The U.S. nuclear groundswell

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of Climate Technology. I'm Shao Kahn and this is Catalyst. Have you ever went to IKEA and bought like four pieces of furniture of the same type and constructed'em yourself? The first one you you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you're missing. Uh the second, third, and fourth ones, you're just knocking them out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear and that's just been proven over and over and over again.

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All right, so I've been thinking about this, and here is the word that I would use to encapsulate what's happening in the US nuclear power market. It's a groundsweather. I don't think anyone would deny that there's something happening here, driven by a combination of political support and load growth, off taker interest. capital formation, possible regulatory reform. But let's be clear, it is still true that the US has built one count of one new nuclear project in the past X number of decades.

And that's why a groundswell feels like the right word to me, because sometimes a groundswell leads to a massive wave, but sometimes it doesn't. So in my mind, the operative question is in which direction we are headed here. We at EIP, for disclosure, do believe that there's a wave coming, as evidenced by the fact that we helped to stand up and invested in elemental power, the pure play nuclear developer whose CEO, Chris Colbert, you're going to hear from in a few moments.

But there is still a lot of work to do to translate all this momentum and excitement into actual capacity on the grid. Anyway, Elemental came out of stealth this week and announced a big partnership with Google to develop a three-site portfolio of at least one point eight gigawatts of new nuclear in the US. See? Groundswell. Um anyway, there's a lot to talk about though in translating that to real action.

And so we brought on Chris, uh, who is the co-founder and CEO of Elemental. Prior to that, he was the CFO at New Scale, which many of you will know is the first SMR company to actually achieve design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And again, for disclosure, as I mentioned, we at the AP are investors in Elemental, and I'm on the board. Anyway, here's Greg. Chris, welcome. Thanks for having me.

Let's start by I guess getting your overall take on the state of the market, such as it is for new nuclear in the US. You've you've been in it for a while. Uh what does it feel like? Like where are we today?

Yeah, so you know, I I have been in a while. I first was recruited over the nuclear in two thousand seven, uh, at the first nuclear renaissance. But um, you know, it's been through its ups and downs since that time, but now I think that there's the right confluence of both um you know market demand, uh investor sentiment. and regulatory and and government policy to really make it happen uh this time and uh we feel pretty well, you know, situated to be to make that happen.

uh in this marketplace. So I'm pretty comfortable with where it is and really excited about where we are, uh, given the journey I've been through uh with nuclear. Yeah, you said the first nuclear renaissance in two thousand seven or so. That was that one was a mirage, right? So the question is is this one gonna be different?

Yeah, so you know, there's a couple of reasons why I I think it's different uh this time around is that the you know, all the things that we learned from that first Renaissance and and no, keep in mind like the Vogel three and four project came out of that first Renaissance that's while not a problem. Just a just a project.

Just a project. Um, you know, and it had issues, but all the things that we learned from that first time around in terms of the policy, the off take, the execution stuff, I think is now all available to us. uh with people who are involved in that to make this, you know, next round uh be successful. But really the advent of the demand side where

You know, back in the two thousands there was not really any demand growth. Um now we're seeing phenomenal demand growth, which was strong to begin with, but just I mean, really taken off with with artificial intelligence uh driving it. And, you know, those trillion dollar balance sheet from those hyperscaler companies that can really allow nuclear to flourish and happen this time around. That wasn't prevalent last time.

Right. So I wanted to talk through the sort of where we are now through four lenses, which I think are the key lenses, and you've already alluded to a couple of them. But so one one is off take and customers, second is suppliers, OEMs, like who's actually making reactors and of what kind and so on.

Third is the role of the utilities, who obviously have a big role to play here. And then the fourth, maybe the big one at the end, is is the regulatory, state of regulatory environment for nuclear projects and nuclear reactors. So the one you talked about the most already, we can just w go through relatively quickly, which is the off take side. Um

What difference does it make? I mean, what I think historically, correct me if I'm wrong, anybody who was considering new nuclear in the United States wasn't really doing a corporate PPA type offtake prior to this new This new wave right now, where obviously you guys just announced this big deal with Google. All the hyperscalers have made some kind of announcement or another.

on nuclear. So it's it feels like one big change there is of course there is load growth in general, but also you've got this class of corporate buyers that are generally universally leaning into nuclear and interested in doing something creative with their balance sheets, right? Going above and beyond just saying, okay, I'll sign a PPA when you get the price down sufficiently.

