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Inevitable
The Missing Piece Holding Back Advanced Nuclear with Standard Nuclear
00:42:48
Kurt Terrani is CEO of Standard Nuclear, a company focused on a part of nuclear energy that gets far less attention than reactor designs but can become the true bottleneck: fuel. In this episode, Kurt provides a nuclear fuels 101, walking through the front end of the fuel cycle from uranium processing and enrichment to fabrication. He explains in plain terms what makes TRISO fuel different, why it appears so frequently in next-generation reactor designs, and how fuel performance shapes reactor economics, safety, and scalability. The conversation also unpacks Standard Nuclear’s origin story, which emerged from a Chapter 11 restructuring of UltraSafe Nuclear, and explores a future where reactor-agnostic fuel suppliers replace vertically integrated fuel strategies to unlock faster deployment across advanced nuclear technologies.
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- [00:00]
A
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Kurt Turani, the CEO of Standard Nuclear. Standard Nuclear is focused on a part of nuclear that doesn't get nearly as much attention as reactor designs but can end up being the actual fuel, specifically manufacturing TRISO fuel for advanced reactors. What I wanted from this conversation was a clear Nuclear Fuels 101 from the front end of the fuel cycle to through enrichment and fabrication and then a plain English explanation of what makes TRISO different and why it shows up so often in next gen reactor designs. I also wanted to dig into Standard's origin story which is decisively non standard for a tech startup. The company came to exist in the wake of a Chapter 11 process at Ultra Safe Nuclear and spun out as a new company just within the last year, backed by a series A from Decisive Point and Andreessen Horowitz and others. And finally, I wanted to explore Kurt's view on how the industry gets to a world with reactor agnostic fuel suppliers like Standard Nuclear rather than every reactor company trying to vertically integrate its own fuel. From mcj, I'm Cody Sims and this is inevitable. Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Kurt, welcome to the show.
- [01:41]
B
Hey, pleasure to be here.
- [01:43]
A
We have a lot we're going to try to learn from you today for sure. And it's going to be deep on the learning side for me. I am certain of it. But why don't we start first with an overview of what is standard nuclear.
- [01:54]
B
Again, really appreciate the opportunity to be here and thanks a lot for setting me up. I hope I'm qualified to educate someone as knowledgeable as you. Standard Nuclear Our mission is very simple. We want to put the nuclear in the nuclear energy. We want to deliver the key enabling building blocks of nuclear power. You know, you look at nuclear systems, there's a lot, there's steel, concrete, inc, chips, valves, pumps. So then you ask yourself what's the nuclear piece? Well, the nuclear piece is the piece the fuel that fissions, where the nuclear reaction happens, not what happens afterwards. I'm an ultimate nuclear nerd, so I care a lot about where we're doing something to the nucleus of the atom. So our focus is that fuel piece is the fuel that's going to go inside a nuclear reactor and fission nuclear reactors don't run without fuel, just like jet engines don't run without jet fuel. So it's esoteric, it's a bottleneck and it's a passion of mine. So that's why we're here. We're here to deliver that fuel for these reactors.
- [02:47]
A
And you all are based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee?
- [02:50]
B
We are based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Not because I'm from here, not because this was my dream place to live, not because this is akin to Silicon Valley or anything like that. It's because this is where our species, human beings, started fissioning and it started enriching uranium and it started producing fuel in very large quantities for the first time. So we are located in what used to be a Department of energy site called K25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Our headquarters here. We're privileged to be here and continue this long term tradition going all the.
- [03:21]
A
Way back to Oppenheimer and everything that happened in the early days of inventing nuclear.
- [03:27]
B
Indeed, yes. You know the story, I think it's 1927 neutrons discovered. 31. I think Otto and Hahn figure out fission. And at that time then there's a race that, hey, there could be a chain reaction. Zillard's walking through some crossway in London. He just kind of goes through his mind. So then they write the letter to President Roosevelt. They this project gets launched certainly where the device was assembled and a lot of the device, physics, gadget, device, whatever you want to call it. And the first test, Trinity is in Los Alamos, but the complex was quite, quite big. Oak Ridge has very significant contribution and history in that we always think of the first fission reaction that was done by Enrico Fermi. That was in Chicago. You got to understand that was a fraction of a watt. And it was just for a very short amount of time. Just a proof of principle. Then the first continuously operating reactor was called X10. It was built in a place called Clinton Engineering Works, which is now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory. So it was here. And then there was another place where they realized, hey, we need to enrich this certain isotope of uranium to make a fuel that can sustain a critical fission reaction. Then they started building these calutrons, which is California cyclotrons, invented by this guy named E.O. lawrence, who was a professor just like Oppenheimer and my alma mater, Cal Berkeley, they start building these calutrons here in Oak Ridge, also in a place called Y12. And then there was another place you start to put a pattern Here is the X10. Y12. You can imagine they made a grid with letters on one side, numbers on the other side. There was another place called K25. That's where they were doing gaseous diffusion enrichment of uranium pushing gaseous chemical form of uranium, uranium hexafluoride through small pores. And if it's 235 or 238, it moves slower or faster to those pores gas. And these were huge. Again, the amount of electricity that was consumed here. The building, the K25 building, was the largest building made by humans ever. So it's all that infrastructure that came about. So Oak Ridge was a major contributor to the Manhattan Project, and it continued over the decades.
