The US did have this long-running anti-nuclear bent.
I can't even tell you how much has changed
in the last few years.
They changed the mandate of the NRC
and they said you are no longer focused just on safety.
Department of Energy pathways have been also unopened
and unblocked for test reactors.
The last 10 years or so,
it's been like 1% of nuclear fuel used in the US
was actually domestically mined.
We're still buying like almost 50% of our uranium
from Russia and kind of ex-Soviet states.
How capital intensive is it going to be
to get your product to market?
Oh, in the hundreds of millions.
The biggest organization that showed up
against Diablo Canyon was called "Mothers for Peace."
This organization was that old
that it was related to the Nuclear Cold War, right?
I'm part of this "Mothers for Nuclear" organization.
Mothers against their mothers?
Yeah.
And then I brought some graphite.
Do you want to take that out
and I'll show it? Sure, yeah.
This is what we are using for our moderator
in our reactor.
It has been designated a critical mineral.
It's an important one.
But this is just graphite.
Like this is not, you know,
uranium-235 or something.
No, I wouldn't have brought you that.
That would've been a little bit dangerous to be holding.
Julia DeWahl is the co-founder of Antares,
which is designing nuclear micro-reactors
for the military and other off-grid use cases.
Cheers. Cheers.
Thanks for coming by. It's great to be here.
So you started out first at Opendoor and then SpaceX.
What did you learn in each one of those
that you took to Antares?
Yeah, sure.
I think one of the big things is always about customers,
right?
I mean, at the end of the day,
this is why you build a business.
At Opendoor, a lot of us were pretty young
starting the business.
I was one of the early employees there
and none of us had ever bought,
let alone sold a house.
So a lot of it was like learning what that was all about.
And I remember in the early days,
we just were working on writing the copy for the website
and we're like—
You have no idea what a homeowner—
"We don't really know much about this whole thing.
So what can we do about that?"
We just went and sat outside a bagel shop
for a Saturday and a Sunday morning
and just bought people bagels
and just asked them about their processes
buying and selling a home and learned a ton.
And just really
thought about what language they were using,
what were the pain points,
and that was really important
to just like really get to know
what we were trying to deliver on as a business.
And then, you know,
fast forward to joining SpaceX after Opendoor.
I joined as Starlink was coming out of R&D
and into go-to-market.
That's why I was joining. To lead that team
and the business operations there.
And we launch and we get our first customers.
And so I invited our first customers
to come join us via Zoom for an all-hands.
And it was honestly the first time
that many of the engineers had actually heard
from the words of a customer themselves
about the experience.
And, of course, everyone loved the internet, right?
The fast internet, it was amazing.
Rural Idaho, right? This is like a dream.
But when we got to talking about the setup process,
everyone kind of was like, "Oh, that sounds rough."
They're talking about multiple Home Depot trips.
They didn't know if they had to cut down trees
on their property.
Like they couldn't get a pole long enough.
Ah, so a lot of it was simplifying people's understanding
of what would it mean?
Well, people kind of didn't realize
how much the setup was so painful.
And it led to basically this cross-functional SWAT team
that was dedicated to mounting options
to be sold alongside the dish.
First-party or third-party?
We did it ourselves actually.
We said it's important that we have a good experience
for that because actually it is a big part
of the experience.
And so, spun up a whole team.
A lot of attention was given to mounting,
which is like, who ever would've thought?
And I think, you know, customers again,
they're just like,
they are the reason you start a business.
And just bringing this back to Antares,
I mean, the reason we started Antares
was to say like the government, particularly the military,
needs more energy resilience,
especially for critical infrastructure.
We just do so much more now in the cloud with satellites.
Our missile defense sites are sitting there
like being powered by diesel generators still.
Like, shouldn't we upgrade that?
Okay, so I'll buy it.
What is Antares?
Sure, sure.
We're building micro-reactors, so small nuclear reactors,
and we are building, in particular,
for critical infrastructure, largely for the military.
Although we do think that as costs come down,
there will be an interesting commercial market too.
But basically anywhere where you're off-grid for sure,
or you just want resilience behind the grid
as it exists today.
Cyber attacks or whatever, the grid goes down,
you want backup power.
It's a really great option.
Okay.
And if one megawatt is a small neighborhood,
if one gigawatt is like a big nuclear power plant
like in The Simpsons, you know?
What are your SMRs?
Sure, yeah.
There's basically three classes size-wise.
You have the really small ones are the micro-reactors,
and we're actually one of the smallest of those.
So we're even sub-one-megawatt,
we're kind of in the hundreds of kilowatt scale.
You could think of that
as like hundreds of houses worth of electricity.
Then you have the SMRs,
which is kind of this middle-ground bucket,
which is an interesting kind of neither here nor there.
But potentially interesting.
I'm sure we'll get into,
in the hundreds of megawatts
or even 50 megawatts.
And then you have the gigawatt scale.
So a thousand megawatts,
and that's what the current power plants are today.
Okay, so you're sub a megawatt.
So we're super small. I see. Okay.
So you're kind of similar nuclear size
to what will be on a submarine or something like that.
Smaller than that even.