Yeah, you know absolutely. The first time around it was all based upon regulated utilities getting the ratepayers to underwrite it. And you know, at the time they were trying to underrate underrate, you know, seventeen billion, twenty billion dollar projects and their balance sheet or their market capitalization may be twenty to thirty billion dollars. And the growth didn't show up.

And their expectation for high gas price at the time didn't come to fruition. We had cheap gas. And so well, those two things really conspired against a demand side of it where we have kind of the opposite where we have, you know, pretty much all time low gas prices, but still a huge demand.

And a requirement from the hyperscalers out there as corporate buyers that want, you know, reliable base load power and, you know, increasingly want to see it be clean and built for, you know, long duration so that they're gonna have it available to them for a long period of time.

So that has really changed from the first time around, both in terms of what's driving the demand and the rest of the environment around it from a market perspective, um, really much better uh for nuclear this time than the first time. Can you talk a little bit more about like what what is the market or what should the market be asking of those hyperscalers, of the buyers? Again, above and beyond, yes, we will sign a PPA if you get the price down low enough, because there there's

you know, a lot of risk to retire along the way in a in project development. And then there's also this question of how do we get the costs down in nuclear, which is at least in part a function of building multiple projects, not a single project, and then driving down a cost curve. So I I know the hyperscalers have been thinking about, okay, what can we do beyond the obvious PPA. How how do you think about that suite of possibilities?

Yeah, that's been the biggest change from the hyperscalers probably in the last two or three years, Shell, is that You know, when I was um before I came to Elemental I was at New Scale and we talked a lot to the hyperscalers and and really said in order for projects to go on, they needed to have some, you know, skin in the game or some some exp um

You know, exposure to the development costs, because you know, unlike renewables where the re development costs might be in the tens of millions of dollars at most. It's hundreds of millions of dollars for nuclear and you can't just have a power purchase agreement to make that kind of investment as a developer.

And, you know, it took a while for people to realize that that was what needed to happen. And, you know, necessity is the mother of invention is that once people realize that I need clean and large amounts of baseload megawatts, nuclear needs to be part of that. Um how I was doing before isn't going to work. That kind of moment really solidified over the last

you know, year and a year and a half with the the hyperscalers of saying, Okay, I need to do more than just say, I'll write you a power purchase agreement. We're going to make some investment. And they made investment, you know, mostly in the technology But increasingly is this deal we're doing now with Google is in the upfront development, which is really the key part uh that needs to be re-rest.

Okay, so that's the customer slash off take side. Um, let's talk about the supplier universe. Obviously it used to be uh New Scale, which was is one of the suppliers, OEMs in the space, but it's an interesting landscape there of like lots of activity, but also very few Andor approved from a regulatory perspective products, I suppose, that you can buy as a developer. So, how do you think about that landscape?

So y you know, we we approached it in in that there's been billions of dollars invested by these technology uh developers in either, you know, traditional light water reactors, which you call gen three or gen four uh reactors, which might be high temperature gas or sodium.

Um, and they're all kind of nearing the end of their development process where they're not quite ready yet. They're all kind of trying to solve for something, whether it's in supply chain or licensing or whatnot. So we're technology agnostic in the belief that or in the knowledge that we can go out and find sites that are amenable to the hyperscale is what they need for off take and location.

um that we can develop in a way that in a year from now or a year and a half from now, we can pick the technologies that have made it through their sort of crucible of licensing and development and and cost. um estimation that we can pick with confidence that we know what we're gonna get, when we're gonna get it, and what it's going to cost. They're they're almost there and you know, I can't tell you which one of them is going to be successful.