- [05:22]
A
Well, thanks for the history lesson. I think it's fascinating to see you continuing to build in a place that has such a rich history and I assume a rich talent pool focused on this space and this problem. I wanted to start with maybe just diving a little bit into the US domestic nuclear fuel industry, I guess, for lack of a better term, and maybe start by just helping us understand the fuel chain in terms of how fuel goes through processing. You start with uranium, it gets converted, it gets enriched, it gets fabricated, it gets Q and A. And then ultimately it's put into a reactor. Where is the US historically been strong in that supply chain? And where is the US historically gapped?
- [06:07]
B
What you refer to is called the nuclear fuel cycle. And the nuclear fuel cycle has a portion called the front end. That's everything that happens before it goes into the reactor. And it has something called the back end. That's everything that happens after it comes out of the reactor. So our focus of this conversation, if I understood your question correctly, we're going to focus on the front end of the fuel cycle. And the front end of the fuel cycle, you walk through it fast. If you don't mind, I'm going to repeat it again. So first part is called mining. Mining and milling. You got to go dig it out of the ground, leach it. At that point you make a concentrate form of uranium. It's mixture of uranium oxides. That's what you call yellow cake. That's natural uranium. Then what you gotta do, you gotta somehow enrich this uranium. And there's different technologies. Like talked a lot about gaseous diffusion. K25 people don't do that anymore. So there's centrifuge technology that a lot of folks use. There's other technologies like laser, but predominantly today the technology is a centrifuge technology. And the centrifuge, think of it as your washing machine. You spin it and the water that's heavy kind of goes out through those pores. You're spinning this to separate these different isotopes. Now to spin it, it's Gotta be in a form of a liquid or a gas. It's gotta be in the form of a fluid. Well, the yellow cake is just powder of oxide. So you have to do this step in the middle called conversion, where you take that oxide and convert it to a uranium hexafluoride which happens to go sublimate, go from solid to gas, I think at about 50, 60 degrees C. So you evaporate it and then you spin it. And if you ever go into these centrifuge facilities, it's just a forest of these pipes which are inside of things that are spinning. They're technological marvels. They are the fastest spinning things made by human beings at 60,000 rpm and they run for decades nonstop. It's really incredible. So it's really sophisticated machines. When you walk in there, My family's in Arizona. I used to live out there. It's like a really hot day in Arizona. To keep that gas in a gaseous form, then you separate the uranium 238 from 235. You concentrate the 235 through the enrichment you want. Then you have this uranium isotope. Isotopics are good, but you have this gas. What are you going to do with this gas? Not useful. So then you have to deconvert it. Then there's a step called deconversion. You turn that gas, you convert it to a form of a oxide powder or in some cases a metal. And then where the work starts for entities like us, that there's a deconversion process and then there's all the other chemical and physical processes after that to make a nuclear fuel. And boy, there's a lot of different ways of making nuclear fuel. There's a lot of different forms of nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel manufacturing, to be frank with you, it's very little nuclear engineering, Lots of chemical engineering, lots of material science, because you're manipulating chemical and physical states of this compound to turn it into a structure that then can be loaded into a reactor and use. Now you say, historically, what parts US was good at all of it. We owned all of it. We invented all of it. I think during the Manhattan Project, a bunch of the uranium came from Congo. But, you know, we've certainly had uranium mines in the U.S. we continue to have uranium mines in the U.S. now we see a lot more investment going into uranium mines in the US it's got a mixed environmental track record. But again, we can't punish the future because of the sins of 50, 60 years ago. We need to learn from those Things and implement good practices. And that's what industry is doing today. Conversion. Again, we used to do it all, we stopped doing it and now we scrambled to bring that capability back online. At Converdine in Metropolis, Illinois. Enrichment, unfortunately, again, we were the leaders and then we've abandoned it completely. The 90s was really the valley of death for a lot of structure. These are big infrastructure, they're specialized. And once you walk away from them, to put them back into place is challenging. We can talk a lot about enrichment, what's happening in the US today, but short of it is that there's a lot of effort to bring enrichment capability back into the US There is enrichment taking place in the United States. For instance, in New Mexico. There's a big plant out there operated by Yorenco. It's called Yorenco usa. There's nothing USA about it. It's a great company, but it's not a US company. And then after that you get the deconversion and fuel fabrication. We're fortunate to have good fuel fabrication capability in the United States for the existing plants of light water reactors. There are multiple companies that are manufacturing that. And then what we're working, a lot of other folks are working is making sure there's a supply of advanced fuel forms for the advanced reactors.
