Accelerating Advanced Nuclear Power

Materie Israélienne and Westinghouse were selected by the Air Force recently to provide microreactors to support the— Okay, I didn't realize Blackland was one of those. That's good. Nice twist. Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom.

Rob. Nice to meet you. We saw each other yesterday. Yep. Nice to see you.

You too.

So we work with state and local governments. He's all right. They left town today.

When it comes to running calls, why do they do the same job? I've got a 7, a 4, and an almost 1. Same state, you said? Yeah. 23 And 19.

If I get a call once a week, I'm doing all right. When did that drop off, it being in constant communication with the state? Your children? College. College.

Yeah, they're not sitting on your lap and watching TV anymore. Hey, how's it going? Good to see you. All right, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.

I didn't mean to doubt you. Thank you. Yeah, so Our moderator is Mike. He's standing back there talking to somebody. We were just going to sit up here.

I don't think anyone has slides, so it should be fairly light lift. And then, for Mike's— there's microphones there. Doug. There's Doug, and then there's Tori.

Katie? No, she came after me. After? Yeah. I was going to say, "Laurie?" Yeah.

For this—. 2 Out of like the 10 tech recruiters for HR.

And then I saw her name on her necklace, and I was like, "You've never tried, like—" She's like, "I tried once or twice. They just butchered the names on my grades." That's fair. Yeah. No, that's not the name. Yeah, that's not the name.

How are you doing? Good, good. I mean, I'll just say, my last name, Choke, is a little difficult, especially if you grow up in New Jersey. Italy? Yeah, yeah, Italy.

Absolutely. Right. But when I got to college, I instantly sort of— Yeah, that's— man. Yeah. I grew up— Yes, absolutely.

I grew up in Chicago, so I grew up all around Italians. So like, I never thought— Yeah. Like, send it out one at a time. Yeah. Yeah.

Sometimes those people— I have seen a terrestrial. What was that? A terrestrial energy. I don't—. I haven't even heard of them, so yeah, that's why I don't know Simon.

There's something What are they? Are they nuclear? Yeah, yeah, micro. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So they're looking at DOE government. Okay. What scale? I think they're only like 1 megawatt.

We're going back to Idaho later this week for that. Yeah, unfortunately, they just pushed me out of my contract tonight to pretty much Friday night because I have issues with this going on. That's a really good one. Yeah, I've heard it's extremely efficient. It is.

It is. It's very difficult to get right in Washington, D.C. So I'm not complaining about it, especially because I have a direct flight. No, for me, actually, Friday is going to be a red-eye to Minneapolis. Oh, OK. And then Salt Lake.

Yeah, Salt Lake. OK, Salt Lake.

Absolutely. I think that's— Yeah, I think we're good with this. Do we have someone else coming? No, just us. Yeah.

All right. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Well, thank you, everybody. Sorry for starting a minute late. I want to thank everybody for coming to what I think is the best and most long-awaited panel of the conference on— thank you— accelerating advanced nuclear power in Alaska and the Arctic.

I know all of you are excited. I want to say I was so excited, I made sure to go to bed as soon as the sun went down. I don't want to hear about that. Bad idea. So we have a wonderful panel of pioneers and experts in the industry.

But before I introduce them, I'd also like to shout out a few people in the audience whom you may also wish to know, including our experts from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who are just the world's top people in the field. And I'd also like to shout out our friends at ASRC Energy and Liam Zolt, who are real pioneers in turning technology into practical applications.

You're welcome. Okay. So, accelerating advanced nuclear power.

Got my notes here. You know, the topic presented to us is on everybody's mind. And the real question is, how do new federal policies reshape the pace and feasibility of advanced nuclear deployment, especially for states like Alaska and for other Arctic states as well?

These gentlemen will all talk about the role that their technology plays in economic development and how they get to site locations, regulatory capacity, regulatory certainty, accelerated timelines, and moving projects from pilot to prototype to deployment. So without further ado, and we will take questions from the audience as soon as they each give a brief introduction. So this is, this is meant to be more of a discussion than a presentation. First up is Paul Katoullian with Applied Atomics. He has replaced Ben Kelly, who unfortunately could not be here with us.

Next is Eric Krikorian with Radiant, Tom Mancinelli with Antares, and Christiane Rabidi with Nucube. So in that order, if each of you would like to just speak for a minute about your company and your product. Yeah, happy to. Excuse me. Excited to be here and to be with all of you.

I'm Paul Katalian, and my partner Ben Kelly, our CEO, is Native Alaskan, born in Kenai, lives in Anchorage, went to school in Fairbanks, and unfortunately had to go to another job that he's better at than I am, so I'm here. But I'm the CTO, so happy to also answer some technical couple questions around the technology. Applied Atomics is intending to build 100-megawatt electric modules stackable up to 1,000 megawatts to support industrial off-takers, uh, co-located data centers, communities, that sort of thing. And what we see in Alaska very much is an opportunity to help industrialize the rail belt. Alaska has a lot of natural resources, and there's an opportunity by adding load growth to take those resources and turn them into Alaskan products.

And at the same time, with the additional load that we could provide or that nuclear can provide, could stabilize the cost of gas. So these two technologies could actually be very complementary for each other. So, yeah, lots of opportunity. Excited to talk more about it and happy to be here. Hi everyone.