Those are like megawatt scale.
So we're like,
think about like we're the size of a car reactor.
Think about replacing a diesel generator
that's used to power, again,
something that would be on the order
of 200 to 300 homes of electricity.
So it's quite small. Yes.
And so a big part of your focus is providing power
in places where you really need that reliability.
Like you're talking about replacing diesel generators.
Is that kind of the design center for you?
Yeah.
Anywhere where you're going to enable a capability,
a mission capability,
that wouldn't really be possible otherwise.
So there's actually some really interesting
space applications,
potentially underwater applications as you move to...
So you move away from like few,
what they call exquisite to attritable systems.
This is where a really small reactor can come in very handy
for, you know,
the submarines are obviously multi-megawatt-powered systems,
but these could be kilowatts-powered,
smaller systems underwater.
But yes, anywhere where you're off-grid,
where today you're relying on what they call
like the fuel supply chain
of like bringing in fuel via helicopter
or barge repeatedly.
And that being a vulnerability,
like this is a great option.
So you're the Starlink of electricity.
Kind of.
We're actually like perfectly paired.
And I wish we could offer a consumer product.
That's not on our roadmap right now,
but maybe one day, like,
backpack-sized nuclear reactor.
I presume it can't be on your roadmap,
but why not?
Is it that selling to the government is much easier
than selling to something that—
There's so many reasons.
I think that you always want to try to get your beachhead
where it's the easiest to achieve, right?
And so we believe, I believe that
premium power is where you need to go with nuclear.
And there's sort of two places for that.
One is what we're doing with Antares,
which is go to the military,
help them with mission-critical need
where they're not cost-sensitive,
where they already pay more for power.
And go there and support them
with this next-gen, better version of resilient power.
Or you go and you sell what we're seeing now, I think,
which is really interesting with the hyperscalers,
is they have carbon commitments.
They want clean, firm, they want 24/7 power.
They're actually willing to pay above market rates for that
and they will pay above market rates.
So this premium power thing
is a really interesting dynamic
like where nuclear is kind of well-positioned.
What are the underwater applications?
Well, it's really just think mini submarines.
Oh, okay, yeah.
Just really small systems like, you know,
what drones are to maybe like larger missiles.
That's kind of the equivalent.
It's not super far along just yet.
Got it. Okay.
What does the path look like between now
and producing power for the military?
I guess, first in a pilot environment
and then at scale
outside of a pilot environment.
Yeah, well, you know,
it's always what are the next milestones that you can do
to prove your technical ability and again,
raise more capital to keep going with your company?
I think the biggest risk often to hardware companies
is you don't get far enough along technically
to merit additional investment.
So we are thinking a lot about our milestones
for reactor development.
And so next year our criticality test
is kind of the first milestone.
By end of 2027, we want to have
our first demonstration unit demonstrated.
And what's really exciting is
there's just so much good policy happening right now
from the DOE and elsewhere
that is supporting reactor tests and pilot programs.
And so there's just like so much happening
where they're opening up federal land.
They're removing—
starting to remove some of those like NEPA-type regulations
that really just hold everything up.
So there is a clearer path now
than there really ever has been for reactor builds.
Oh, we'll get to the regulatory side.
I have a lot of questions,
but what is your criticality test in 2026?
What does that mean?
Yeah, it means that you're testing
that you can actually start your reaction.
So like you've figured out
the right amount of moderator-to-fuel.
And you start it going critical.
You don't have it continue on for a while.
You don't typically have a power conversion system
that's actually taking the raw energy
and turning it into electricity.
So it's just one of those initial tests,
like can you start to put all your pieces together?
And when do you, you know,
the fusion guys are all focused on this.
Producing more power than you put in.
I know that's different.
That's a fusion thing,
but when do you actually produce power?
Producing power will be like your first reactor test.
It's like, can you do the whole shebang?
Like you can get this thing up and running.
It's producing power.
And that's what we're aiming to do by the end of 2027.
Oh wow, that's like pretty soon.
Yeah.
What does the market look like for these small reactors?
Who are you going to compete with?
Well, the market for micro-reactors
is one of these ones where it's like, well,
there are no micro-reactors today on the market
to just like buy and use.
So what do you think they're going to be, right?
And so I think, first and foremost,
it's going to be the most critical assets
where you just cannot have them go down.
Which is why defense is the perfect first market for it.
And so it's going to be all of your critical infrastructure
on every single base that there is.
Obviously, you'll start with the most critical
of critical missile defense sites and off-grid locations,
things like that.
And that's kind of defense.
Then you think about commercial,
basically you have to see where the cost curves gets you to.
Like how cheap can it get?
This is just like space, right?
It's like those first expensive launches into space
like that better have been a really important thing
you're putting up there, right?
But now that launch cost has come down,
you can start to be like, "Oh, what else?
What else could we do that we can do some more stuff
that's like maybe not so mission-critical?"
I think we'll see the same thing
in the commercial industries.
Oil and gas has a lot of areas
where they, again, use diesel generators
to do things like compressed natural gas
along their pipelines
and they actually have carbon commitments,
which are really interesting
that they're sort of thinking about.