But there's so many of them out there that have invested so much. I'm very comfortable that there's going to be, you know, probably three or four at least that are going to make it through that part of it that will be successful in the long term. Um, just hard to pick now. But that's how we really see it. And if you look at the two different kinds of broad types of the fission reactors between light water and non light water.

The light water is fifty to sixty year old technology. They're just doing it with better um designs that are are are safer and simpler and bringing the cost down, uh sometimes smaller so they do more work in a factory versus doing it in the field. And then you had the non lawn white lightwater types, which, you know, have better safety characters and whatnot.

But may not be, you know, really quite ready from a supply chain or the fuel supply or some aspect of it which probably will take a little bit longer to get confidence around that part of the of the OEM's uh equation. But certainly what we're looking for, um, in the early thirties and the late thirties, we think that that's the early thirties is the light water reactors and the late thirties is when we'll see commercially more of the um non light water reactors come into fore.

You mentioned briefly the question of scale. This has obviously been another um hotly debated topic in nuclear world, which is, you know, historically we've built large mega projects pretty much exclusively. There are technology companies who are developing everything from micoreactors that are a megawatt or five megawatts or something like that, up to

you know, gigawatt scale type reactors. The deal that you just announced with Google is for three projects of one point eight plus gigawatts total. So six hundred megawatts plus per project. Is that born is that scale born out of um sort of what you view as the sweet spot given the technology landscape? Or is that more a function of, well, this is the scale that a hyperscaler needs to fulfill the capacity of a data center or both?

I i it's really both. Um,'cause we're solving for two things, right? One is um they have huge needs, but they they want to see us get down the cost curve, which means you need to have multiples. And when you look at the sort of intersection of doing multiples, the size of the need they have, the capital they can deploy, and what it costs for various whether it's micro, small or large reactors.

the small light water reactors fit more generally into that category, um, as well as some of the smaller Gen four um reactors as well. So this is kind of anything from seventy five megawatts to three hundred megawatts electric. Um, that fits pretty well because again you get more swings at bat, so if you have one not work out, the other two will carry you through, which is how you wanna see a portfolio work.

And when you have multiples at a site and multiples in a d in a deployment, you can get down those cost curves both in the factory and in the field more readily than you could with a a large reactor. Um so that's really how we we saw it playing out uh in real time. Um, you know, and the hyperscalers looked at all of

And, you know, it was our goal as Elemental was to find the right solution that kind of threads the needle between the OEMs, the utilities, and the customers in terms of what makes the most sense. And that's where we landed up uh in our conversations with Google. Okay, so to sort of encapsulate what you're saying overall on the supplier side, your bet. Is that Currently nobody's quite crested over the commercial readiness hump yet, but you think there will be multiple

vendors, OEMs who will get there over the next year or two. And so you're basically positioning yourself to to wait and see who gets through the crucible or over the crucible, around the crucible, whatever the whatever the metaphor meant is meant to be. Uh

And then and then pick the winners there. But that's obviously contingent on anybody sort of like getting through and getting commercially ready, which maybe is a good segue to the the next category here, which is the regulatory the state of regulatory and permitting.

Talk to me about what where you see that. Yeah, so I mean uh a number of designs have gone through a design certification process which gets you a license for your technology. Think about like Boeing gets their seven eighty seven jet liner approved. Um some folks have gone out and and gotten uh construction permits or they're applying for them. Um so that's getting the permission to start constructing it.

Uh nobody's gotten yet to the point of um an operating license where you get the ability to load the fuel into these new designs. Um so that's kinda like the remaining one. But for light water reactors, this is really fifty year old technology being run by the Navy successfully for You know, since the fifties and the n commercial nuclear fleet since the fifties.

It hasn't changed dramatically in terms of the fuel type or what you do. Basically, you know, you split atoms, create heat, make steam, turn a turbine, make electricity. It's that simple. Um so all these technologies are gonna work. And I would point out that, you know, all the technologies that have been deployed just most recently, whether it's an EPR, an APR fourteen hundred or an AP one thousand.