Uh, Arak Rikorian. I'm head of business development for Radiant Nuclear. Um, we are a, uh, technically a micro modular reactor manufacturer. Um, high temperature gas, uh, uh, technology. Um, our scale for the unit that we're producing for the government is a 1 megawatt portable system.

So in terms of, uh, Just general differences in the industry. Uh, we're a fully integrated portable system that's intended to be a behind-the-meter solution. So it's not, uh, powering the grid. It is, uh, powering the site, whether that's a manufacturing facility, a, a data center, um, a fishery, whatever, what have you. Um, we are deploying our first commercial unit next year.

Our demonstration unit, which we have full power approval from the DOE, is being shipped to INL, Idaho National Lab, as we speak. And we started our residency there, I believe, about a month ago. So we'll be doing full power criticality demonstration of our full system at INL this year. Deploying next year and just scaling from there. Thank you.

Hello, everybody. My name is Tom Mancinelli. I'm the head of strategy and policy at Antares. First of all, I'd like to thank Michael, Paul, Ara, and Christian. It's great to be on the panel with you.

And thanks to everyone for attending and everyone who's put on this conference. So like everyone else up here, we at Antares are building a microreactor. To deliver safe and reliable power. Um, we're primarily building today for what we would consider to be defense and space applications. Uh, so obviously think military installations, um, think about critical infrastructure here in Alaska.

Also, um, we believe there's a real market for space nuclear, so that would be, um, future of the lunar surface or even nuclear electric propulsion on orbit. Um, we certainly think the military and commercial use cases are compelling here in Alaska. And we look forward to having more conversations with anyone who's interested in learning more about our technology. But just a simple statement up front, we're a sodium heat pipe cooled reactor. We use a graphite core.

Our company was founded in 2023. We have raised over $140 million. We have about $13 million in contracts from the federal government. That would be across the Pentagon and the military services. And NASA as well.

Um, just like, like Ara said, uh, we have received a license from the Department of Energy in April, uh, approval of our documented safety analysis to turn on an initial criticality low-power demonstration test as part of the Department of Energy's reactor pilot program. And we expect to be able to do that before the July 4th deadline. And that's something that I hope we all can celebrate, those of us who are focused on advanced nuclear energy and helping our country adopt this technology robustly once again. We're out of Torrance, California. We have 322,000 square feet of manufacturing facility.

We hope to produce dozens of reactors there each year. We also have offices in Idaho Falls based on our partnership with INL, and then an office in Aiken, South Carolina, based on a partnership we have with Savannah River National Lab. Our system, our first of a kind system, which we will turn on for an electricity producing reactor in 2027 will produce 300 kilowatts electric, and we immediately intend to iterate upon that for a second of a kind and nth of a kind solution that our goal is to get up to 1 megawatt per unit. We were recently selected by the Air Force to provide installation power for Joint Base San Antonio, and we look forward to making progress on that project and meeting the Air Force's deadline, which is 2030. We think we can go faster than that, and we're determined to do so.

But excited for this panel and look forward to your questions and a good conversation.

Hi everybody, my name is Cristo Rabitti. First of all, thank you, Michael, for having me at the meeting and my co-speakers. I'm the CEO of a company that designs nuclear microreactors. The name of the company is NewCube Energy. We are based in Idaho Falls, probably has to do with the fact that, you know, 3 out of 5 of the first 5 employees were actually, you know, from the Idaho National Lab.

Was an easy choice. We started 3 years ago. We recently joined the Launch Pad program, which allows us to, you know, to go through the DOE licensing process instead of the NRC for our first unit. That was announced a month ago about. And we have similar technology to Antares: heat pipes, core, graphite, high temperature, which I believe is going to be the future of nuclear reactors.

I think that the simplicity is the driver, and that was what we aimed when, you know, we started to design this reactor. We really thought about having an extremely simple design which actually is a fit, at least the way in which I see it, for the remote application in Alaska. This reactor, actually, this size, we are 1.2 megawatt is actually designed out of my experience that I had here in Alaska when a few years ago in 2021, I was part of USNC and I was developing the market here in Alaska. That was a little bit of my lesson learned that I thought that the size was not a fit and the 1 megawatt was a better fit for the application here. Of course, the future may drive the size larger, but I think is the really the pinch point for Alaska in terms of size, what we need to address and resolve here.

Well, thank you again for having me here. Oh no, thank you, and thank you to everybody. I'm sure there are lots of questions, but I'll start with an easy one. As pioneers and advanced leaders in the field, how do you move from manufacturability to transportability as you get closer to deployment?

How would you—.

Anybody can take it. I can start. Our facilities are, are full plants, so for us, uh, manufacturability and transportability are— they drive more of the construction feasibility and reducing the CapEx. The way we do it is through repeatable patterns in modular design, and that comes from some of our experience in other industries building large facilities. There's a lot of cost savings that are opportunistic in the design that if you're able to deploy consistent patterns throughout the design of a system, it makes it very repeatable and very modular, and you can set those constraints for those devices based on your transportation supply chain.

So we, we're currently tooling up so that we at our headquarters are producing one unit a month. So we're going— we are going into production now. So the, uh, it's, uh, it may or may not be a different timeline, but we're deploying starting next year. Um, and it's a real— not a problem, but it's a real opportunity that we're solving today. So we will be manufacturing one a month, uh, for deployments to Alaska and, uh, other, uh, strategic, uh, areas specifically for government for the next few years.