Ironically, right?
Can they move towards some more renewable
or nuclear type resources?
So I think there's going to be
some commercial applications there too.
Mining, for example, too.
Like anything that's just like off-grid,
hard to power today,
really hard to get fuel into.
It's perfect market. Yes.
You're probably following the US military,
there's all these controversies right now
with people talking about fuel quality
and fuel contamination issues in Asia,
I think it is. But yeah.
Presumably places where you're worried
about fuel availability at all times
and ensuring that you constantly have access to fuel.
That is the place where there will be the most pull
for these solutions.
Like that's where generators work worst.
Yes, and you know, there's a famous defense quote,
I think it's "unleash us from the tether of fuel,"
which means just like,
gosh, the logistics supply chain has been such a challenge.
I mean it was 50% of the—
I think the Afghanistan casualties were from just logistics.
And so, you know, having situations
where you can kind of reduce that risk
helps and it's a great market fit.
Yes.
You were saying there's no market
for these small reactors today.
Why not?
Like—
We've had nuclear fission technology
for a long time.
Yeah.
Why hasn't it been done?
Gosh, there's so many reasons.
I think we ended up...
I think there was just a macro really negative climate
around nuclear in general.
So it impacted anything small as well,
coming out of the seventies,
and so you had macro forces related to just like inflation,
kind of just cost of capital.
People stopped building,
which coincided with the environmental movement,
which was extremely anti-nuclear.
They actually sort of conflated nuclear weapons testing
even with—it was just like "no nukes" with energy.
It's like, "Oh that's actually pretty different."
So a lot of things converged in the seventies
and then by the eighties we stopped building in nuclear.
Okay.
So you just view it as a part of the general
anti-nuclear swing and thus also led to
the cessation of construction
of new nuclear plants in the US and everything like this.
Your corner of the market also got caught up in that.
And that's why we haven't ended up with them.
Were there ever products available at this size range?
There were but they were pretty few and far between.
Mostly test reactors, small things built.
We actually put one reactor into space in the 1960s
to test that out.
Did it work?
Yeah, for a bit.
I mean, a few months and was like,
let's try to do some
systems in space with power.
It's important to have power in space
and I think that's a whole other frontier.
Obviously the US did have this long-running,
anti-nuclear bent where I grew up in Ireland similarly.
Yeah, there was the exact same thing
and Ireland was very paranoid
about a particular British nuclear power plant, Sellafield,
that was just across the channel from Ireland.
Does Ireland have nuclear?
Ireland has no nuclear power.
The UK does. France does.
Ireland does not.
And I believe it's banned
and so you can't, per the current rules.
There's actually many states in the US
that have bans as well,
but they've just been falling left and right.
It's so cool to see.
Well I was going to ask this.
The vibe has really shifted over the past 10 to 15 years.
Yep.
Why?
Honestly, it reminds me of gay marriage.
I mean, and if you look at the polling.
It came from the youth, right?
It definitely comes from youth for sure.
But it's like, it just... Enough things add up
and it just swings and no one ever looks back type of thing.
That's how it feels.
The percentage point change we've seen
in the last five to 10 years is almost 20 points.
It's like 17 points or something.
So it's 60-plus percent of people support nuclear.
It's actually almost surprising it's that low in some ways.
But yeah, it's just huge public sentiment shift.
And I think the old hippie nuclear testing
or nuclear weapons testing folks are kind of dying out.
What is wild though is I did a little kind of activism
related to Diablo Canyon Power Plant here in California,
which was slated to be shut down this year.
Sure, yeah.
And just a few years ago,
Newsom had to kind of begrudgingly say like,
"Oh, you know what,
we probably should keep this thing on.
We can't afford to have the power going out."
But I listened in on some hearings
and actually gave some testimony there.
And it was so funny to me
that the biggest organization that showed up
against Diablo Canyon was called "Mothers for Peace."
And it's like, do you understand the irony of your name?
This organization was that old
that it was related to like the nuclear Cold War.
Right? Totally.
And it's like, gosh, we've moved on.
We were joking because I, sort of, am part
of this "Mothers for Nuclear" organization
that's like tongue in cheek a bit on that.
Our mothers against their mothers.
Yeah, our mothers against their mothers.
And it's just funny how old school
a lot of that opposition is.
So I guess as a "science advances one death at a time"
dynamic going on here, whereas the memory of the 1960s
and peak nuclear confrontation
and, you know, Three Mile Island and all these things.
As all that fades,
maybe it creates an environment
where people could be more supportive of nuclear.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
What was your activism around Diablo Canyon?
It was just exactly that.
It was like, let's make sure that this actually passes
and we don't shut it down.
But it's safe.
But there was a lot of people just calling and saying,
"Hey listen, nuclear's super safe, it's carbon-free.
Ostensibly, in California, we care about these things.
Let's support this.
Let's overturn whatever legislation was done
10 years ago that said we should shut this thing down."
And it did pass.
So now we do still have it open.
Everyone on "Progress Twitter" likes to complain
about the NRC,
but for the NRC we would be living in
that Jetsons vision of the future
and everyone would have their
nuclear-powered car that they used to drive
to their nuclear-powered office and everything.