- [10:18]
A
We'll focus mostly on fabrication because that's what you all do. So as I understand it, what you're focused on fabricating at standard nuclear is this Triso fuel, which maybe you can describe it as I understand it, are these pellets of fuel that are coated, that are not heavily used today in existing nuclear plants, but are often seen as a critical component for a lot of the next generation nuclear reactor technologies that are in the process of coming to market. Is that the right framing?
- [10:48]
B
Indeed, it's accurate. So they are what we call, and we call them coated fuel particles. And this is really important. Maybe let's get some axioms and parameters defined here. So a nuclear fuel, a definition of an ideal nuclear fuel is that it undergoes fission, generates heat and then releases that heat. And then it doesn't release everything else that comes out of that fission reaction, which is radioactivity and radionuclides and all that. That's the ideal nuclear fuel. If you think about it, what is a radiological concern or a nuclear concern? It's when radioactivity gets out. Otherwise it's a. Okay, so the name of the game is to extract the energy out of the fuel, conduct that heat, transform that heat to any kind of power that you Want electricity, propulsion, heat, whatever you want and make sure radioactivity doesn't come out. So what have people done in the past? They've made ceramic pellets, put them in a metal tube, they've made metal sheets, metal rods and all that.
- [11:39]
A
I typically think of fuel rods as the form factor that most nuclear power plants are using today.
- [11:46]
B
Precisely. And that's the most common fuel form. That's what light water reactors use. So then they're like, okay, well what's the issue with that? Why don't we just keep using that? Well, those fuel forms, they've really become extremely reliable over the decades. And the way their folks, particularly in the United States, the best nuclear plant operators in the world are in the United States, the failure rates are very, very low. But still you're releasing radioactivity from those fuel forms. So then we're like, okay, well what are we going to do? So then you're like, okay, let's put it inside of a big vessel and piping that's really sealed. And then we're like, okay, now let's put a big concrete containment building there that's going to withstand all these things and nothing's going to leak out of it and it can be pressurized. So you see, that's the structures you build in there. What's the role of those structures? To keep radioactivity from coming out and protecting the system.
- [12:32]
A
Which is why the vast majority of nuclear power plants are these large concrete structures. And the vast majority of cost is the infrastructure around it.
- [12:41]
B
You said it. I imagine you got very good visibility into this, the nuclear company. That's what these folks, because they know, it's that rebar, it's that steel, it's that piping, it's that site work. That's where all the dollars go. The economics of light water reactors or existing nuclear is really interesting. 75% of the cost, the levelized cost of electricity, 75% of it is, is in that original capital that you put in. It's in that $10 billion or however much you put in for that one gigawatt plant. And then the fuel and the operating cost is that remaining 25% really small. It's very interesting to think about it compared to the combined cycle gas plant or someone else, how the cost is really constant on the capex. So then this philosophy came about and this is what's interesting. Triso fuel technology, coated particle fuel technology, it ain't new. This is not a new concept that we came up with a couple years.
- [13:25]
A
Ago as I was researching for this conversation. It's been around since the 1950s.
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B
Yeah.
- [13:30]
A
Almost since the dawn of the nuclear age. This has been one of the potential technology pathways.
- [13:36]
B
I love nuclear history. I can go down a rabbit hole. But again, it was actually in 43. There was a guy in Oak Ridge named Farrington Daniels that came about. It would be great to have a high temperature reactor that goes to very high temperature. Carnot efficiency tells us that if your temperature is high, your thermal efficiency is high. So it was like, let's go to high temperature. And then people figured out, well, when you go to high temperature, things move. Radio radioactivity can get out easier. So then I started thinking about, okay, what are some fuel forms that can operate at those high temperatures? And then people came up, well, we know metals tend to melt and deform and all that, so it has to be ceramics. So they were like, great, let's start coating the fuel with these ceramic layers. And I mean, again, nothing works the first time. They went through a lot of development. This is late 1950s, early 60s philosophy that, hey, instead of relying on that big concrete containment building that cost so much, everything else, let's have millions, hundreds of millions, billions of small pressure vessels in the form of these ceramic pressure vessels. That's what you were talking about when you were talking about the coatings that go around it. So let's have a nuclear fuel. Let's coat them with these ceramic pressure vessels. They don't melt, they can withstand radiation, and let's put the burden on them, which I'm a big believer in the principles of being antifragile and not having a system that's fragile and things can go wrong. So one of the big themes in that kind of approach is to decentralize and have discretized your source terms and where your fuel is. So this is a very old idea. The fuel particles are really small, Cody. They're the size of a poppy seed on your bagel. So they're really that small. You can see them, they're visible, but they're tiny. What folks do, they take those small particles, they put them in the form of a cylinder or a compact. That's usually what you see visually. There's something bigger and they compact it. Again, it's compacted into also a ceramic and they can withstand these very, very high temperatures.
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A
These are what, like tennis ball sized? Roughly cylinders?