We are manufacturing our fueling facility right now. So that's a separate NRC license that we will have so that we can do our refueling offsite. So our spent fuel will never be onsite at the project location. It will always be in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We have a— secured storage facility for dry cask storage there.

So we'll have a manufacturing presence in Los Angeles, uh, and then our manufacturing— high-throughput manufacturing facility will be built adjacent to our fueling facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So over there we will be producing 1 unit a week. It's called R50 for that reason. We'll be producing 50 units a year from our facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And the manufacturing part is not something that we're really planning for.

It's something that we're doing today. So it's an important facet of scaling, and it's being addressed at our facility in El Segundo today and scaling in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Yeah, as I mentioned, we have 322,000 square feet of manufacturing facility in Torrance, California. And, you know, we at Antares, like I'm sure a lot of panelists and others in the room, think about the building of a microreactor as one essentially large systems engineering challenge. And the way we think about that systems engineering challenge is to break it up into its subsystems and its individual components.

And so we very much believe in the necessity of designing, building, testing, and iterating. And rather than doing that with our entire system, we like to break it down into smaller systems. So if you were to walk on our factory floor any given day, you would see us testing our control drums, us testing our heat pipes, us testing the tolerances on our graphite and our heat— the wall material of our heat pipes, the purity of our sodium, all sorts of the different smaller subsystems and smaller components, because we believe that through testing and refining and becoming experts at each of the individual components and subsystems, we can make the larger system close. And so that's, that's what we try to do at Torrance. That's what we've done with electrically heated demonstration units where when we haven't had nuclear fuel, we've inserted high temperature heat cartridges into the core of our reactor to get our reactor up to 800 degrees Celsius, which will be its operating temperature with nuclear fuel to test how the graphite interacts with our sodium heat pipe walls how it interacts with our heat exchanger, etc.

So it's really for us about testing and testing and testing. And then yes, like Radiant said, like Ara said, we want to move to manufacturing and we want to almost have at our plant in Torrance— think of it as you have like an automotive assembly line. We want to have a reactor assembly line because we want to be producing dozens of these a year to meet the demand, not just here in Alaska, but also in the lower 48 and potentially even internationally. I would like to shift a little bit the question in the sense of transportability and manufacturability, but in reality we came to those requirements starting from affordability. So the idea is really, you know, at the end of the day is the cost that you have to control.

And given, you know, the experience in past project, manufacturability and whatever you can avoid to do on site was actually a cost driver for trying to keep contain the cost. So I go back then when we start to design the reactor, the idea is that, okay, affordability is first. Now, if it drives the fact that we should be within a certain size, for example, our limit was everything, everything that is complex that we don't want to manufacture on site should be a module that we manufacture in the factory. So we actually decomposed the plant in modules and with each module should be fitting a transportation capability. So that is the way in which you actually— we went back to the design involved and we actually decomposed the whole plant and the reactor in components that can be transportable.

Not for the fun of it, just because there were cost drivers that we want to avoid. Very good answers. Okay, let's throw it open to the floor for any questions. Raise your hand.

Okay. All right. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah. Yeah.

First of all, thank you for considering Alaska as part of your business plan. We tend to get left behind from time to time, so thanks for not leaving us behind. We appreciate it. Ara, you're shocked to know this one's for you, so I just want to make sure that I heard you right. So somebody can buy a commercially available reactor, probably the U.S. government first, when?

Between now and 2029, all of our reactors, they're portable, fully integrated systems, will be deployed to government customers. So think of whatever, disaster relief, military bases, foreign military bases. Maybe a military base or two in Alaska, hopefully. Yeah, well, we'll get there. We got paired with Space Force Buckley because I believe they needed it first and immediately, and we are ready for production.

So Colorado, right between Denver Airport and Denver City, Space Force Buckley is there, and that's what we're paired with, and that's what we're going to be deploying next year. So in terms of contracts, we will be deploying to commercial industrial customers, Alaska, the lower 48. Starting at that timeline once we're done with the initial government contracts that we do have. And the second question is, people are a little bit freaky about nuclear. You've heard this probably 10 billion times.

All of you have. You said something about spent fuel that passed by really quickly. Can you say that again? Like the risk of nuclear contamination comes from spent fuel, which is not a risk in Alaska because—. So not— well, with our system, not a risk.

Couple things. Uranium, if you have a fresh reactor, it's not giving up much radiation. You can, in nuclear programs, they'll eat uranium as a professor and just show the class that that's not the issue. The issue is the spent fuel. So the product that is left after the fission reaction.

And historically, every single reactor in the United States, maybe not naval reactors because those are moving around, but every reactor has its spent fuel onsite adjacent to its system, and it just stays there, whether it's in dry cask storage, whether it's in different formats. Our system will always be fueled, refueled, decommissioned offsite. So the spent fuel, which is the major concern when it comes to nuclear, and I think that that's a little overblown because the safety concerns are around spent fuel are highly regulated by the NRC. But for our system, fueling, refueling, decommissioning will be done offsite in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in a secure location. And all of the spent fuel will always be there.

So for our deployments in Alaska, none of our fuel will end up on site because we will be shipping the core, the entire system, and then replacing the core in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And that's why we have a separate fueling facility and a separate NRC license for that. Does anybody else on the panel want to speak to that? Yeah, I would just say in general, you know, nuclear energy is— it's the safest and most tightly regulated source of energy that can generate clean, firm baseload power. I also think it's important to note that for all of us, because we are microreactor developers, that the amount of spent nuclear fuel is far smaller than most people realize.