Is that true?
How good or bad is the current regulatory environment?
How much is that changing?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's an overestimated headwind. Certainly today.
I think if you go back five years ago,
10 years ago for sure,
I mean they hadn't licensed anything in decades.
There had been nothing new.
But I can't even tell you how much has changed
in the last few years.
It's kind of remarkable.
And it's been across both the Biden
and the Trump administration,
which is amazing to see.
The legislation around nuclear passes like
95 to 5 type of thing, right?
It's like really, really strong bipartisan...
What was interesting to see is it started with Biden,
a bunch of legislation related to modernizing
and reforming the NRC.
The biggest thing they did was they changed the mandate
of the NRC and they said,
"You are no longer focused just on safety,"
because what's the safest number
of nuclear reactors to license?
Zero, so they expanded that,
"You must consider the full environment,
the full civilization."
That's great.
And then just change things around
like the advanced reactor pathway,
removing some of the barriers.
And then it's continued on with Trump
and in fact he's sort of added
even some more teeth and specificity.
So right now, they've changed it to,
"You have 18 months to get your answer from the NRC.
License or no license."
Like do you pass or not?
And what happens if they exceed the 18-month window?
You know, probably it's in the details somewhere.
But the point is that these have been declared
that timeliness is important.
There's also been some leadership change,
which is just more reform-oriented, which is great,
and there's just a huge microscope on it.
Everyone's watching.
Everyone knows who's submitting their paperwork
and what's going to come out the other side.
Another thing that happened with some of these Trump
executive orders is the DOE pathways,
Department of Energy pathways,
have been also unopened and unblocked for test reactors.
And so actually Antares is part
of this new test reactor program which allows the DOE
alongside usually like Idaho National Lab
to be sort of your regulator
as you're testing your first reactors
so that you don't have to spend all this time upfront
with the NRC for something
that you're just still innovating on and iterating on.
And so that's a really nice, I think,
first step before you go through the NRC.
Wait, so let me make sure I'm giving this right.
There is now a Trump-era change
where we essentially for the first time ever
have a second nuclear regulator
where you can go the NRC path
but also there's a regulatory sandbox where you can start
by working with the DOE and get up and running there.
Yeah, that's essentially right.
How big is the sandbox?
I mean, the DOE has always been a path.
There actually technically has always been a path
within the military
because they license their own reactors with submarines.
So it's always kind of been there but
hard to navigate, not well-staffed, not well-known about.
And now it's like everyone's watching.
Let's go DOE, let's go INL,
Idaho National Lab, and let's make these things happen.
So there's just been a lot of stated like,
"You must enable this thing."
And like, now here's some...
It's actually a $0 program,
but it gives you unlimited access to staff
and all these other things.
And the point is like everyone's watching
to see how fast you can get
one of these reactors through safely.
So are you guys going the DOE routes first?
Yep, we are.
And the DOD route, I mean to say like,
the Army is now also able to license its own reactors,
alongside the Navy which already does.
So that will absolutely be our first stop.
The NRC really only regulates civilian electricity.
So civilian power.
So we actually don't need to even go there yet.
I see.
So you could be selling a lot of reactors
and never go through the NRC.
We'll basically do our test reactors with the DOE.
Alongside the DOD who can now—
who has the jurisdiction to regulate.
Which is great. I didn't know that.
So this is the rare bipartisan issue.
It's a true... Kind of a gem.
I can paint three clean energy futures.
One is the solar and regular renewables view.
You know, Casey Handmer was just on this podcast.
And solar will get very cheap.
Batteries will get cheap enough
such that you can go all in on solar and batteries.
Maybe some other renewables in the mix.
But there you go. That's it.
Nothing will be able to cost-compete with that.
That's one vision.
Another is that we will rediscover nuclear fission
and we'll figure out the spent fuel
and everything like that.
And we'll just do what we used to do,
which is build nuclear power plants at larger scale.
And that delivers us enough clean energy.
A third view is that fusion will work
and we'll actually have nuclear fusion at
useful, meaningful scale of the grid.
Between those scenarios,
how would you handicap them?
I think it's... You know, I'm going to leave fusion out
because I'm not enough of an expert
to know when and how that will happen.
I would love for that to happen.
How exciting, right?
Between the first two,
we do a lot of market manipulation of our energy markets
and there's a little bit of like,
flavor of the administration that does happen,
especially between renewables and oil and gas, right?
Nuclear's been a little bit actually
immune to that.
But there hasn't really been almost a true market
for this stuff.
Like the renewables have been heavily subsidized
for a while and nuclear has not been.
That did change in 2022 with the IRA.
There's now production tax credits for nuclear,
which has a lot of ripple effects.
But I think we're going to see a lot more progress
with solar and batteries in particular.
There is a reason, however, that the hyperscalers
who are committed to their climate targets
are not just going for, you know, solar farms.
Like why are even thinking about nuclear
if solar is so cheap?
And it's because actually
to get true hundred percent, 24/7 coverage,
the battery or the excess build-out is massive.
It is really expensive.
It's basically on par with nuclear costs.
