We do have prepayments from customers, right?

But it's really when you start putting power out. And we have a great position, right, in terms of being able, like, so the question was like being well capitalized and can we build. And now we've proven, yeah, we can build. We're going to keep getting better at it too. So, like, at the end of the day, I think that's how we see this lining up. And that's where I think the market sees this and says, okay, if you back up what the size of some of these orders are,

I mean, I think publicly it's like we have like an 18 gigawatt order book. Yeah. And that's, you know. Are all of those hyperscalers I mentioned available? Can you put your collos? Yeah, I mean, it's our neocloud. Well, now that you're a public company CEO, do you like the idea of potentially being a meme stock?

I mean, look, to be honest, like, the stock's very cool because it's great to have people who are partners with us. Like, we're huge believers in ownership. Like, every person who's an employee at Oaklow, we focus on equity from the day we started to, you know, it's just like you're a full-time employee. This is part of the story. We want people to have upside on this.

A story that we like, so that's, like, really important for us. So it's great that then there's more investors that can get in on this, right? That's awesome. Being a meme stock, I care about what we're building for, which is a very long run. So like volatility is like, okay, there it is. My view is look at what this is turning into, look what we're building for and look at the scale. If we execute, there's a clear trajectory to become one of the biggest companies in the world. So $8 billion looks like a small number, relatively speaking, to what those numbers would be.

So the question then, the key is like play the long game and execute over scale, right? And that's kind of how I think about it. But there's a lot of competition in the next-gen nuclear space. It's like Bill Gates, the Russian government, probably Elon Musk pretty soon. Yeah. New Scale, X energy. Whole tech just filed to IPO the day we're doing this recording. Tell us how your other differentiator, not just fast reactors and fuel recycling,

but you're the only one selling power as the product. Yeah, like licensing. Yeah, this goes to the origination of Oaklo. Like when Carolyn and I were talking about this, it was like, hey, this just seems, like there's so much potential in doing this better differently and new how do we do this what's the best approach and what came clear to us in time we spend including time like when we work together in this thing called the mit reactor technology course which is this really cool thing where they have utility executives come in and have a crash course and nuclear technology given by mit and

the institute nuclear power operators what i saw was like why aren't people doing this why is the industry where are utility executives not wanting to invest in this technology where aren't they buying it why aren't they building it so i coming from an engineering brain right was just like pitching the product on the pure technicals, and it never moved the needle with like CFOs of utilities, who then became CEOs of utilities. But what did was changing the risk profile and the product offering. It wasn't asking them to take on,

because here's what the industry was doing. Here's what the bulk of the industry does. They design a reactor to something like 80% completion. They take the design paperwork. They give it to a customer. Well, don't give it. They charge a nine-figure fee if they can get it, which most can't, fee to the customer

to then say, okay, here, take the blueprints, complete the design, permit it, cite it, procure it, build it yourself, and operate it yourself, and we'll just keep charging you for ongoing services. And in some ways, that sounds good economically, but people don't want that very much. And so what we saw was, okay, especially for new technologies that have all this potential but need to be reduced more to practice,

the risk needs to be taken off the table. Well, we should get the reward of that too. So our view is make it easy to sell reactors, which is not selling reactors, it's selling power. Because that's what people wanted. So when we said that pitch, it was like, well, what if we just built and sold you the power? They're like, yeah, that would solve a lot of things.

We'd want to do that. There it is. So then it's like, okay, now we design and operate. Now it scales in really important ways. Now, we can do the other model if people really want it. We can do build transfer. Those are all options. But to get customers excited, you've got to make the power first.

And this allows us to move at our speed and not the speed of really slow customers who need to be the ones to build your plant or your product. But then also we get to internalize all the learnings. So that's the other differentiator. And that's why we're taking this approach. And then it gives us, like, fleet-wide learnings at scale. And that's super important. So the other next-gen nuclear companies, they're basically handing a PDF to the customer and saying,

here, build a nuclear power plant, we designed it for you. Yeah. Like, imagine if you went and bought a car. Yeah. You didn't buy a car. You bought blueprints for a car that weren't even fully done. A kit with a CIR's home kit. I can't even drive.