You know, depending on how you account for your spent nuclear material, you could keep it in the size of a paint bucket. That said, spent nuclear material is dangerous. There are radioisotopes that are, that are dangerous that we need to account for, and we should respect that. So we will make sure that in everything we do with our regulator, every step of the way, that the material is sealed, tracked and accounted for and in no way exposing the public to any risk of dose in any way.

Okay, Liam, and then we'll go to the back after you. So I have an economics question mostly for the micro guys, but to a lesser extent, Paul. So nuclear power is not cheap. It's just— that's just a fact. We're trying to make it much cheaper.

And I think we're doing a good job and we're well on the way. But one of the reasons nuclear power is expensive is because there's a lot of overhead costs that are completely irrespective of the size of the plant and also a lot of upfront costs with the NRC permitting a new reactor type, site licenses, etc. So I, in my mind, when we scale that down to the 1-megawatt range, we're distributing those costs over a much smaller number of kilowatt hours. So my question for you guys, particularly the micro reactor guys, is what needs to happen left at the— I know there's been great movement at the NRC. What regulatory change needs to happen for you guys to have a reasonable cost per kilowatt hour at the end of the day?

So, I mean, I'm not on the regulatory side. We have a completely separate team. And I know there's Part 52, 53, the new one is 57. We're going to need a 70 for the fueling facility. Naturally, the regulatory environment adds significant amount of cost.

But the streamlining of the regulatory process, we've had a lot of tailwinds where I believe before it was a multi-year process for you to go through NRC licensing with microreactors specifically. I don't know how it applies to larger SMRs, but with microreactors, especially in a fleet deployment type scenario, naturally you're You're reiterating the same system and it just many, essentially the manufacturing plant, uh, for a fully integrated system. Um, so fleet deployment and, uh, um, a replication of the same exact system, uh, is likely to have a significant streamlining in terms of what the regulatory process looks like for that. I can't speak to the timelines, but it's definitely not gonna be multi-year, 18 months. It's going to be significantly lower than that.

We have a pretty good idea of what that's going to look like. And the reality is that that development timeline will match what the regulatory timeline looks like. So it's not going to be something that should be a bottleneck when it comes to microreactors.

Part of your question had to do with cost. Our system is a fully integrated portable system that's deployed for behind-the-meter use. So when you're dealing with behind the meter, not front of the meter, but behind the meter— the front of the meter means you're feeding the grid essentially. Behind the meter means you're feeding the customer side. When you're a baseload onsite generation source, you have the entire value stack of that cost.

So whereas grid power on the generation side may be in the single-digit per kilowatt-hour rate, the reality is that most Alaska ratepayers are paying 20+ cents per kilowatt hour on the commercial side. Um, and when you look at the system cost and then in terms of a PPA structure, um, whether it's our government unit or a commercial unit, uh, you're looking at something that is going to be very cost competitive for that behind the meter baseload power, uh, uh, cost. So in terms of decreasing those costs, and further streamlining it. Naturally on the regulatory side, that's being taken care of in real time from the administration as well as the industry at large. On the system side, naturally your first of a kind is going to be your most expensive system where you will iterate on top of that.

We've already done significant redesigns, understanding things that were over-engineered or could be better done. And that's when you go into production with a system that is, uh, that is perfected, as opposed to the first time you're making a prototype. So iteration is naturally a way that companies cut costs. I mean, at SpaceX, you had a, I think, $13,000 per kilogram payload for Falcon 1, and then Falcon 9 went to to a fraction of that, and then now we've got Super Heavy, which is a fraction of that. So does anybody— oh, sorry, does anybody else on the panel want to speak to that?

Just very briefly. Oh, go ahead. Just very briefly. So agree with everything Art said about improving your, you know, manufacturing and getting from first of a kind, second of a kind, nth of a kind, improving and increasing efficiency. I would also say one of the main drivers of cost is fuel.

And if we can address our country's ability to reestablish a domestic uranium enrichment supply chain, hopefully we can bring down the cost of fuel. We today entered into a partnership with URENCO for enrichment services, and we're excited about that. We need to do more of that across the entire domestic uranium enrichment supply chain. And then, you know, the more that I think the industry begins to standardize around one single type of fuel and even one type of fuel specification— I know BWXT is here— They make our TRISO, that's Tri-Structural Isotropic Fuel, which from a safety standpoint, each piece of fissile material in our, in our fuel is encased in 3 layers of silicon carbide that's then packed into casings, cylindrical casings that we insert into our reactor. That's— the government has invested millions of dollars at DOE and Idaho National Lab over several years to making that fuel form safe.

I think we need to do more to aggressively sort of adopt and hone in on a few forms of fuel that can then reduce costs. And then if the government can provide that to us as government-furnished equipment, that'll reduce our costs further. Can I add a couple of comments? First of all, we try to make reactor microreactors because the idea is that they should cost less, right? Check.

Okay, now what are the costs that they do not scale? Like, you know, it doesn't matter if it is, you know, 10 megawatts or 1 megawatt. As you pointed out, is operation and siting. Okay, now siting, well, depends. If you build 15 units of 1 megawatt, you are still smearing.