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B
Yeah, exactly. There's a pebble form. That's a tennis ball size. There is a compact form. It's about a half inch by an Inch or sometimes an inch by a couple inches. The normal operational temperature of the fuel is 1200 degrees C, 1100 degrees C. And it can go to about 1800, 1900, 2000 degrees C and withstand those extreme conditions at normal operating temperature of this kind of fuel. The type of fuel that's in light water reactors completely failed. It's balloon, it's burst, it's radioactive inventory. So it's a fuel form that's designed for extreme temperatures, extreme conditions, and has the burden of providing that functional containment.
- [16:02]
A
So the heat gets out, but the radioactivity stays within the little ball.
- [16:06]
B
I very much appreciate that you remembered our principles of ideal nuclear fuel. The heat's getting out of it, they're good conductors of heat and the radioactivity is contained within them. And that's really the ideal nuclear fuel. And it removes the burden of having this, all this concrete and steel around it.
- [16:20]
A
Why didn't it take off? Why didn't it become the way.
- [16:23]
B
So it did and it did not. First of all, the reactors that use this type of fuel, we operated them in the US in the 70s, commercial scale. There's Peach Bottom, there's Fort St. Vrain.
- [16:33]
A
These are high temp gas reactors, high.
- [16:36]
B
Temperature, gas cooled reactors. In Germany they had a number of them, AVR and thtr, I believe Japan has one that they're bringing back online again, hdtr and there's a couple of them operating in China today. So what happened in the US is that you've got a high temperature gas cooled reactor, as you noted. So the name tells you a lot. It's higher temperature and it's gas cooled. There's a helium gas is cool again instead of a water. Now if you think about it, a lot of times when we get into the electricity production piece, what do we do? We have steam to turbines. So if you have concentrated solar, if you have gas, if you have coal, what do you do? You're always boiling water and then you turn a turbine. So they had a heat exchanger between the helium gas and the steam. And the heat exchanger technology and the controls of the 70s wasn't good enough and the steam would leak into the helium. And steam is actually one of the most challenging corrodents out there and cause a lot of damage to those reactors that shut those down. Nowadays there's much better heat exchanger technology. There's heat transfer to molten salts to supercritical CO2. There's all these cycles available. The fuel itself, just like light water reactor fuel has benefited from decades of research and Development and improvement. And it's proven the program that the US Department of Energy ran about 20 years ago and still ongoing, it's called the Advanced Gas Reactor program. It proved that its radioactivity is really retained by these fuel particles operating to very high fuel use factors and high temperatures.
- [17:57]
A
Now going back to the supply chain that we talked about, the step before the fabrication was the enrichment. And as I understand it, this TRISO fuel is enriched to a different degree than the fuel that a current active light water reactor uses as well. And there's been also a bottleneck on access to the right kind of enriched fuel, this halo fuel that is needed to produce the TRISO that you are trying to produce. Can you talk a little bit about that side of the challenge for you as well and how that may be shifting also?
- [18:31]
B
So what you said is accurate is that often the users, the reactor customer, the reactor system that wants to use trisofuel prefers to have higher enrichments. And so everybody in the commercial sector wants to use low enriched uranium leu, low enriched uranium and usually in light water reactors, people use around 5% these days. They're going to about 6% enrichment. For Triso, folks like to use 15%, 19% or so. And at 19% they call it high assay low enriched uranium. I got to be honest, I'm not a fan of the acronym at all. It's called HAILU is still leu, but it's just words. There are some reactors that use lower enrichment. Trisol, for instance, the Chinese high temperature gas cooled reactor HDR PM uses enrichments of 8 and a half percent. And I'm very fortuitous. It's very fortunate for me to be in this situation where we are suppliers to a number of advanced reactor developers. And yes, there's a lot of them that want the 19% enrichment, but there are folks that are using significantly lower enrichment. So I just want to caveat that it's ultimately the end user's choice what the enrichment is. The chemistry doesn't care what the enrichment is. Our fabrication is completely agnostic to that process. Now let's talk about enrichment because I think that's applicable. Whether you're talking about 5%, 10% or 19%, it is a bit of a bottleneck. The enrichment, again, frankly speaking, Russia was a big provider of that. It's a service and it's measured in this weird unit called suwu, separative work unit. And CEBU is a commodity. You can go look it up what the swoo price is today. It went as low as $30, $40 maybe 10 years ago, it's at exorbitant prices right now. It's like $200, $180 today. And that's because that source went away. And again, these are some of the things that I think strategically we haven't done as well. In the 90s, US government was like, well, we have everything that we need for our US government purposes. Industry just go buy it from global markets. There's the Russian Federation, they're not an adversary anymore and do global trade. So that's what happened. With that supply gone, the sewer prices have gone up a lot. But then it's not just that the sue is expensive. When you want to go enrichments above 5%, 8%, 10%, certainly in the teens and 19%, there are new regulatory licenses required to deliver that.
- [20:50]
A
I mean, you're still way far away from like weapons grade enrichment, which is 90% plus enriched, but still you're moving up the path, I guess, certainly.