A kit without like all of the parts done yet. So you have to then complete it and do it yourself. That sounds potentially really profitable. It is because a PDF is not as expensive. But not if not the people buy it. It's really profitable on paper, in theory. Yeah. But meta doesn't want to build a power plant.

No. Neither does PG&E. At some point, but they want you to do it first. So then if you do it first, then guess what? Then we have a different offering because we can move faster because we can build ourselves and sell the power to those who want the power who want to move fastest. People need power.

So the product you're selling is a 20-year contract to buy all the electricity of our reactor. Yep. You always talk about hero stats on the show. Are there any other wild hero stats in terms of like how much went into this facility that really like I remember when we were walking and you were saying oh yeah these walls they're 14 inches thick Like can you sprinkle on some more context about the magnitude of the place where we are? Yeah, I mean look this is like we excavated piling's like 60 feet deep not excavated we piled them down the concrete surrounding this vessel is well over a foot thick reinforced, it's incredibly robust, strong structure. The vessel and the support structures, let's just say very, very, very strong.

It was pretty cool, right? And like, part of this was over-design it to build it with some speed, and that way you consider, you have your margins in there. And that's something I think people sometimes think about is like, well, if you go fast, you're cutting corners. No. If you do it right, you're just over-designing and over-engineering and over-building,

but you're making the decision quicker with a conservative-bounding assumption. Now you end up paying a little bit more for it, bit more for it, but you get it back through the getting it done and learning through the process faster. And that's the part of the philosophical kind of approach we took to learn from this, which was really important. And we learned a ton, accordingly, on that front.

I think one of the coolest hero stats to me about this is, as far as we can tell, the reactor that we're standing next to is the fastest privately-sided and privately built reactor in the history of the world. Wow. That's a hell of a hero stat to me, right? That was our first one too. And in an industry that the story is too long, too expensive, over budget, over cost, everything, to have a different element to that as your first one is really important for us as an organization to build off of and learn from.

One thing I'll just get on if you want, like this part of power, that's the layer everyone focuses on. But the underlying layer that enables that is fuel. And the recycling part is changing the world and how we think about this because of the energy content available in this material. And then therefore the benefits on the cost of fuel and therefore the cost on power. This is the tidy side of your business. And this is the part that is radically underappreciated, I would argue, by most people. Why? Because we don't really do it in this country.

We're going to change that. Technically, we are recycling as a country. Like, we're making a little bit of fuel recycled as we speak from in Idaho. It's actually going to go in our first reactor up there. But when you think about recycling opens up the door for, you get the potential for massive revenue offtake, massive revenues from offtake for the fuel you make. Part of it. Because you're getting cheaper fuel.

Yeah. And you're making fuel abundantly. We have a fuel shortage in this country for nuclear. Like in the world as a whole, like, is this ramp rate of build expects to go? The fuel supply chain is going to lag to keep up. Recycling helps contribute to that. So there's that benefit. We can fuel our reactors or some others, which is huge.

But also, out of recycling, when you think about what happens in a nuclear reactor, those neutrons are causing all these things to happen because they're getting absorbed by atoms or splitting them, they're changing atoms. It's literally alchemy. So you're going from uranium to all sorts of different materials. It's like the whole periodic table in various concentrations is in the fuel, the used fuel. So when you recycle it, these facilities all of a sudden become able to be some of the largest critical mineral and resource mines on the planet. That's huge. That's insane. And the

feedstock is either cheap or free or subsidized or we're paid to take it. So like, this is a huge outcome that changes the entire paradigm. Like the recycling unit economics can can when you start layering these things look really, really like, whoa, this is wild, right? Let me make sure I get this straight. What we consider nuclear waste. We consider nuclear waste. a big problem of the nuclear industry. Like what do you do with nuclear waste? Right. Do you put it in the ground?