So we're not there yet.
It's one thing to say.
The other is that the cost of solar
at the panel level is dirt cheap, right?
And installing it dirt cheap,
but to actually integrate it, build the transmission,
and then the added grid complexity
where you need now these peaker gas plants to run
when the the clouds come
and that kind of thing.
That actually has a ton of costs
and it's sort of hidden costs.
I think it's underappreciated certainly
by the solar maxis out there.
It's real, you know,
and so I think we're always going to want to have
multiple sources of energy, right?
It's like diversity is good.
It's like if one thing—
if natural gas prices are through the roof, hey,
we have these other things.
We have this base load nuclear,
which has been just like so stable for us.
And I think we're going to want to have everything.
I actually don't think there's going to be a world
that's going to be like a hundred percent nuclear.
But is diversity of energy sources valuable because
the solar maximalist would say, "No, it's fine.
Solar will just take everything."
And wouldn't the nuclear maximalist say
just we can have a lot of, you know,
we figure out how to at scale produce nuclear power plants
and why do you need nat gas?
Why do you need anything else?
It's a good push if you are able to own,
through and through, your whole supply chain.
You make the panels.
You mine and process the minerals,
which we have like zero interest in doing as Americans.
All that dirty work is done in China and elsewhere.
If you really did all that yourself,
then I could say, okay, you own it. You can do it.
Right now at least you have,
"Hey, if your natural gas pipelines get shut down,
actually it's not a problem for us.
We're not even an importer anymore.
We're actually good."
This is actually the reason that...
Do you know what percentage of France's electricity
is from nuclear?
It's declining, right?
But historically it's been around 70%.
Yep. Yeah.
Do you know the US?
The US for nuclear?
Oh, it's small. It's 5-10%.
It's actually more.
Really? 18.
Oh, okay.
And everyone thinks it's below 5-10%.
It's like, when I got into this,
I thought it was like 2%.
But anyway, my point is that France made a very,
very deliberate decision to actually go to 70%,
if not more at the time in the seventies
because they had no carbon resources.
So they didn't have the ability to say,
"Oh, we'll just dig in our backyard and we'll be fine."
And actually uranium, while it does require
digging out of ground or whatever,
is so much easier to store.
It's a million times as dense as coal.
So it's a lot easier to work with than...
The reason people get uptight about oil and gas supply
is that it's like not easy to store.
And if it's not easier for you to come by,
you better well have good geopolitical relationships.
Yes, yes. So anyway,
this world and where it's headed,
I think it's still going to involve multiple sources.
Julia's work involves managing a lot of risk:
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Tell me about the supply chain for nuclear fuels.
Yeah, I mean,
you dig uranium out of the ground
and then you need to convert it to a gaseous state
so that you can enrich it and have the...
you kind of put in a centrifuge.
It goes like this and the heavier isotopes go out
and the lighter ones stay in
and you can pick those out and make those into your fuel.
The mining part has been something
that we've hardly kept alive.
I mean there was, at one point,
a couple of mining operations going in the US.
The last 10 years or so,
it's been like 1% of nuclear fuel used in the US
was actually domestically mined.
Where are the last uranium mines in the US?
They're places where you would think:
Texas, Wyoming, those sorts of places.
In the western states.
But we now again, like everything else have said,
"Okay, wake up, let's actually reshore some of this stuff."
So we're starting to see more uranium mining.
Conversion and enrichment is still largely done overseas.
And yeah, we're still buying like almost 50% of our uranium
from Russia and kind of ex-Soviet states.
So I think it is important that we're thinking about like,
how do we have far more of a domestic supply chain?
We have the ability to do it.
We have the uranium and actually
there's a little bit of Silicon Valley DNA
entering the space with General Matter,
which is Scott Nolan's company out of Founders Fund.
So he's getting into the enrichment space.
They're a uranium enrichment company.
They're a uranium enrichment company,
which is like real picks and shovels for a real hard
atoms business to do that.
But I think it's really meaningful work.
I think it's really important.
Do you care more about the mining,
the enrichment happening in the US,
or just there has to be
an independent supply chain for the whole thing?
I think you just want diversity.
You know, you don't want everything from one place.
And I think we do want to have capability.
So I think all of it should be at least partially done here
and with our allies.
How did you end up starting Antares?
Gosh, I mean...
Like most people do not happen on this kind of idea.
No, you kind of don't really happen upon it.
I was working at SpaceX at the time
when I first started reading about nuclear.
And it was when I was actually working
on getting Starlinks into Ukraine.
So after Russia invaded Ukraine.
And I just started like reading more
about the conflict there,
probably more than I normally would have,
because I was actually speaking with Ukrainians
and like thinking about what was going on there.
I was a history major.
So I think there was just a little bit of like,
"Oh, geopolitics. Resources are important."
Russia has a lot of resources.
You know, randomly, my cousin is the CEO of a glass factory,
making literally glasses like this.
And he is like,
"We're going bankrupt because of energy prices."
And you're like, "Golly, what is going on?"
And then I read about Germany
and the nuclear power plants they were shutting off
to turn on coal in a place that is like—
It was so insane. Green Party.
