The Exchanges

Q What do you think the biggest misconceptions are around nuclear waste and reactors? Is there still, are there still misconceptions? I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm in an echo chamber, but I feel like everybody's on the same page.

A I think, I think there's definitely a little bit of a, a bubble in, let's say American tech or, you know, American re-industrialization. And that's because I think we're all very, very tuned in with energy needs, right? We all recognize that energy is so important for what all of us need to do. Re-industrialization, Artificial intelligence, national security, all of these things are energy issues. So I think that we're a little bit more tuned into it, but there, there is still pretty broad based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste. Um, I like to, to point out to people that if you took all of the nuclear waste ever generated inside the United States, right? And by the way, we, we generate a lot of power with nuclear today. About 20% of our power comes from nuclear. But if you took all of that waste over the last 70 years, It would not fill up an Olympic sized swimming pool. All of it. Right? So we're talking about a very, very small amount of physical material. And when you have a small amount of physical material, it's actually very easy to protect. Right? So we can encase it in concrete. We put it in safe places. And the comparison of that is, you know, carbon in the atmosphere and particulate matter in the atmosphere when we talk about oil and gas. And oil and gas is fantastic. I love the industry. I think that it's powered humanity to this point. But if…

AI assessment note: “there is still pretty broad based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste”

Q What's the current state of nuclear in the US? It seems to be laggard, but it seems like there's a lot of energy, no pun intended, around it.

A Yeah. You know, nuclear in the United States has been paused for about 46 years. It's been paused essentially since Three Mile Island. Um, and there's some good reasons for that, some bad reasons for that. The industry sort of took a pause, uh, when Three Mile Island happened to, you know, reevaluate and make sure everything was safe. And unfortunately, when you pause an industry, it's kind of hard to restart it again. The tools atrophy, the labor's not really there anymore. The regulator's not in practice. And so we're really trying to reboot this and start over. But When you reboot an industry, um, you have to make sure that you are designing the reactors in a way that makes sense for the new methods of building things, right? We build things differently in the United States than we used to 50 or 60 years ago. Uh, we don't do as well at like very large scale manufacturing or very large scale construction. We're much better at modular manufacturing. So that's really what we focus on is building a modular reactor that can be manufactured here and that we build thousands of throughout the United States.

AI assessment note: “nuclear in the United States has been paused for about 46 years”

Q That's great. What exactly are the executive orders that he signed?

A So he signed four of them. Um, the one that's most relevant here is revitalizing, uh, nuclear testing at the Department of Energy. So the Department of Energy is a test authority in the United States. It has the authority to basically take a prime contractor and allow them to split an atom, uh, out in, you know, the middle of nowhere, somewhere it's very safe to do that. And, uh, that allows us to gather data, right? And data is the most important piece for a commercial regulatory process. If you want to take a reactor concept and scale it out all over the United States, You really want to have tested that somewhere and made sure that it's safe and make sure that you understand the characteristics. So that's what we're going to be doing. Um, that executive order, you know, essentially takes the legal structure that's there in the DOE and points everybody in the same direction to say, let's do this quickly next year.

AI assessment note: “So he signed four of them. Um, the one that's most relevant here is”

Q What exactly is going on there, and how far behind are we?

A So China has had a lot of success in building one type of reactor over and over and, you know, over again, which is really what we need to do. In order to do something well, you have to do it often, right? And if you have the same design that you're doing over and over, you learn a lot, you get better at it over time, you, you know, shore up the supply chain, you have a labor base that understands that, that system. And they've, they've been really successful at that. So they are ahead of us in terms of scale. Now they're also ahead of us, unfortunately, in terms of Uh, new test reactors. They're, they're also turning on innovative types of reactors that were invented in the United States in the seventies and eighties. And they, they sort of sat on the shelf and we never really tackled them. Um, we ran into a bunch of regulatory roadblocks and then we never turned them on. And China is now sort of taking those ideas and actually turning them on on the mainland. So they're being both very experimental and actually figuring out how to scale out. And those are all the thing, you know, those are the ingredients you need to have a mature industry. So it is a, it's a scary place. You know, I think that China understands that Energy dominance over the next hundred years is going to be even more important than energy dominance was in the last hundred years. And it was already pretty im…

AI assessment note: “So they are ahead of us in terms of scale. Now they're also ahead”

Q Right. This might be a wild question because this is so physical and it's an energy and industrials, right? So we're seeing AGI come into the scene. Maybe you call it super intelligence now, whatever you want to call it, but how does AGI and AI advancements, how do those affect getting nuclear online sooner and all of these reactors up and running?

A So this is probably a controversial statement, and, you know, investors probably really, really want to believe that AI is going to, like, help us build a ton of reactors. I actually think that if you're looking for an investment that is protected from AGI, it's something like this, where it's extremely physical. You're bending steel, you're stacking blocks, you're building plants, you're laying concrete. It's going to be a long time before AI touches that level of the physical world. There are a lot of things that are going to be automated first before that. The other thing I'll say is that our customers are going to be data centers, right? They're going to be people who want to actually power the AI. So interestingly, nuclear is sort of like the derivative to AI. If you believe that AI is going to go vertical, you should probably invest in nuclear, you know, because A, you're going to power it. B, you're going to be very insulated from, you know, the deflationary effects of that. Um, and yeah, of course we use LLMs and these sorts of things to help us do work management and help us control information and these sorts of things. But at the end of the day, this is a matter of, we need to bend a lot of steel, we need to weld it together, we need to stack the blocks.

AI assessment note: “It's going to be a long time before AI touches that level of the physical”

Q So what role exactly does Valor have in America's re-industrialization?

A I mean, I think energy is one of the most important inputs that you could possibly give the reindustrialization movement. Cheap energy is how we make metals, right? It's how we would make aluminum and steel and all of the base metals that we use to make parts. If you think about what's happening over the next hundred years in manufacturing and reindustrialization, we're essentially taking what was an extremely labor heavy industry into being an energy heavy industry, right? So we're, instead of, you know, the manipulation of machines with You know, hand lathes and these sorts of things. You have automatic lathes and automatic CNC. You have robots moving parts around. So we're really just starting to consume energy to create physical goods. And that's also true at the materials layer as well, right? So at the, the layer of making the steel, making the aluminum, you're essentially just consuming energy. So if we have cheap energy, we have a real shot at making, you know, all the stuff that we need to make for our nation and for other nations around the world. So it's very exciting.

AI assessment note: “I think energy is one of the most important inputs that you could possibly give”