They may have had challenges getting to the finish line, but once they got to the finish line, they are all working and and the AP one thousand's working very well. So for light water reactor technology Uh there really isn't a technology risk. It's just pulling together the right pieces to, you know, de risk it in the front end to get to a final investment decision and then start construction and and have a solid plan.

to be successful when you get into the field'cause that's where the challenges have been traditionally. Do you see any evidence? There's obviously been been a lot of talk about having the NRC reformed in some fashion or another to speed up permitting. Um, do you see any momentum there from the NRC? Has anything changed? Do you need anything to change there?

So, you know, there's been a lot of uh legislation over the last several years really driving the NRC to revise its policies, become more um balanced in its approach for, you know, making sure to maintain the safety to the public and the environment. But, you know, recognizing that there is a public benefit for nuclear power given its clean base load c attributes. Um that has been demonstrated by reduced timelines for them to review various applications that I've observed.

just in the fifteen years I've been in the nuclear space where, you know, what once took four years is now being done in two years. Uh the hope is that we'll get down to maybe a a year, year and a half. But you know, what you'd like to see is that for this baseload technology, which is what it is.

uh to be sort of in the same time frame of development of a traditional combined cycle gas plant, which might be, you know, two years of development and licensing and then two years construction and then, you know, four years or five years you're operational.

Um, we're not there yet, but I do see a path by which you could get down to from the seven to eight years we're looking at the first ones to getting down to five or six years, which to me really makes a game changer when people have their planning horizons. That brings it all forward to be a real equal um uh discussion. And, you know, I think we're gonna get there. Um and we have been getting there, uh clearly.

All right, so then the final lens through which to look at the current state of affairs, I think, is is utilities. Um who ha who operate basically all of the existing nuclear in the United States. Uh Georgia Power is the one company that has actually built a new nuclear generating facility in the past, I don't know, three decades, four decades, whatever it's been. Um and now they many of them are also exploring new nuclear, but I think

You know, coming into it maybe a little with a little bit more caution, at least than the hyperscalers seem to be. What's your perspective on what you're hearing from utilities? Yeah, so you know what I hear from utilities now is what I heard from utilities back in the in in the past, right? Is that You know, they fundamentally can't take development risk. Um and you know, that's a uh having done fossil plant development, I did that for fifteen years of coal and gas plants.

That's a business where you expect to make two or three times return on your on your investment uh on the development of that FID. And that doesn't happen uh for utilities. They're stuck at ten percent. Right. So they're taking three X risk for a ten percent return. It just doesn't work out for And, you know, we're seeing with a with the many of them, not all of them, but many of them, is a desire to have a developer like Elemental come in.

align with the hyperscaler, take care of the commercial risk, take care of the development and the construction risk, and then transfer uh the asset at commercial operation when you know you can just look at what constellation trades at in terms of what their cost of capital is.

Pretty easy for them to do that, very huge markups and and value to them to do so. Um or they can operate the plant um as the operator for it in their territory. And we're looking at all those models with them, but you know, what we really see is that the the recognition that somebody needs to come in to take that uh development and construction risk.

Uh the government's taking a piece of it, but there's gonna be a slice left over for the private sector. And utilities just aren't the right investor for that because they're just a fundamentally different risk profile from what uh a developer does traditionally. I think the other thing that we're seeing from utilities is interesting is like

The the subset of utilities that already have operating nuclear that either has retired already, I'm sorry, was operating and has retired or is scheduled to retire or that they were thinking about building but then stopped building. I mean, they're all kind of re-examining. all that and saying, Oh, there's maybe there is a nuclear renaissance coming here. How do I take advantage of the fact that I do actually have experience

in nuclear to to get that capacity back online or online in the first place. And that seems kind of universal, right? Like I feel like every utility in their boardroom, if there's nuclear somewhere in their fleet, or there was supposed to be nuclear somewhere in their fleet, they're taking a fresh look at it.