Crazy, right? Lost their minds.
So I was like, "What could be so compelling
that someone would do something
so counter to their own good," right?
As a country, as a nation.
And I, at the time, again, I knew nothing about nuclear.
I didn't know the difference between fission and fusion,
honestly, at the time.
I certainly didn't know
that it was a pretty big part of our grid and other things.
But it just was one of those
like completely under-celebrated,
under-championed by anyone.
The climate tech...
Climate people really weren't into it either.
And so it just kind of got me curious about it
and then just started reading more.
Wrote a piece that I posted on Twitter
and it's actually how I met Jordan, who's my co-founder,
and he's the one who actually had the vision
for micro-reactors for the military.
And I just said, "What a great beachhead". Like again,
premium power, great thesis to go to market with,
and just really got into the topic.
How did you arrive at that as a beachhead?
I think, you know, you just say like,
where can you go that you don't have to compete
on that LCOE level against the cheap solar panels.
Where do you go where there's a real need?
And mission assurance
for something critical to the military.
Like, they will pay for that.
This is also an area where like they
were obviously behind the Manhattan Project.
They're here to help develop new technologies.
And so what a great partner to have
when trying to do something like this.
Has DARPA played with this stuff at all?
Or has it come from... It sounds like you're working
with the main branches of the military.
Yeah, you know, we are not working with DARPA
mostly because it's actually not as technically risky
as you might even think.
They prefer things further at the risk curve.
Exactly.
We actually... In a funny way,
it's not even really a tech problem.
You know, I mean it's hard to build these things,
but it's not brand new.
But someone just needs to know how to—
It's not novel in that way.
That's interesting.
What lessons have you brought
from your prior experience at SpaceX, at Opendoor
to building Antares?
You know, one of the things I really took away from SpaceX
was just like really getting into it.
It's a very confrontational culture
and it's not afraid to say like, "Screw your next meeting.
We need to keep talking about this."
And I love that.
Like, I want to bring that energy everywhere I go.
It's like, if you are unsure about something,
if you're questioning something,
you should probably stop and dig into it.
We had this thing called the "Five Whys,"
I don't know if you ever use—
In general, yeah. It's like a...
one of these Silicon Valley little quips.
But it's like that on steroids.
And I think the pausing to probe super deeply,
question things, like really hash things out
was a big takeaway I learned.
Like, wow, that's really effective
at getting to the right answer,
at making a decision,
at changing course when you need to.
And so I've tried to bring some of that to Antares.
You know, investors are hot and cold on hard tech
depending on when you're raising money
and everything like this.
Presumably there's a J-curve
in investing in Antares
where there's definitely some R&D
before you eventually start paying it back with revenues.
How is the experience of raising money for this?
It's going to get harder.
I think it hasn't been hard to date
only because there is interest
and excitement around nuclear.
It's also just fewer dollars in the beginning.
You're kind of like honeymoon phase of all of that.
I think it will get harder.
I think now the time is ticking. It's like,
"Okay, let's see your next technical milestones."
This criticality test,
obviously the full reactor end of 2027.
I think it will be challenging.
And there are several reactor companies out there,
so it's a bit of a race.
I think it's going to be fun.
I mean, I wonder what Polymarket would have to say.
Several reactor companies out there,
even at the end of the market that you guys are going after?
Yeah, everyone has their different niche, right?
I think our niche is again, the smallest,
the most DOD-oriented.
There's a lot of micro-reactor companies or SMR.
And I'm doing this because it's like,
"Are they SMR, micro-reactors?"
Anyway, that are going after data centers
and the data center build-out, which is an amazing market.
I mean, amazing.
I think people will pay a lot more, again,
going back to the premium power point,
they will pay more for power for this.
Not exactly our target market.
Right, so your niche in the market,
it seems like you guys have selected a part of the market
where maybe there's less competition.
There's still some people going after
the military applications.
There always are.
I mean, if you have a good idea,
there's going to be a few people working on it.
How capital-intensive is it going to be
to get your product to market?
In the hundreds of millions.
Okay. Yep.
I think what we...
And it depends on what you mean by "to market," right?
So I think our big milestones,
like can you build a reactor, prove it,
turn it on, it's producing power.
Then I think you can think about interesting layers
of capital in terms of pre-orders for your reactor.
That's going to be my next question.
When does the money arrive?
Yeah, exactly. Bigger government grants.
So we're kind of still in the hundreds of thousands,
single-digit millions of dollars of grants
that we are getting right now.
But you're moving into the tens of millions
of dollars R&D grants.
And then you want to eventually move into that
program-of-record, real dollars.
There's a really interesting program right now
that the Army has put out called the Janus program.
Are you familiar with the COTS program that SpaceX used
to bring, to develop their first reactor?
Not by name, but I'm familiar with—
Commercial Orbital Transport System.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm familiar with the broad—
So it was the innovation basically
to say like, let's try something that's not cost-plus
and let's actually do something that's milestone-based
and you know, "Well, basically we'll cut you
if you don't hit the milestone and it's fixed contract.
We're not going to pay you for whatever."