So, you know, you can smear even if— the smearing is not depending on the size of the reactor, it is depending on the size of the demand. Okay, so there is really— the answer is actually not, is it impacting the single unit? No, you should look to the the deployment in the site, how many megawatts total you need. The other thing is that I think that the siting cost is right now decreasing very fast due to the new regulation for microreactors. I think that is something that we're going to see less and less impactful.

With licensing that are built around the design, they can build an envelope of safety with respect to the site, I think that that is something that we will see, you know, being less and less impactful. The other one that I mentioned before is still, you know, something that I think that in terms of cost is going to be very impactful and could be still smeared by the site, which is operation. So again, if you have one unit and you require operation on site, that is one cost on the unit. It doesn't matter instead, if you have 15 units at that point, you can have the same people monitoring 15 units instead of 1 just because it's 1 megawatt each. At that point, you're smearing again.

But at the same time, I think that we are really looking at the new NRC licensing Part 57 where remote operation is coming forward. So that is really something that we are, as a company, we are watching very closely. I think it will be an enabler and we think it's going to come true. Great. Oh, yeah.

This way. Yeah, I agree with all my colleagues here and very excited to see the new regulations in the microreactor space accelerate forward, both from technology choices and regulatory improvement. Because we're a light water reactor, we're following the more traditional path. So our direction's a little bit different, but we have to— we have the same concerns and some of the same solutions. Um, we're going to be— we're following the NRC Part 50 license, which is the established light water reactor path.

Um, what we've found in our history is treating the regulator— part of it is cultural, right? If you treat your regulator more like a customer and they're part of your initial requirements gathering from the get-go, you make different design choices when you're building a system than if you design the system you think you should, and then try to make it compliant later. There's a lot of efficiencies that are to be gained there. The other part that we do, and that I think all our organizations do really well, is we vertically integrate the knowledge in the system. So instead of having more traditional systems are built with layers of contractors and subcontractors and EPCs and that sort of thing, we are, in our case, we're our own EPC.

And we work directly with the tradecraft as much as we can. We make sure that we're educated enough to be able to directly work with the folks that are actually building the machine. And a lot of what we're doing is assembling it ourselves. Now, that leads to the next thing, which is really good interface requirements management. There are a lot of cross-impact choices that are made in the reactor that impact the civil structural, for example.

Or the power system that affects the electrical system. And if this work is distributed over a bunch of other companies, you have to have an exceptional project management team to keep all that coordinated so it doesn't balloon out of control. By having that all under one roof, we're able to more nimbly make those changes when we realize we've made a decision that could be better. So this ends up You know, it's a lot of our experience. Some of us come from SpaceX.

I also happen to have a nuclear background. This is how we solved kind of the launch pad problem, where when we were designing and building that pad, it was an extremely small engineering team and a lot of tradecraft. And you had, if you look in Florida, the two pads, one of them is NASA's for billions of dollars, and then right next to it is SpaceX's for low hundreds of millions. Both of them are super heavy-lift vehicle pads. Both of them are fully capable.

So what was the difference? It was, it was that integration. It was these design patterns. And then it was being able to design something that was easy to walk your regulator through so that it would make sense and to give certain guarantees across your hardware, software, instrumentation, and controls. The big systems themselves so that you could very easily explain no matter what situation you're looking at, you're going to see the same guarantees, the same promises across hardware.

And that, that then leads to both more efficiencies in the supply chain because you're bulk ordering the same components across everybody and you're sharing that and cost reductions in your regulatory because as we know, in the nuclear industry, we, we pay our regulator So if we make it hard for them to study, they're going to need more study time. And so that becomes part of the constraints too. Great. Gentleman in the back. Yes.

Thanks for coming today. I have a— my name is Noel Wilson. I work at ASRC Energy Services and I also have a bit of a nuclear background too. So one thing that keeps coming up, because I've been advocating for nuclear for a while, A thing that keeps coming up, you know, for a while it was the, the accident risk, and I think a lot of that dark cloud is starting to fade away as people are starting to get a better grip on reality there. But the, the lingering issue that I keep hearing over and over again is, what about the waste?

And, you know, as an engineer and as someone who's familiar with this, I view it as a very solvable problem, um, either by closing the fuel cycle reprocessing, or even through various means of isolating isotopes for other uses and then finding ways to geologically or through other means isolating the stuff you don't want to deal with. How do we— what are we doing to communicate to the public that this is an engineering problem? This is something that we can solve. It's actually something that experts in the world have solved, at least in theory. And we just need to figure out what, what sorts of means and policies we want to do to make this work.

So that we have a sustainable system on our hands instead of something that everyone's afraid of long term?

Great question. Yeah, it is a great question. I would just say, um, this is a, this is a national problem. It's a problem that's existed for a while that's, that's essentially bigger than any one of our companies. That said, I think we are all trying, uh, to work with, um, federal regulators and the powers that be in Washington to bring about solutions.

You know, in France and Finland, they have ways where they've had communities volunteer for consent-based management of spent nuclear material for permanent repositories. Communities that have perhaps at one point been, you know, have expertise in the mining industry or have expertise in doing things deep underground. And those communities have raised their hands and said, hey, we'd like to help manage, you know, French spent nuclear material or Finnish spent nuclear material. And they're doing it and they're actually making money in doing so. I commend the Trump administration.