Do you consider that nuclear fuel to power these operators? Yeah. So it's like the landfill that's a stain on the countryside is a gas station. Yeah. And the gold mine. It's both because you literally make a bunch of gold. I'm not kidding you. You make a lot of gold out of this stuff.

Not to mention ruthenium and palladium and platinum. There's a bunch of these critical minerals that come out and fuel for energy. And the fact that you can recycle wasted nuclear fuel and use it for your nuclear reactor, that's one of the two silver bullets you talk about. It's a huge one. And here's why this is so important for scale. When I look at the world right now, we have an under supply of all the things needed to make fuel. That's mining, that's conversion, that's enrichment, that's fabrication.

We're working to solve all of those on the front end, but recycling helps as well, because it alleviates the needs here. The other thing is, like, uranium in today's reactors, when you pull it out of the ground, you have to enrich it. And when you enrich it, you're discarding a lot of the uranium you pulled out of the ground. And that uranium isn't used for much of anything on power. Some of it's used for industrial purposes, but it's really just sitting there. It's a byproduct. So that means that when you go back to the mine, the amount of energy extracted is less

of the available energy in that material you pull out of the ground in today's reactors. It's less than 1%. But the fast reactor, it's way over 90%. So that's a 90x improvement in utilizes. Think about what that does to your margins. Oh yeah, it's a profit puppy. So most traditional nuclear reactors have to go and mine uranium from planet Earth. They need fresh uranium.

Fresh uranium. Pay people to mine it. Enrich it, which costs a lot more money. Then they use it, and then they store it in a mountain and tell humans to stay away for a million years. Whereas you, instead of paying for your fuel through the mining and the enriching, some companies will pay you to take it. So it's a negative price? I mean, even the government technically has a burden to get rid of this by the nuclearist policy. So they're getting it to you.

Yeah, so there's a different revenue stream here potentially as an offtake. This is wild. Yeah, just to take it. And then, so it's a recycling fee. You get, right? And then you pull out the fuel, which you can use, sell it to yourself, make energy from it or sell it to others. They can make energy from it. And then sell other various isotopes and other materials that come off of this.

And that's what you think is the biggest thing Wall Street's underappreciating about your business. The fact that you can recycle. fuel. Yes. And what it does to diversify revenues and give you this incredible position in the fuel markets, but also very importantly to help nuclear meet its opportunity, because we need more fuel. Recycling is a way to unlock that. As you told us, fast reactors have been around since the 60s. They eliminate the nuclear waste problem, which is wild and have big safety benefits because they self contain themselves. Okay, so it sounds too good to be true. Our question, why didn't that become the standard, the fast reactor? I think the reality is during that first buildout, Nuclear

1.0, when it was really going, it just wasn't mature enough. It wasn't. It wasn't The early ones we built weren't performing as well. There were things we were learning about it. There were things we needed to discover about how to best manage this from the coolant, the chemistry, the materials, the operability, the design, the implications on all of that. Until this new wave started, its early, it kind of roots in the late 2000s, early 2010s, when us and a few others said, hey, this is actually really where the future of the atom is going to go. Let's lean into it.

And the thing that compounded and I think stunted some of that effort, too, was the fact, like we said, it sounds cheesy, but it's real. this was not easy information to get access to, partly because it wasn't digitized. It was in the libraries. Yeah, you had to go read it. And then like limited distribution on copies, and some of it was restricted information. So like getting it was just, but once you pour it into it,

or you'd hear lectures come from the labs who worked on this, you're like, you asked the same question. Why are we not doing this? But then when I spent time in the industry, you start to realize those are the factors. So then it was like you needed capital that was more risk on. You needed companies that would say, let's try to do things a bit differently

in terms of the supply, like the what you design and build yourself, what you partner with others to get early repetitions before you do in-house, how you permit it, how you design it to those things, to capitalize on this technology. Because the thing that had also happened was industry was trying to make it look like what it wasn't,

which was a large light water reactor. And if you try to treat it like that, it's sort of this like, you know, square peg round whole thing, it just doesn't work as well versus saying, let's design to what its organic potential is. Gotcha. Well, so that's one differentiator, the fact that you're doing fast reactors.