So anyway, the Army has taken that model a bit
and I think used that as inspiration for this Janus program
where they're saying, "We're going to fund up to
three to five companies to build their first prototype
alongside us, kind of at a base.
And then we will choose a winner
and we want to build 5 to 10 reactors,
if not more on bases."
And so the demand signal now is hot.
And so this is going to be great for our future fundraising,
for the industry in general.
It's like very, very good demand.
A lot of incumbents build on military,
US defense contracting.
What is your experience as someone who's
attempting to sell to the military?
I mean, people are actually kind of well aware
that this cost-plus model is not great.
The question is like, well, what are the alternatives?
Who's going to go do it?
Anduril has been an amazing example of that.
So I think a lot of us in hard tech really look to them as
what we try to emulate.
Every branch of the military
has these innovative arms that tell you like,
"Hey, we want to hear about your ideas."
And they do actually, you can go talk to them.
They're giving out grants for things like...
I do think everyone wants the innovation.
They are, you know,
and in this day and age of information everywhere,
you can learn a lot quickly.
They do want to work with startups.
I think we'll only see more of it,
but you have things like the government shutdown
and the pace of government is slow.
So you've got to just be able
to keep pushing those timelines, again,
while not running out of money, to be able
to make it through that valley of death.
What's been harder than you expected building Antares?
Because presumably you expected it broadly to be hard.
You expected there to be a lot of technical risk.
Capital intensity. Yeah, harder than expected.
Oh.
There's a couple things.
I mean, I think, gosh...
Recruiting is always hard.
You're up against the SpaceXs of the world
that have just a lot more credibility, right?
When you're the no-name person at the very beginning,
it can be hard.
I think there's a lot of complexity,
and even though I said
we're making so much progress in regulation,
there's still red tape everywhere.
Things cost more than they probably should.
You know, we spend a lot of money paying the national labs
to do things like clear out a pit
so that we can test our reactor.
And it's like, we're paying for that.
And they're like, "You know,
here's hundreds of thousand dollars. Here's the bill."
So there's stuff that you're like, "Gosh,
there's really a lot of expense everywhere
and it just slows things down."
And so I guess we were somewhat ready for that.
But some of this stuff just seems silly
and when you're building in software,
you just don't have to worry about it.
You just sit there, code, and do your thing
and go right to market.
When you have to work with the real world, you have to,
you know, you have to play their games a little bit
and you have to follow the process in some ways.
And there's not always a way around it.
Sometimes it's just through.
You said there's still a lot of red tape
despite the fact that
there's been the first Biden-era
and then Trump-era improvements.
If you were in charge, I know energies are...
Or you know, we'll give you a role
with no powers across all these departments.
What would you change?
What do you think the specific improvements
we could make are?
If I were fully in charge of energy,
I would love to see the US government be a buyer.
I think that is... Just like actually the NASA was a buyer
for SpaceX's eventual launch product.
I think having the US government be a customer
for nuclear would be great.
And so we have this a little bit with the DOD.
It was a very interesting announcement
that just came out a week or two ago
that doesn't have a ton of detail,
but it's starting in this direction.
I think it's very positive.
I'm a small government person, so I don't say this lightly,
but I do think there are certain things
when it's national security related
and things like energy resilience.
There should be public-private partnership.
But anyway, the announcement is that the US government
now wants to spend $80 billion
on nuclear development alongside Westinghouse.
So they've basically chosen the technology.
And I think that's actually a good thing
because you don't want to...
You want to be able to build one thing
and then repeatedly build it
so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time.
You actually have economies of scale,
like the learning curve that you go down from doing that.
So I'm excited about that news.
I think that's the type of policy I'd want to see more of.
And, you know, we'll see how it goes.
I mean, this is the biggest ever commercial nuclear
public-private partnership we've seen.
And sorry, specifically they're buying from Westinghouse.
Just a large amount of nuclear power?
Well, it's a combination.
So this is where,
I mean, the details are a little fuzzy
but they've announced 80 billion.
They've announced Westinghouse as the partner of choice.
Not all those dollars are going
right to Westinghouse.
And that's a company that makes just the reactor itself.
So there's money that you would spend on a plant
or licensing fees or whatever else that surrounds that.
But I think it's really positive.
I think what it does is it's a catalyst
for the whole industry, right?
Like supply chain, workforce.
People are now paying attention like,
"Oh, there's real dollars to be made here."
There's a huge trillion-dollar asset under management
company called Brookfield Asset Management.
And they've actually just gotten in the game as well
in the last couple weeks.
I'm sure there was talk, right?
To take the V.C. Summer plant
that never got completed in South Carolina
and actually finish it.
And so again, they now have some nice tailwinds
with those new production subsidies.
They are partnering with the local utility to...
And again, a local utility doesn't have the risk appetite
to do this themselves, right?
Or the balance sheet to do this themselves.
And so there's some really nice
market signal you get
when the government's saying,
"We're going to spend $80 billion on this."
But I think
it gets the rest of the industry moving.
As you guys were exploring and developing the early stages
of your business plan,
did you consider for a product that is as tightly regulated
as this, did you consider doing any jurisdiction shopping
where you develop a product that you sell in Singapore
or the UAE or Prospera or
some more favorable jurisdiction?