They released the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus proposal. They've solicited information from the states, and the states that volunteered have raised their hand and said, we would potentially like to be a part of managing the entire lifecycle of nuclear energy. We, as we as Antares as a company, have written, have written letters of endorsement to the states that have asked us 4 letters on that. And we hope that the Department of Energy makes a strong selection that could lead to a longer-term solution for how we manage this. But we do agree with you that it's solvable.

We think a lot of this comes down to demystifying nuclear, educating people that, you know, all nuclear is not what you see on television and the movies. And as I said earlier and our— and others have said, this form of advanced nuclear energy benefits from years of investment that the national labs— while we haven't been producing nuclear power plants on the civilian side as often as we might like, we've been learning a lot with it through advanced fuels and through different techniques to manage nuclear material. And so we do think this is, this is solvable and achievable. We just have to now summon the willpower, have the difficult conversations where we build stakeholder buy-in and find places to do this. So my comment is that yes, you are right in saying that the problem from an engineering perspective can be solved.

But there was not really a lot of action, so there was not really a lot of talk about it. I think that what Tom just mentioned, the fact that, you know, this administration is doing a lot in terms of fuel recycling, fuel cycle management, it is probably right now the moment that we can talk about the fact that From the engineer's perspective, the problem can be solved. From, you know, I'm not a fuel company in the sense I don't do fuel management. From my perspective, actually, what I can do, and in reality it is in my favor, is try to burn as much as I can of the fuel. So the better I use the fuel, the lesser will be the waste.

So that is, from my perspective, actually, you know, the less money I'm throwing away in fuel because I'm more effective, right? So that is my commitment to try to reduce the waste is actually improving the performance of the reactor itself.

Let me, let me speak on the education side, because I think that was part of the question. I come from renewables. I spent 24 years in solar and storage development. Back in 2001, when I started, the environmentalists were not fans of solar. They would complain that it's got cadmium, it's got lead, it's got tellurium, it's got a lot of different elements that end up— they were worried it's going to become a Superfund site for every single solar array.

With a little bit of that education and understanding the benefits that it produces and the encapsulants on the solar panels and the reality that it's not just going to leach into the ground, over a few years, the environmentalists became the biggest advocates. I think we have the tailwinds right now on the regulatory side, on the federal side, on both sides of the aisle when it comes to nuclear, where it is going to take a little bit of education. It is going to take a little bit of more advocacy, whether it's on the political side or from the industry side. But I do think we're at a very similar inflection point when it when it comes to the public perception of nuclear, its safety. It is the highest regulated industry, and whether you have the storage on-site or off-site like ours, the storage and safety requirements around that envelope are extreme.

So I do think it's just a little bit of footwork that's going to be done by us in the nuclear industry as well as on federal side.

Yeah, and this is a fantastic question. So I was getting my nuclear degree during the Fukushima accident, so I got to see real time how my faculty addressed the community, and some things they did really well, and other things they didn't do so well, because I don't think they— when you're in it, you don't always necessarily understand how other people are going to receive the information. There are things we do from a technological end. Modeling and simulation has gotten a lot better to understand once a— like what we're trying to do because we're light water, we have to do the more traditional spent fuel pool, dry cask storage. What we're trying to do as an adder to that is long-term modeling and simulation of how the fuel transmutes so that in the future, when the fuel cycle is able to be closed, we're able to be a provider of feedstock for fast reactors, breeder reactors, that sort of thing to reprocess.

But the other part, I think, is there's an opportunity for nuclear companies during town halls to, to pose and answer, I think, 4 questions, which is what are the risks involved in the technology and be honest about it, but also be honest about their proportions. As an example, during Fukushima, I happen to live near a power plant of similar design. And so the community in central Illinois was saying, well, you know, if we get hit by a tsunami, would our reactor melt down? And the professors just looked at everybody straight-faced and said, yes. And this caused panic.

So you got to, you got to give context a little bit. But the second question is, how do we as a, as the company protect you? Technological means, procedural means, that sort of stuff. The third one is, how do we let you know something has gone wrong and that you need to do something? And finally, and so that is again lessons learned from the past, is like, be communicative.

Things happen, and all these processes that the regulators ask us to put in place and that we design for ourselves are there to be used. Hopefully you don't need them, but if you do, you can't hesitate. And finally, how do you protect yourself? So during the Fukushima accident, you know, there's distribution of iodine and, and some sort of things. Where, where's the issues going to be?

How can you avoid it? Again, being communicative about it ahead of time and give people a way to feel safe and, and to be actually safe. And this is something that I, I think that we as an industry need to confront head-on and be communicative about. And, you know, my perception is that people are generally reasonable if they're given this information to do right by themselves. Yeah, I would just say, at the risk of saying something semi-provocative, you know, again, nuclear energy, spent nuclear material will be tracked, monitored, tightly regulated, watched, and controlled.

We in Alaska, we and across the country, we need all forms of energy, including oil and natural gas. But let's just remember that the externality, the waste that's produced there is CO2 emissions that go straight into the atmosphere. And I would argue that that has— that that's done more harm to health risks and health issues around our country than spent nuclear material. Only semi-provocative.

Any questions in the audience? If not, I will ask you one. We hear a lot— you're all— many of you are working with the government on different programs. We hear a lot about what a reactor can do for a community or an industry. But what is the ideal non-government customer like for each of your companies?

And what— and how could people identify themselves as a potential customer when you work through the government backlog?

Big industrial loads. Give me a smelter. That's my one, especially in Alaska. I think that would be phenomenal. Data centers are great.