And by the way, fast reactors are the only thing that can fully recycle like that. It's because of the physics of fast neutrons. That's the unlock. So it's interesting to watch the range of cities and states announce their carbon neutral targets, like Virginia, California, carbon neutral by 2050, New York, Louisville, 2050, 2040. So we were like wondering about this long-term vision.

We put ourselves 20, 30 years in the future. Is there going to be a mini-Oclough next to Madison Square Garden to help New York City get to carbon neutral? In Midtown, Manhattan. I think, okay, honestly, I think there's a very real world at some point that that is viable. And New York's actually a very fascinating place for that because you have central heat.

So you can also use the heat for district heating. Because a byproduct of your reactors is heat. Yeah. Right. You already see those steam things in the middle of the streets. Yeah. But there's a long path to that. So in the near term, you're more likely to be offsite.

You're going to be in areas downstream, down the grid, where it makes sense to build more, where real estate's little cheaper, where you're not in the middle of Manhattan. Do this, do this more. And then maybe that's possible. Yes, technically, completely viable. Upstate New York?

To help the state? New York hit carbon neutral? Yeah. Or probably more realistically, other states that are, I'll just be candid. Like, I'd love to see New York. They're doing a lot. They've got to do a little more because there's other states that are moving a little faster. So it'll start there.

But then, yeah, maybe it's in upstate New York. Maybe it's in, you know, it could be in a number of places that serve that market. But, like, I think at the end of the day, it's going to start more in those centralized areas. So what we're seeing at Oaklo was more likely to be these campuses where you have large power coming out that have good interconnect, good grid infrastructure, and then that power goes out to the areas they need it. Yeah.

But I do think there's a world where it starts to move into closer to proximity. Or things move closer to it, which is the other factor. Early, early days of Oakland, like one of our very earliest, like, you know, potential, I think customer meetings. Yeah. It was like, 2013. Someone was like asking some of the question was like, you could put this in New York. It was like, technically it's possible. But from regulatory permitting, there's some things that need to change.

There's a lot of stuff. Like, let's just be realistic. It's like happened for a while. And they were like, well, because I was like, yeah, you could put it at the basement. And they were like, no, you put it at the top as much. ballast for the skyscraper. Oh, yeah, because they need a ballast. Because they need a ballast at the top. And I was like, a penthouse reactor. I was like, that's pretty sick.

Empire State, nuke. Yeah, I was always laughing. I was like, think how cool the event could be up there. Like, sorry, this is really silly, but like, one thing that Carolyn and I used to laugh about on Saturday Night Live was, you know, the like, Stefan about the clubs. It was like, imagine the skyscraper pinnhouse reactor club that's underground. Really silly.

Well, perfect timing. Because when Jack and I were preparing for this interview, what we realized, this was like our big breakthrough, Oaklo is the Lulu Lemon of Nuclear. What we mean is, you're trying to be a lifestyle brand. And Lifestyle is not our word choice. That's yours. Right. You've talked about nuclear lifestyle innovation campuses.

Or Licks, I think they're called. They're not called Licks. We can't say Lix. Inlix. Inlix. Inlix. Inlix. So they're kind of like nuclear company towns.

Yeah. Can you explain what a nuclear lifestyle innovation campus is? and how they might be coming to Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Louisiana? And do they have an Equinox gym? Like, visually tell us this, take us into this world, this Lulu Lemon-branded nuclear world. I mean, this is swinging for the defenses. Okay, I'll be semantic. I like the rebrand.