Yeah, I mean I I think that most of these utilities that are operating uh utilities of nuclear plants, if they had the opportunity to pick up an existing operating asset or one that was, you know, largely complete and de-risk. Um, they'd be very inclined to do it. Uh, because you just look at what, you know, constellation stock price has done. I mean, that's the example I look at since it floated.

um you know it's just been phenomenal returns because of the preponderance of nuclear in its in its base. And that's a purely merchant generator. It's not even a regulated utility constellation. you know, phenomenal in terms of what it's done. But that just proves the value of nuclear, um, to all these folks. It's how do you get the assets on there? And, you know, interestingly

Through the investment that that EIP made in in in Elemental, we're exposed to a large number of those operating nuclear utilities. Um so we have that capability of uh of working with them and they're familiar with what we're doing. And, you know, in part uh validated what we're are claiming to do, which is to really, you know, span the void between The billions of dollars that have been invested by OEMs doing new designs and the gigawatts of demand required by hyperscalers.

How do you meet those two things and and us coming in the middle and making that happen is really what what Elemental's about. Are you tired of overpaying for big name PR firms but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks?

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All right, so I I wanna talk about project development for nuclear, because I think it's actually something that people Certainly we hadn't thought enough about before we started chatting with you folks and and getting involved with elemental.

It's different um and and distinct from project development of of a wind or a solar project, for example, or a battery project or even a a gas or or coal project. So you just give me a quick snapshot of like End to end, what does project development look like for new nuclear? Yeah, so we start off with and this is the first thing we did was we went out find a customer, somebody who's willing to say, I want twenty to thirty years of power at this price range.

and willing to put in a portion of the development capital. That was probably the first twelve months of our existence was doing that um with all the hyperscalers. Just Google happens to be the first one across the line um on it. And then working with them saying, Where do you need these assets? and working cooperatively with them and their host utility'cause many times they're building data centers where they have existing data centers and they know

the existing utilities. Um, you know, we're coming and saying we don't want to get between you and your customer. We just want to give you what your customer wants in a way that works for you as a utility. That's a very different model from what you saw, you know, in the late stages of fossil, which I participated in, which was basically if you build it, they will come. Um also with renewables, we're go out and get a plot of land, connect it.

and then go hunt for a PPA from somebody. We've reversed that process uh by putting the customer and the demand first, then finding a site, working with the utility. Go through the red flags analysis of it. Um, do it in a technology agnostic manner, uh, which you can do in the NRC process under an early site permit application. And then once that's in and you've gotten the site proven up from that perspective, and that's really the environmental um characteristics of it.

You then select the technology and do a construction permit that's particular to that technology. And that, you know, kind of brings us to, you know, say twenty five, twenty six, we're doing that first part, twenty six to twenty-eight, we're doing a construction permit.

you know, twenty nine we start construction and by thirty two, thirty three we're operating the plant. Um there's a lot more in there than what I just said obviously, but um, you know, it there's a lot of pieces to it. It's more akin to a fossil plant development.

Um, but just much more uh expensive because the amount of work you have to do with the regulator and the amount of design you have to have done and the fact that You know, unlike, you know, a a two on one C C G T which you can go out and talk to Siemens or GE or s you know, Alstom or whoever's out there doing those now. They have proven designs. We're still getting through that into the um development cycle for the new new technologies and nuclear.

You talk a little bit more about the site selection bit. Like what are the just at the high level, what are the the characteristics, what are the check boxes you have to check for a site to be suitable for new nuclear? So, you know, it comes down to which of the technologies by size you're looking at because generally size dictates how much fuel you have on the plant and the amount of fuel it tells you how much danger or risk you have.

Um so the smaller plant sizes, the small module reactors we're looking at for Google, you probably fit about a hundred acres or so uh or less. Um and you have no other uh consequences beyond that. But the sites have to be seismically, you know, qualified for the design you're building and some designs are more seismically robust than others. So you kinda have to envelope that part of it. Um you want to be sure you have access to transmission because uh I'll tell you that

You know, it's gonna be easier to permit and get a con a nuclear plant built than it is to get new transmission lines. And that's just historically how it's been, you know, everywhere I've been, whether it's in the US, the UK, Australia. uh over in Taiwan, uh Philippines. People think that somehow transmission is a uniquely American problem. Um, it's not. It's a challenge wherever you go because transmission lines are infrastructure that don't provide a lot of spin off economic development.

to the people whose property it crosses. That's just the fact of life. Um so you wanna be close to that. But fortunately in the US we have a pretty robust system where any former coal plant or any former large industrial site will typically have the nucle the uh transmission infrastructure necessary for it.