- [20:59]
B
But again, this is why I don't like that other acronym. And that's why everything is leu. Everything is low enriched uranium, which is what they call in the jargon called attractiveness. It has very low attractiveness if you're trying to do something nefarious. But yeah, you're spinning it longer, you're separating it more to get there. There has to be an investment in the licensing to bring those lines up. So then the question is, well, what is the industry doing today? We're talking about near term deployments. Certainly we are manufacturing for our customers. So where's this magical stuff coming from? The good news is that there's a few things happening. Usg, US Department of Energy specifically, they are releasing material at the right enrichment to the advanced reactor developers. There's a process there. You can go apply for that.
- [21:40]
A
Oh, wow. It's a federally run program.
- [21:43]
B
Yes, sir. And Standard Nuclear is a proud recipient of some of that material. Even though we're not an actual reactor developer, we use it for some more development activities and passing it on to our customers. You can go request haylou. It goes on a rolling basis and there's multiple companies that have received it, many of whom are customers. So if you want to be at the higher portions of the LEU enrichment, you can get it from US government. They're bridging the gap. If you want to be at the lower enrichments, 10% or lower, you can actually buy it commercially today. And, and again, I'm not just telling you that I have purchased up to 10% from folks that provide enrichment services. So that's also really good. And then because of this bottleneck, a crisis is often an opportunity. There's a lot of good companies that are investing in bringing enrichment to higher assays. Irenco is investing that we talked about. They're starting in the uk, they're going to do it in the US and then there's a number of US companies that are doing that general matter Centrist Liz, you can name these gle, there's a number of folks there. So all of this is really good news for the industry as a whole. Certainly for standard nuclear, we really care about that feedstock being available and not being a bottleneck for end users. And we see that coming in and frankly speaking, it's strategic. It's really important to do this in the United States. So again, really happy that we're doing this. And then US Government, US Department of Energy is also supporting those folks that are bringing enrichment up and I wholeheartedly support that.
- [23:02]
C
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at mcj here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collect membership. Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at MCJ we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another with MCJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system, and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJ VC and click click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
- [24:04]
A
Kurt, One of the things you snuck into a mention there was that a few of the new reactor technology companies are actually also needing to or trying to produce their own fuels and we're going to get into the origin of standard nuclear and I suspect there's going to be a message of focus and focused technology roadmap when we do but maybe describe a little bit. I don't think a lot of people who are maybe following the nuclear space and maybe have some interest in new SMR small modular reactor technologies and things like that quite appreciate that some of these companies not only are having to build the reactor, but they're having to build the fuel processing for Their reactors as well. Maybe unpack a little bit about that for us to just to frame that. And I think that hopefully also provides a bit of clarity on why a company like Standard Nuclear might be needed for the industry.
- [24:58]
B
Fantastic question. We talked about the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle and then there's a reactor piece and there's a back end. And when you try to bring in these advanced nuclear technologies, all of a sudden a lot of the parts of this chain don't apply anymore, so they're missing. So then you look at it, it's a gap. But also some of the folks may be looking at it as an opportunity to vertically integrate. Boy, that sounds good.
- [25:20]
A
Very Elon Muskian thing to do.
- [25:22]
B
Yeah. I'll tell you what, I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of folks. This is one of the great things happening in the nuclear industry. Some of the best of the best from other industries, including companies like SpaceX and whatnot, are now coming to tackle the nuclear problem. And I talked to a lot of those folks that were deep in the supply chain of companies like that and they're like, we were aggressive in our supply chain, we brought the best practices, we closely monitored our suppliers. But I think those claims are a little bit overblown. That's what I keep learning. There's a difference between having really good supply chain management and doing everything on yourself. So there are companies that are like, okay, for instance, I have a reactor that's going to use Triso. I need to make my own Triso. I need to design my own reactor. Wait, I need to make this other material, graphite that goes in there and machine it. Wait, maybe I'll start doing my own engineering, procurement and construction. There aren't a lot of utilities that know how to operate these reactors. Maybe I'll start being my own operator. So I mean, the vision can be big. That part is easy. You and I get in front of a whiteboard and come up with an awesome vision. The tough part is execution and maybe this is a good time for me to talk about the history of how we came about and use use Ultra Safe Nuclear as a good example. Ultra Safe Nuclear was a company that was founded in, I think 2011. The idea was, hey, micro reactor, high temperature gas cooled reactor using Triso. Back then it was remote communities and shale. And we saw what happened with all the energy needs. So division was good, it was all that. But what happened is what we just said in that it was like, okay, well these are gaps. We're Just going to do them. Okay. Designing and building a nuclear reactor is really hard, really hard. There's the engineering part of it, it's extremely multidisciplinary, extremely. And then there's a licensing part of it which is not for the faint of heart. You have to do all this. Ultra Safe Nuclear was doing the reactor piece there, was developing projects, was also developing the manufacturing, developing the field. I was at Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. I built this pilot fuel line. But ultimately it's really tough to generate the resources to do it all. And the company entered a distressed financial situation in 2024 and I was naive enough to then go ahead and join the board. After the company was in the distress situation. At the new board, we voted to take the company into a court supervised restructuring and sale process under chapter 11. That was really fun. You don't go to grad school engineering to try to go to a Delaware court and go through all those proceedings. For me it was a great learning experience understanding all that. That's how Standard Nuclear came about. Standard Nuclear was founded in 2024 by investors that had invested in Advanced Nuclear and recognizing that hey, these reactors don't run without fuel and recognizing the importance of the fuel supply. So they had actually started Standard Nuclear to create them as a competitor to companies like US and C that were making their own fuel to be a reactor agnostic fuel supplier. That's how the company came about.