Technically, they call them nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses, but I like the nuclear lifestyle innovation campus because that's what it turns into. So nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability. Asset. And why would a state take one-fifth of our country's nuclear waste? So, think about it like this. If you told a state, so in the waste today in the United States, there's a almost, well, it's about 100,000 metric tons, a little less, I think.

That technically would fit in something the size of a super Walmart, like a super Walmart, not in, you know, Vermont or California, like a super Walmart here. But, so that's pretty small. That's from the whole history of nuclear power generation in the U.S. But there's enough energy content in that material to power the entire country's energy needs for over 150 years. years. Because that waste is only 5% used. It's only 5% waste, really.

It's like 95% fuel. Another way to talk about that waste, all of that, it's more than four Saudi Arabia's worth of oil. Yeah, that's the context. So each state, and they're actually going to pick three, and this is going to grow, so that means each state is getting more than one Saudi Arabia worth of oil. Think about the wealth of that. So it's like a modern millennial company town built on nuclear with fancy architecture that

like... And yeah, you'll have a very fancy equinox. You'll have an amazing job. So these nuclear towns would do fabrication, enrichment, recycling. They'd build reactors. They'd build power generators. They would build recycling centers. And they would have a Saudi Arabia's worth of energy supply in their state and yoga classes.

And every year it's refueled with a Norway worth. A Norway's worth of fuel. Yeah. Every year, that's just the bonus top of up. Think about that. So if we can embrace, it's insane. If we can embrace nuclear waste is an asset to be recycled, not a liability to very in a mountain, then we have four Saudi Arabia's worth of energy. And when you add all it

up, that's why we describe this as Oaklo having a lifestyle brand. So what happens at the end? When conventional nuclear power plants hit their 40th birthday, they either get extended another 20 years or, like the plant I grew up eight miles from, they get decommissioned and it becomes a nuclear haunted house. How long do nuclear fast reactors at Oaklo last? And what happens at the end? Yeah, I mean, most of these designs are going to be designed to last for, you know, 60 plus years. And so you're going to run for the lifetime, and then you can renew them for a while. Like there's only a few parts of the plant that are really life-limiting, right? And most of the time that's going to be your foundational concrete or your vessel.

So by the time you reach that lifetime, some of that's unknown still, because some of these things are going to run for maybe 60, 80, 100, 100, 20, 140 years. It could be a long time. You're going to end up, yeah, you'll basically tear it down, decommission it. And my imagination is that in most of those sites, you're just going to be built, you have these, and you'll build the next ones. You'll tear these down at some point and build back over it. Right next one. That's probably how it's going to go at those timescales.

But, you know, that's variable. But you're going to get these things that are going to last for a long time and have a long life ahead of them after their initial licensing period. And to pause the pod for a sec, for one final entry into our nuclear date night dictionary, half-life. Can you sprinkle on the definition for us? Yeah, half-life is a great one. it's the time it takes for half of a material that's decaying to decay away. So if the half-life of something is one day, it means after one day, there's only half of it remaining. Okay.

And then after another day, only half of that remaining, which means there's a quarter from the original quantity. Gotcha. Which means by the time you've gone through 10 days, there's basically almost nothing. So 10 half-lives basically is almost zero. It's not exactly, but it's almost zero. Okay. So it's a good rule of thumb to think about how long does it take for this to fully go? away. It's a decent rule of thumb. Okay. I thought he was going to say asymptote.

It is an asymptotic decay. That's for later in the dictionary. All right, so we've only talked about one of the revenue streams of Oaklow, the selling of 20-year power agreements through the fast reactors. But Sesame Street would love the second part. Yeah. The recycling. The recycling. Fast reactors, the advanced kind that you're building, unlocking fuel recycling. Again, almost sounds too good to be true. It's like a restaurant that uses food waste instead of fresh food, but still creates Michelin quality meals. So can you sprinkle on some context into how you actually recycle nuclear waste? How is that physically possible? How do you do it? So that's a cool thing. Nuclear waste, basically 90, 95 percent fuel that hasn't been used. So how you recycle it. So you take it out

and then you take it to a facility and you chop it up. And then when you chop it up, you dump the fuel into effectively a recycling unit, electrorefiner, as we call it, where then it's dissolved into a bath of liquid salts. And then there's a series, an array of anodes and cathodes. Right?