You know, we really didn't.
It felt like there was enough signal
that we would be able to
get through regulatory and see some positive change.
There was enough basically demand signal within the US,
and it's... I don't know,
we take pride in also building for our country, right?
And it feels good to be developing something
for our military and our allies.
So we didn't really shop it around too much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I guess the US military is a large buyer, in this case.
Very large buyer.
The largest buyer of non-commodity energy,
if not all energy.
How soon afterwards will you go to, like,
I presume you want to do civilian premium power use cases,
like you're saying an oil rig
seems like the one that,
ironically that... It would be hard to get gas,
it would be hard to get refined
diesel or gasoline to an oil rig.
Does that come right afterwards
or is that such a different ball of wax
from a regulatory point of view
that maybe it's like 10 years later?
I think it's, you know, you're developing concurrently.
We are talking with oil and gas already.
Just understanding them, right?
"What do you need?
What do you think you'd pay?" That sort of thing.
So I would say it fast follows, right?
A few years later.
I think it's going to be such a nice proving ground
if we can make it through and test on a military base,
for example, and get a first reactor live
and get some revenue from that,
then I think it's like open the aperture pretty broadly
for what else is out there.
Does this movement towards re-onshoring manufacturing
in the US and various blockers people talk about to that
between supply chain is difficult in your...
You've talked about in the fuel context,
but also supply chain for manufacturing,
talent and the roles that people go into
and finding talent in specific areas.
I'm just curious. What has your experience been
of building a hard tech company in the US?
Supply chain is... Yeah,
the bottlenecks. Supply chain is challenging
when you need to work with nuclear-grade material
and no nuclear plants have really been built.
It makes for a very limited number of suppliers.
Which means costs are higher.
You know, options are just fewer.
So like, if they're not responding to your email,
well what are you going to do?
You know, there's only one other option.
And like, I don't know, they're busy or whatever.
So those dynamics are really challenging.
The graphite that I brought here is actually
from a Japanese company, right?
No one's even processing that stuff in the US.
And so you're kind of,
you're literally going all over the world
for these supplies.
So that's challenging.
You know, talent is challenging in the sense
that there are so many options
for hard tech in the LA region, right?
So you need to have a compelling mission,
but nuclear is compelling.
So it's been challenging, but not in some ways.
If you want to work at SpaceX and you love space stuff
and you want to be at that name brand place,
we've lost you.
But if you're interested in nuclear
and being able to build from the very beginning,
that is a compelling piece.
Yes. It's the Shackleton pitch, you know of—
Yeah, totally.
High risk of failure. Totally.
And that's the pitch that you're making.
Yep. Yeah, I like that.
What trends in nuclear should we be excited about right now?
So the trend I'm excited about is bringing back online
these recently shuttered plants
because they don't take too much money to bring back online.
And we've seen a couple big power purchase agreements
where you have Google partnered with NextEra
or the Iowa-based utility to bring on Dwayne Arnold,
which was shut down about five years ago.
And then you have actually Three Mile Island,
the site of the infamous accident is also—
Almost accident. Well, it was an accident
but it was not really a big deal.
Like this much radiation came out.
It was like this amount of a chest x-ray.
Yes, completely overblown "accident".
That's being brought back online.
Partnership between Microsoft and Constellation, I believe.
So that's kind of fun.
I mean, you're seeing like,
let's go take these assets that are just sitting there
that shouldn't have been turned off.
Bring them back online, bring them back to life.
Tons of power coming out of them.
And we need it yesterday, right?
Yeah, I mean it's so striking
the big trend in the US right now,
being that grid demand was flat for the longest time.
Like we were completely not— Exactly.
Not adding power generation nor adding power transmission.
And now because of data centers,
essentially, we have this enormous boom
that is just leading to things
that maybe previously would've been competitive.
People can't get enough of anything, right?
You know, people can't get enough of nuclear,
they can't get enough of solar,
they can't get enough of natural gas.
And just everything is backlogged.
It's really interesting.
Even the natural gas turbines are backlogged.
Totally, yeah. I mean, multiple years.
Across all the manufacturers.
You know, it is hard when
something like this
goes into one of these inflection points,
and to your point,
it was less than 1% year-over-year growth
for 20-plus years.
And now it's like people are estimating
5% annual growth next year.
Like, oh my gosh.
Last question.
What kind of culture do you want to build at Antares?
Hmm.
Well, I think it's certainly one of excellence,
and I think that means
delivering quality product.
How you get there...
I mean, there's a lot of ways to get there.
You can have the combative SpaceX culture.
You can have a less combative, maybe more,
I don't know, writing culture.
They don't write that much stuff down in SpaceX.
To me that matters less.
Although I tend to be one for a working environment
that is energized, positive preferably.
But I think, ultimately, I would be proud
to be delivering on an excellent product
that can be delivered to market soon, right?
And we can all go use.
But, okay.
So you want the kinda results-oriented culture.
Results speak for themselves in a lot of ways, yeah.
Julia, thank you.
Thanks. Thanks for having me.