- [28:00]
A
As I understand it, you acquired out of bankruptcy the USNC fuel manufacturing assets.
- [28:07]
B
Precisely at that time. We remain the only reactor agnostic nuclear fuel vendor. You know, when we started out, we're like, okay, this seems like the reasonable thing to do, the smart thing to do. And that thesis has been validated just by the fact that we're also just a little bit of a weird advanced nuclear company. We've got significant revenue, we've got customers. We're not in like, hey, give us 10 years and we'll generate some revenue. So we're really happy to be here at this critical time supporting the industry. But most importantly, stepping back a little bit from the companies that are also trying to vertically integrate. This is really important nuclear fuel as it is for the light water reactors today that are operating. It can't be this black box, cost of goods sold specialty thing that you buy from one vendor. That's just not going to happen. And the best analogy I can give you is, hey Cody, I sell Toyota cars. Toyota is a great car. It's got these safety features. But when you buy Toyota, you have to come to Toyota, gas stations. And that's when we sell it to you and you know, you just have to buy it from us. Are you going to buy Toyota? You're not going to buy Toyota. So fuel is a commodity. Every other kind of fuel is a commodity and so is nuclear fuel for the existing plants and it needs to be a commodity now. We've certainly positioned ourselves to be this low cost, large scale manufacturer of fuel. I think it's a much more lucrative business plan for standard nuclear shareholders for our company. Ultimately we're much better off having a lot of customers that are using this type of fuel. Microreactor, smr, larger plants, space reactor in all these different forms as opposed to one company that makes their proprietary fuel. And frankly speaking, the industry is not amenable to that. I can tell you that the nuclear plant operators are nuclear utilities that have been operating plants for decades. They are very good at securing competition and making sure that they're not beholden to one supplier for this strategic asset and certainly having price pressure. So it's very natural that the markets it's already going that way. We're really happy to be this reactor agnostic fuel supplier.
- [30:02]
A
And it's such a fascinating story, you now being a one year old series A stage startup, but based on as you said, I guess 14ish years of R and D and technology advancement in the fuel space and then seeing the opportunity, like you said, that fuels are a thing that can be used by all reactors. They shouldn't be tied to just one reactor technology. And by being a technology agnostic fuel provider in theory you have the ability to serve, I think many of them. How custom do you need to make your fuel for each of these reactor types or are there essentially a set of standard skews that you end up creating over time?
- [30:44]
B
Fantastic question. So it was very clear to me again having been in the system, having seen the technology, the perspective from the past and where the technology was going, that there is going to be variation on the specification of the field that the customers want. With that in mind, we were very conscious of that when we were deploying our commercial scale manufacturing line which is operating today. Again, we're not in the planning, design mode. We are manufacturing fuel today. I'm sitting in a facility, you can come and see the beautiful system machines operating. But when we designed these, we recognized that we're going to have variation in the fuel specification. So we built that flexibility into our systems manufacture. What do I mean by that? Let me give you some good analogies there. The architecture is the same. You've got a uranium compound, maybe it's oxide, maybe it's a carbide, maybe it's a nitride, maybe it's a mixture of these things. There's a sphere, can be bigger, it can be smaller, and then it's coated with carbon and silicon carbide and sometimes some other refractory carbide. Exact. So that's the architecture. Now people can change this, they can change the size, they can change some of the densities, they can change some of the chemistries. So we built all that into our system and the way it works, we have the same machine, but then we have 50 recipes and we develop these recipes and when we go customer A, we use recipe A, customer D, we use recipe D with the same machine. The best analogy I can give you think of chip manufacturing. You have a node, you have your 7 nanometer node, 4 nanometer node and then you go ahead, you still do lithography, you still do deposition, you still do cleaning and all that. But again you manufacture these different designs. What we're seeing right now, Cody, is I think a little bit too much variation, which is not bad in the short term. We developed a recipe for our customers and we can serve different customers with different recipes and that's all fine. That's what's happening right now. Every field that we're making is slightly different than the other one. But going back to the conversation we just had in that I want this industry to be wildly successful. I want US portion of electricity, 20% right now comes from nuclear. I want a lot of that come from Trisol reactors and I want that 20% to increase hopefully to 40% or 30% or so. So if you think like that, there is a lot of fuel that's needed, There's a lot of fuel that's needed. And this idea, we're going to have 17 different flavors I think is not sustainable and it's not good for our customers and it's frankly speaking, not needed. It's one of these things where like, well, we like to have our own specification. But when you go to the gas station, you've got three grades. And so there needs to be a little bit of standardization and we need to again commoditize. This is how we get to commodity low cost supply for our customers.