So it goes to like, you know, battery chemistry type thing. But instead of pulling electricity out, when you put electricity in, it separates these elements that are in the fuel out by their electrochemical behavior. But we did read that there was a catch in our research.

We'd known about this, actually, for recycling nuclear waste for decades. The risk of proliferation. Yep. Let's talk about that. Can you explain what that risk is? Yeah, we'll throw a proliferation into our date-night dictionary, too.

Yeah, this is an interesting one, too, in D.C. circles. What I mean by that? So one of the things that we have to manage, obviously, is the appropriate, say, civil use of nuclear materials. Right, civil, so it doesn't become weaponized. So if you concentrate it in the right forms and fashions, you can make it into weapon-usable material. This is a national security concern.

if it gets in hands of the wrong people. This is why we had to show our U.S. passports seriously when we came into this facility. That's more of just security management, because nothing in here is like that. I mean, it's all low-enriched, but it's more just security and protocols and access. Okay.

But, you know, that is the thing you need to manage and mitigate to. And there's a lot of ways you can solve for that. But one of the key things is if you're not actually producing directly usable, usable, weaponizable material, it changes that paradigm. It goes back to our conversation similarly. It's not the same, but similar to safety. If you design something that is basically inherently safe or passively safe, in this case for nonproliferation or proliferation considerations,

something that cannot be directly weaponizable without much more for like much further processing and refinement, you're, you kind of have these inherent, you know, safeguards. You have these inherent anti-proliferative features to it. And that's an important thing that modern recycling can enable you to do. And why that matters is that tech, that approach I just described to you, you never separate out pure plutonium. And that's one of the key things you want to focus on. And neither do you ever have of highly enriched pure, separated, highly enriched uranium in the system. Those are the two things you have to manage from proliferation consideration. Some people will point out and say, well, if you go Google electrorefining and plutonium, people do sometimes talk about using electrifying to purify plutonium in the weapons program.

Well, that's because they're taking pure plutonium. When plutonium is there, it decays a little bit, and some of the buildup of amraceum occurs. And so they can use electrifying and pull the amraceaum out to refresh the plutonium. That's very different because you're starting with pretty much pure plutonium, which is purifying it. That's different than when you're starting with a whole bunch of stuff and you're never producing pure plutonium. And they're different processes. They have some similarities. But that means that this inherently has very strong inherent non-proliferation features.

So the outputs of this are really nasty material that's thermally hot and radiactively hot. Not useful in a weapon at all directly. You would have to go through a bunch of other steps to go make it a weapon. Is there a fuel recycler who could be lazy or cut corners and leave enrich plutonium? No, because you never produce it in this system. And this technique, you never, ever have it, really. All you have is it's mixed up with these other materials that can't make it work very well. Like, you just can't do it with that.

So we interviewed Jim Kramer last year. Yeah. And he invented this term called Total Opportunity Value. It supposes, what if everything goes right for this company? Yeah. But Nick and I are also, you know, former finance guys, and we had Compliance Series 24 certifications. So we look at both sides, the opportunities and the risk. So we're going to present to you what the lovers would say about Oklo for the perfect scenario

and what the haters would say about Oklo. Okay. So the lovers are going to say, hey, in 10 years, Oklo will be owning operating a huge fleet of reactors that help reduce the world's carbon footprint. You're running the fuel recycling facilities to manage nuclear waste, and you're producing cancer treating isotopes. Every data center will be built beside an Okla reactor. Every island currently burning diesel will switch to an Okla reactor.