Industrial parks, innovation campuses, manufacturing, something that needs large, stable baseload power.

Alaska's costs, like I said, retail costs on the commercial side are significant compared to other states. So I don't think it's very difficult to justify the right pairing with a customer. The real, the real filter for a system, I'm assuming, for any of the microreactors is going to be what's that load factor for the customer. So if you're, if you're consuming 100 kilowatts as a baseload, it's, it's probably not going to pencil out. But if you're consuming, in our case, let's say a megawatt minimum as your baseload, then there's absolutely no reason why it wouldn't work.

We would be able to produce at an extremely competitive rate to what the grid power is today for any facility in Alaska that is consuming enough energy? Yeah, communities in remote, austere environments, rural hospitals, rural municipal airports, places where you absolutely need 24/7 uptime and energy resilience, where, where we as nuclear can uniquely unlock a mission or make things easier, where you won't have to rely on the complexities of diesel fuel logistics, or you won't have to rely on a vulnerable grid. So those are some of the applications— remote mining. Those are some of the things that we're focused on. Yeah, I think that first of all, I would start anywhere above 1.5 megawatts.

That's probably a sweet spot. And there is not really an upper limit. Probably, you know, I would not target anything above 1 gigawatt, but we have also another design, 15 megawatts. So that probably is more for the 1 gigawatt. And the other thing is that we have a very high temperature.

So actually industrial application and cogeneration, you know, sometimes, especially when you're looking behind the fence remote, you have to be creative in the sense that you have a very variable load. And actually the load is not only electricity, could be heat. So you have to be a little bit more creative. And in this situation, maybe you may need also, you know, batteries, you may need, you know, you need to create the best fit for the environment, right?

Thank you, panelists, for taking the time to come to Alaska and, and present on this. This is a really, really incredible discussion that we have here. The question I had, and I think, Ara, you spoke to it, is the refuel rate for all of your systems. And I imagine each panelist here, each of your systems will require a replacement of the fuel. Uh, the question I have pertains to the fee structure associated with that.

And so how is that gonna be— how is that gonna be imposed on your customers? Will that be included into the, like the, the cent per kilowatt hour? Is that gonna be like an additional fee on top of it? What, what's that look like?

And sorry, part 2: how often do you have to replace the fuel? Okay, so, and this is very specific to every reactor design. In our case, for example, for the small units, it really depends on the quality of the fuel. And here, you know, without going into details, if you can procure HALEU instead of HALEU+, the lifetime will be longer, right? So in the best scenario, actually, we are looking to more than 25 years with without refueling.

So in our case, actually, we are not even thinking about doing the refueling at all, just to remove the whole plant. In that case, you know, Great Pages is pretty clear. There's no refueling, right? So I don't have even to deal with that.

Yeah, right now, we're estimating that if our reactor is operating full power 24/7, that it would provide 6 effective full power years. But obviously, that number depends if your load is smaller than our reactor's capacity, you could obviously extend that lifetime. For us, we would be talking about purchasing a new core and swapping out a new core. So that would depend on whatever our price is, you know, 6 years from the date of first operation.

Two questions were cycle and then the cost. So on the cycle side, capacity factor really does matter. I mean, if you're using it at full power or using it at a high capacity factor but not full power, it's going to vary. I believe what we have publicly stated is that it's between a 5 and 8 year refueling cycle. So I believe that's the answer for that.

And then in terms of cost, I mean, we're using HALU, which Christian mentioned, which is high assay, low enriched uranium, the highest civilian enrichment you can have outside of the military. With— I don't want to give too much away in terms of business models, but the intention is that the volatility of fuel price as well as the procurement of fuel will be something that, uh, the customer will never need to, uh, consider. So, uh, for, for our system, it's, it's not something that's of concern to the customer. Uh, they're, uh, they need to make sure that they have the loads that they need for the system and not to deal with becoming a, uh, uh, an expert in nuclear supply chain. So, so somewhat vague answer, but I believe I gave enough.

Yeah. So as a, as a small modular reactor, but a larger unit, we're targeting a capacity factor, first of a kind of about 90% on the higher end, you know, as we do next of a kind, maybe 93, maybe 95. Our When we do site surveys, we don't— we try to go into sites where we can be economically competitive, you know, so we don't get people— we don't want— we want our customers to benefit from us being there. So that's part of the conversation that, that goes on. One of the advantages that we can provide is long-term price stability because we can do long-term fuel procurement, uh, with some of the more established fuel forms.

So that's something that we can work through power purchase agreements and things like that. But the idea is from a customer-facing point, from a customer experience point of view, the cost is baked into the meter cost. And so the customer is just paying the meter and that's it. Um, and because we'll know we can lock in these long-term agreements, we can stabilize that cost. So when you're looking at providing power to the rail belt or to do— I know there was some discussion about sustainable aviation fuel and that sort of thing.

A nice advantage of what we can do there for Alaskan customers is, you know, the industrial users would pay a price premium that would stabilize the cost for residential users. And there's, that's kind of the opportunity there along what we're looking at. Great. I think we have time for one last question. Uh, a quick one though.

Yeah, thanks. My name is John Jackson. I'm the National Technical Director for the Department of Energy's Microreactor Program. So I'm just curious—. This is a little bit of a self-serving question—.