- [33:13]
A
How does that happen? Because it's not like reactors can change their design on a dime here. These are projects that are going through very expensive multi year NRC reviews to get into market. Just trying to advocate for everyone to align on a handful of standards if they already are planning on a certain fuel type is not going to happen quickly, I assume.
- [33:36]
B
Beautiful. I'm so glad you asked me. You set me up so well for this. I mean, this has been in the back of my mind for a very long time. And we've talked to our customers, we've talked to stakeholders. We actually talked to other folks that are looking at manufacturing TRISO or manufacturing it again. I've come from the DOE National Laboratory system on the R and D side. So we're also longtime friends and colleagues of the folks that did the Advanced Gas Reactor Program International Lab System. So we talked a lot about this. We actually had a workshop in May for the Advanced Fuels campaign of the U.S. department of Energy. And we presented the idea of an open standard triso. And the idea was, and this is what's happening today, we are sending out a questionnaire, let's say, to the industry, to all the stakeholders, to the end users, and tell them, hey, what are the parameters that you care about? And we Hope in early 2026 to have committees where we all come together, we get everyone's feedback, and we define the next specification of TRISO that lends itself to how industry is looking at utilizing it. And then going through a collective effort, again with support of the Department of Energy laboratories and industry as a whole, to go ahead and qualify these new fuels, the variations that we're talking about. Cody, you don't have to change your reactor design. You can burn a fuel with slightly different enrichment or different chemistry or different sizes in there. The key is that you don't want to have. If I'm looking at the shelf, I don't want to have this shelf. That material is there, is for customer D. The material on this shelf is for customer A. You want to be a pool there. And this is how you get into a true commodity. And by the way, if you say TRICEP is going to be a commodity in one of those companies that's trying to vertically integrate, you're going to get fired on the spot. Whereas we say here openly we want TRIS to be a commodity. So to get to that, it really takes all the stakeholders being involved, and we're really happy to drive that and organize that.
- [35:15]
A
You're basically banking on everyone wanting to accelerate time to market and sacrificing a sense of proprietary control in order to get to speed of market because there are economies of scale around the fuel is sort of what I'm hearing. The argument that you're making that's right.
- [35:31]
B
And in the short term, Cody, these advanced reactors are going to use their own special specification. But all these folks, they have a foak first of a kind cost and then they have projections for the cost to come down again. I'm working really hard to bring the cost of the fuel down for them and this is one of the key ways to get there. And I can tell you the industry is very supportive of this.
- [35:49]
A
And you're a venture backed company now, you've got decisive point, Andreessen Horowitz, some very known investors supporting your business. You're betting on this economy of scale transition happening and commoditization of fuel, which is interesting. You usually don't hear venture backed companies wanting to move toward commoditization. But in this case you are, I assume you also are needing to see some incredibly significant ramp of these advanced reactors hitting market over the next five to 10 years. Do you have a projection or a sense of how, how large that advanced reactor market is likely to grow that is reliant on these triso fuel infrastructure that you're building?
- [36:28]
B
You definitely should believe that we do. We've got our models, we've got these different cases of how these reactors come to market. Definitely we are betting on the advanced nuclear. We're big believers in it again, I really think it's viable. It's really exciting. I was doing this, but 2025 was really an amazing year. The executive orders really brought a lot more momentum to this. The true demand was what was really unique a few years ago. You got to understand 10 years ago this is stuff that you got to go get a grant from the government because government needs to look invest in long term security of energy. Then in 2020, 2021, people are knocking on your door, hey, I want nuclear energy. And then with the executive orders we see awesome momentum there. And I saw this wave coming. That's why I wanted to make sure fuel was not a bottleneck. We certainly see that wave of advanced nuclear coming. You're absolutely right. You don't hear a lot of companies saying hey, we want to commoditize this thing, whatnot. But our bet is on the wave coming in a big way and it's on the scale that we can deliver. And we're extremely cognizant of the fact that if the fuel price is really expensive, if the fuel price is unique to a certain system, you're not going to have a lot of offtake. And our business is founded on massive offtake. We are looking at being the gas station. So we want a lot of different cars out there and we want the gas price not to be a bottleneck to people driving those cars. So I'll give you some numbers. If you look at the amount of electricity that's being generated in the US today, the fraction of it that's nuclear, if that fraction was to come from Triso based fuel, we would sell over 2,000 metric tons of uranium in the form of Triso to the market. Am I thinking all that's going to come from triso? Absolutely not. But am I thinking a fraction of that is going to come from Triso? Yes, and that's quite significant. So our capacity right now, let's talk about our capacity. That's really important too. We are booked up, my friend. The capacity that we have, which is the largest capacity anywhere in the world outside of China, is completely booked up for 25, 26. We are bringing on capacity really fast and we're going to be the biggest supplier in the world. We're going to surpass China here real soon and then we go from there. But the capacities that we're bringing up next year, we're going to be in the order of a couple of metric tons per year production capacity. As we grow and expand, we're going to get into tens of metric tons per year and hopefully hundreds of metric tons per year. You can see if I was just going to replace the nuclear electricity in the US right now with this fuel, it would be thousands of metric tons. So we certainly see the demand. We see the companies that are users of Triso, we see the quality of their management, their investors, their progress. There is a lot of reason to be highly confident, optimistic about demand coming in. And you know what the best reason is? The contracts that I have today and the field that we're manufacturing today, that's the ultimate signal we're really grateful to have it.