Every community trying to save the planet will retire their dirtiest power sources and buy a six-pack of oaklos instead. You're going to solve climate change and nuclear waste to cure canceler. Okay, here's what the haters would say about Oklahoma. They would focus on the risks. If AI slows down for any reason, resistance to data centers and AI bubble pop, that would hurt demand for your reactors. Regulatory. Nuclear is the most regulated industry in the world. It's possible you never get approval for the powerhouses you're working on.

political, the politics could turn against nuclear someday, or you could just fail to execute the roadmap. Not to mention competition. You're not the only pure play publicly traded nuclear company anymore. How do you stack up against new scale X energy, conventional nuclear in plain English? Why should investors be more optimistic than pessimistic, more bullish than bearish on Oakla? The things you said, power, great. Fuel, a fundamental enabling stack. To use the Jensen analogy on layers of the cake, right? Like fuel is the bottom layer of the cake. And we're the main company playing in this fuel recycling game that ties in with reactors and with isotopes.

So great place to beat for that. Almost every really cool thing we've ever done in space has been powered by isotopes. We don't have enough of them. We've had a downrate missions to do really cool things because we don't have enough of these things. True. So it's a great thing. Why? You make these almost always on batteries that last for decades, thermal batteries that make heat and power.

And that's how you can ensure we can really be durable in space. So, okay. So there's a huge diverse set of, and same things apply for. defense, right? So there's huge opportunities across those, those market spaces. And we're uniquely playing in the three of them like this. That gives us a huge amount of flexibility. So even if there's some squishiness or somewhere squeezes or there's uncertainty that pushes it, there's still a huge amount of upside on those things. I hate to say these things like this because it sounds draconianly simplistic, but like treating medical issues, treating cancer, improving medical

like not, those things are only going to become in more demand, right? Those are not going away because of fundamental demographics. On top of that, like, AI is not the only energy driver. It's the flagship driver right now, but there's a lot driving for why we need more energy. And the biggest reason why is because people are tired of paying more for their electricity. So they want things that drive prices down, which new generation

helps stabilize and ultimately do. So, like, those things are truly on the side of how we're going to be successful here. There's going to be several nuclear winners, if not many. This is also why we invest in other nuclear companies, partnerships. Help them. Maybe we make money from it, maybe not, but we're uniquely positioned I think, to be able to bolt on to any nuclear deal,

basically in the Western world in some form. Whether it be we're providing recycling services to take waste whack, we're providing fuel, we're providing the power from our reactors. There's a way for us to do this and play across the whole ecosystem. So in a way, we're uniquely positioned as a crossplay on everything. It's not, this is a bit of a stretch.

It's not quite the exact same, but one thing I've thought a little bit about this is one of the underlying capabilities around AI is built on some of these chip layers. like, that's a similar, like, well, energy, obviously, but the next layer up is chips. Like, that's a play where we're similar to. We have a capability to bolt on a number of different platforms,

but we're not just making, you know, GPU chips. We're making the equivalent of recycling services, like RAM and, you know, all this stuff. Like, you know, that starts to get a silly analogy, but I think there's some, there's a way to think about it like that, and it's very underappreciated on the business. No, we love the cake analogy. You could make a case that you guys are working on three monopolies.

Kind of like how SpaceX has a couple monopolies, right? Yeah. Space-based internet, rocket launching. Those are like two monopolies they basically control. Fast nuclear reactors. Fuel recycling. Kind of two monopolies if you get there in the next few years. Plus, isotopes, not a monopoly.

China and Russia are doing it. And we're doing it here as well. But it's not exported. But damn. Would I love to round up and say there's three monopolies you guys are working on? We always love healthy competition. We should whip up some final rapid-fire questions for our buddy, Jake. All right.

What's the best barbecue in Texas? Oh, you can't ask me that. Lockhart? That's controversial thing we've asked. I'll say this. The easy answer is anything in Lockhart, Texas. Like, literally, like, I highly recommend anything here. You cannot go wrong with the barbecue here.