But as you race toward your initial criticality in your deployment, how do you best leverage the federal research and development programs like the Microreactor Program for accelerating and enabling your mission?

Yeah, okay. Well, hi John, and I— we, you know, we received two game vouchers, and so we are definitely working very close with the National Labs. And, you know, as, as NTD for the microreactor, we always coordinate with your programs so that, you know, we, we, we do something that is special to us, but at the same time we leverage what the DOE is doing. In addition to that, I think that we were really excited to be part of the Launch Pad program. So that is actually a huge help in terms of stabilizing the uncertainty around the, the, the, around the timeline for licensing, which is really great.

So right now I think that we are able both to do small technology augmentation out of the work of the DOE in collaboration, collaboration with the DOE. And at the same time, we are taking advantage of the licensing path that they just became available through the DOE. So, yeah, I would just say that, you know, it was about a year ago, May of 2025, that President Trump signed 4 executive orders related to the nuclear energy industry. One of those is 14-301, which directs the Department of Energy to reform the way in which it does reactor testing. When that came out, I think a lot of people were skeptical that they— that the Secretary of Energy could take and help 3 companies get to criticality before July 4th.

But I really think and hope that we're on the pathway to doing that. That's really exciting, and it would not have been possible were it not for the tremendous partnership we've received, and I'm sure others on the stage have received from the Department of Energy's office in Idaho, the staff at Idaho National Lab. And like Paul said, I mean, you know, we're 80 engineers trying to build a microreactor. That's essentially what— what Antares is. And we also know that there are experts across the entire National Lab ecosystem, not just at INL and other locations, who have been working on nuclear projects for decades, spending their whole careers on this.

So when we enter into a conversation with them, we enter in with a spirit of excitement and aggressiveness and we want to move fast. But we also enter into those relationships with a spirit of humility and thinking that, you know, two heads are better than one and that these engineers have made more mistakes than we've attempted tests yet. So it really behooves us to listen to them. And when they say, hey, have you considered tweaking your design and doing this instead, we kind of ask questions. Well, why?

Explain to us more about what you mean by that. What's the intent behind that? What's the context? And then they'll explain that, you know, years ago they tested a similar facility or tested a similar design that had a flaw and they learned from it. So we're trying to take those lessons and take lessons around not just the fuel form and other things, but reactor design and and use it to accelerate the progress that we have in this window right now as a result of having the wind at our sails and the bipartisan support and all the other things we've mentioned on this panel.

So the partnership with INL and DOE Idaho has absolutely been essential. I don't have much to add to my peers here. I mean, it really has been a very collaborative effort from the NRC, from the DOE, from the national labs that we work with, specifically INL and DOE. And going from just being a regulator or a hurdle to becoming, uh, organizations on the federal level that, uh, are, are working in collaboration with the nuclear companies so that they can create the safest, best-valued system that is possible for industry, for military, for, uh, what have you. Has been a welcome change, I think, in the nuclear industry.

And that goes to the DOE, that goes to the NRC, and that definitely goes to the INL team in DOE that we've been working with.

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with my colleagues here on stage. Federal, federal research, both fundamental research and the funding that they give for opportunities in the commercial space are absolutely critical and invaluable to the development of new technologies and just the progression of, you know, what we have. Um, again, being a PWR, we are, I would say, maybe like 50 years in a position, 50 years in the future of where you guys will be in 50 years. Uh, of like, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Like everybody that has done research research and development for us that we're leveraging, that we're learning from.

To agree with Tom is like, they've forgotten more than we know. And same with the regulator too. And it speaks to like the attitude that we find beneficial to have with them is the regulators and the government and the researchers, the Senate, it's us, right? It's— we're all Americans, we're all citizens, and we want to move this technology forward, and everybody is playing their role in supporting that from the regulator side, who embodies the industry's knowledge, who is trying to teach us to make sure that we do a good job, to the DOE, the national labs who are building the tools and researching the things that enables technologies like ours to go into production without having to do test reactors anymore. Light waters don't need to do that.

That's a huge advantage. And the micros and all the technologies that are coming up with tris and all that eventually will get there too. And that's all thanks to the work of the national labs, the funding that goes there. That's, that's what makes companies like ours possible. Fantastic.

Well, everybody, on behalf of the Department of Energy, on behalf of the conference organizers, thank you to a wonderful panel who I think will all become household names for good reasons in the next couple of years. You guys have time for a quick picture? Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

Yeah, I hope— no, thanks for inviting us. Yeah, yeah, hey, let me give you a card. Yeah, thanks, Tom. Yeah, look forward to being back up here. Are you in the Bay Area?

I'm in Washington, D.C., but I'm in L.A. all the time. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Tim, for great questions. Yeah. Great job.

Oh, thank you, thank you, appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Yeah, you too. Hey. I'm Mariana.

Hey, Mariana. I'm a student at UAF, and I'm doing a project on logistics. Oh, cool. Up to Alaska. Okay.

And I was listening to you guys talk about really small ones, especially for spaces. I'm doing kind of like half-half, you know, I work with trucks, trains, a little easier, but I didn't volunteer. No, no, no, no, but, but yeah, definitely. So, um, as I've learned just even from watching the, the the Pika video, Ice Roads, obviously a barge up from Tacoma taking, putting our reactor on a boat up the Hay River from Canada. Is that right?

Yeah. So I heard about that. Because my concern is there aren't runways in the remote areas. And so while our reactor—.