- [39:04]
A
This has been very helpful for me in just understanding the overall industry and understanding the place you're hoping to put Standard Nuclear within it. What's hard about building a fuels company? Lots of things, I imagine. But what are things building a nuclear fuels company in particular that maybe people who work in energy don't fully appreciate that you're having to grapple with every day.
- [39:25]
B
We are very fortunate in that the team that is at Standard Nuclear is a team that used to work on that US Department of Energy advanced gas reactor program. All that team transitioned from a national laboratory here. We've had the last few years to scale up our technology. We don't Have a technology development problem. We have a lot of technology optimization and cost cutting that we're doing. Our technology works. That's really good. So then if you asked me a year ago, I was like, capital with the situation that was there a year ago. We see so much excitement around nuclear and investment there. And that's really awesome. Particularly again, I love the fact that it's also private investment. It's the American way of doing things. Investors are intelligent and they make sure the companies do the right things, that competition is really good, the demand is really, really important. Making a very high value product nobody wants to buy is a problem. So the fact that that demand is there and again, not just demand from a reactor developer, but ultimately the demand from their end customer, hyperscalers or whatnot. So Dan, what is this stuff that's challenging? The technology part of it all that is fun, it's the best. That's why I wake up every day. The challenging part of it, the regulatory part, is full contact sport. It's not for the faint of heart. The nuclear regulations. Overkill. You hear sometimes I talked about the executive orders to try to streamline things and go under DOE regulation. People are saying, well, this administration, they're just going to rubber stamp stuff or whatnot. Far from it. Far from it. It is a rigorous, painful process, rigorous to go through that. And it really is everything that you think breaks out their environmental safety, construction, quality. You take all those things, you multiply it by 10. When it comes to nuclear, it's overkill. Most of our hazards in our facilities are chemical hazards. The nuclear community, I think the regulation is really overkill. It's gone really to an extreme limit. And so operating within those confines is really challenging. So really we need more logic and we need to use reason as we do this and not be extreme just because it's nuclear. We're just going to be extremist about this. That part is a lot of work and it's not fun, I can tell you. Certainly I don't enjoy it nearly as much as making fuel. The other part ultimately is again for us and everything that we're working towards is making sure we don't have one plant or one niche application. We really want to see this type of energy and this type of fuel proliferate. Space exploration, surface power, remote communities, forward operating bases, defense applications, data centers, communities, heat generation, it's all that. So it's a really pivotal time for the industry. That's what's really going to be key. That last one was a lot bigger than us. But we certainly are trying to play our part to make sure that that happens. And I got to tell you, we work extremely well. We a number of partners upstream and downstream from us. And right now there's this collaboration. It's not competition. Matt and Yasser at alo, they're my good friends. We're all really good friends. We're all going to share information.
- [42:13]
A
Matt at alo, who put us in touch originally. So thanks to Matt.
- [42:17]
B
Exactly. So there's that spirit that gives me a lot of optimism in that we're all working together to make sure this happens because ultimately, really, every phone call we have, everybody, we all tell each other, we're all really believers. At the end of the day, this is about making sure this nation and our humanity benefits from the source of energy and be delivered in big scale and low cost.
- [42:36]
A
Well, Kurt, is there anything else we should have hit on today? This has been super helpful and I really appreciate you making the time.
- [42:42]
B
No, again, really grateful to be here. We went through this winter or valley of death or whatever you want to call it with nuclear. Nuclear energy is safe. All you got to do is look at the track record of it we need to continue. And folks like you and I appreciate what you do is educating everyone about what this sector is, what's the track record and what are the parameters people should care about. We need it. We need it as a source of energy. It's not an option. It's one of the options that we need, one of the sources that we need, amongst other things. Thanks for doing your part and bringing it to market.
- [43:11]
A
Well, hey, thanks for joining and excited to see the company continue to grow and see what's next.
- [43:17]
B
Thank you, Cody.
- [43:19]
A
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At mcj, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us at MCJ VC and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter MCJ vc. Thanks and see you next episode.