But go to Lockhart. Diplomatic answer. Best business leader, who you got? Man, that is a good question. I cheat with multiple answers. I really admire the things, the easy answers to look at. with what I see going on between, I mean, between what Elon does, and being visionary, what Jensen's played the long game through

and opened up these apertures and how we think so optimistically. I love that so much because that's how we think, too. And then, like, I mean, I always love Sam's audaciousness to dream endlessly. So, like, yeah. Cool combo. What's the best thing to do in New Mexico, not the National Museum of Atomic Science? You got to eat red and green chili on everything. Literally, you can find it in and on everything. So find it on everything, including the weirdest things you could possibly imagine. Best book you've read. Oh, gosh. I'm a sucker for the Lord of the Rings. I'm also a sucker for Jurassic Park. And I have to say, and it wasn't just because of the movie, but like Project Hail Mary, I absolutely loved. What's the best scientific word you like to flex? scientific word? Well, it's all the nuclear date night ones.

Yeah, we got it. The best joke you've ever heard about nuclear. We get them all the time. It's like one of those things where it's just like, oh, you're working nuclear, do you glow green? You know, why aren't you glowing? Do your kids have three eyes? You know this? And the best ones are the ways you say it.

It's like, you don't see eye glow green? Like, what's wrong with your eyes? Or like, oh, yeah, the kids got, not three, he's got four eyes. Yeah, it's good. Really good vision. All right. All right.

All right, Jake, we ask every interview guest on the best one yet this. If you were a stock, what would be your three or four letter ticker symbol? You personally, Jake, to wear. I was a stock? Yeah. Oh, JDW. That's just like a thing I've used as I'm in Jacob.

It's like my middle initial. It's just like an easy thing to do. I know that sounds so simple. That one or do it, D-O-I-T. Nice. Do-I-T. That's probably like in high school because like my name's Do-It, like she was like,

oh, just do it. Oh, my God, he goes. Oh, just do it. Oh, just do it. Legend. This is sick. And I was like, man, if I ever like, yeah, it'd be like such a great endorsement

if I was ever going to do that. Just do it. But the key thing to me that I go back to is when I grew up in the space, when I was a kid, and I had different internships and around different people, when I was in the early days of starting Okalo, and so many people would tell us, well, you know, building a nuclear reactor is like the hardest thing you can do. Like, you're brave, why would you try it? It's like the hardest thing.

You know, there's a lot better ways to make money, all this other stuff. And I was like, I don't believe that it is the hardest thing to do. I think there's enough reasons we can do it differently and better to not make it the hardest thing in humankind to do. The key then was like if that's where your starting point is, this is the hardest thing to do. And then the very first time you do it, you set a world record. Like, that's awesome. And that proves that we've done some things pretty well, but there's obviously a lot of room for us to get better and scale from.

And finally, Jake, what's the takeaway on Oaklo and Nuclear? That the long-term solution for how we think about energy, abundance, availability, affordability, sustainability, being clean, like basically the terminal energy state with the physics that we know today in the universe as humankind it is fast reactors and recycling so it's the silver bullet for those things that then enable the silver bullet for treatment of significant medical issues including cancers including support for better diagnostics and imaging supported by radio isotopes nuclear technology is the path to really like human thriving and we're in the very early chapters of it and oko's excited to be playing on pretty much all front's there. Jake, Nick and I admire innovation. We appreciate the risk you're taking here,

and we're grateful that you and Oaklo team are doing what you're doing. And like Teaboy, we love that you're doing something brighter, smarter, and it's entertaining. You made it fun. Fun. Yeah. You made it really fun. I think this stuff is the cool stuff. And congratulations on the upcoming baby. Yes, thank you. In like six weeks, by the time this publishes, you're going to be a couple dad. You're going to be close. Congratulations, man. Thank you. That was epic. Very exciting. And congratulations to Caroline, too. It's incredible what you two created together. Yeah, thank you so much. And I don't think we'll have a three-eyed baby on this one either. If you love the best one yet, subscribe to the show for daily pop business news and

interviews. And comment what company we should deep dive on next. Funest Place in Finance.