Um, so that's the key piece of it. And then beyond that, it's it's pretty much you can be in a lot of places. Um, and we have a proprietary system that we've developed through a number of different databases and and vendors. to rapidly just select down those sites that meet those criteria and then layering over it where is it that our customer wants to be in the utility they want to work with. Um and that's probably the interesting thing because people, you know, started off

Uh investors asking like, well, where what's the right place to be? And the answer is the right place to be is where our customer wants to be. Well, where do they want to be? And what we found is that there is some uh geography to it. They are more focused on who the utility is they're working with because they feel they have a better relationship with some utilities than others. Um, and you know, given that they're gonna be making these investments for assets that will provide benefit.

not only to the hyperscaler, but also to the rest of the grid. Because frankly, once you add a very robust nuclear plant to the system, it benefits everybody that's connected to it because of the reliability and the stability it brings to the grid.

Um, they want to make sure that they're getting proper benefit uh for that recognized on what they're doing. And, you know, some utilities are more evolved than others in in doing that, uh or the discussions between the hyperscaler and utility are more evolved uh in that regard. So, you know, that's kind of uh the process that we've been going through in a in the site selection. And, you know, I would say that finding sites hasn't been

the challenge, qu quite honestly. Um, it's making sure we know where the where the people want'em. Once they tell us where they need to be, we can find sight.

All right. I wanna get to the the I guess the last key questions about nuclear in the US, which are how much, when, and at what cost. Maybe we'll start with at what cost. Well you know, the the knock on nuclear in the US has been to the extent that we've done any of it, it's been it's ended up being very expensive.

cost overruns, et cetera, et cetera. And there's lots of different theories on how you drive down costs and lots of different examples from other countries, whether it's Korea or China or whatever it might be. Given your strategy, what is your thesis on how we get nuclear in the United States to be cheap enough to be economic for whoever the customer is. Obviously it's a different answer if you're Google or Meta or or whatever versus

uh versus somebody else. But like clearly we need to drive costs down. It's not entirely clear the first project anybody builds is going to be the cheapest. So what does it take? Is it just repeatability? Do the same reactor over and over again? Is it at a site level? Like what's your thesis on cost? Yeah, th th there's there's probably two levels to it. One is is repeatability, right? So just doing a one off design isn't gonna work. And so that's why it led us to the three projects with Google.

You know, is three a good number? Yes. Would five be better? Absolutely. Does it need to be five? It would be a bigger check for people to write to do that. So you kinda have to be constrained by what that part is. And, you know, to put it mildly, you can't do

enough large reactors in order, you know, and raise the capital to do it. It's just too much of a check to write uh to make it happen. So you need that repeatability because, you know, Google and everybody we've talked to recognizes that Okay, the first one is going to be more expensive than the second one than the third one. And, you know, if I have a project that has two units on a site, the first unit on a site's gonna be more expensive than the second unit on the site.

That was true for Vogel, that was true for Baraka, that's true for any single you know, any time you've looked at a construction at multiple of the same units in the same site. Units two, three, and four, you're amazed at how much less they are. Um, but it shouldn't be surprising'cause if you ever went to IKEA and bought like four pieces of furniture of the same type and constructed'em yourself.

The first one y you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you're missing. Uh the second, third and fourth ones, you're just knocking'em out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear and that's just been proven over and over and over again.

So, you know, I think the key thing is that the repeatability and going in there at the mindset of you're doing multiples on a site and multiple sites, um, really allows you uh to have the confidence because it's been demonstrated.

Uh even at Vogel, you know, Unit Four I think was forty percent less than Unit Three. I mean, just think about that, you know, part of it. So if you started off at Unit Four instead of Unit Three your example, you probably would have been okay. But that's not the way it played out. And then there's the site specific stuff which

you know, again, lessons learned is just make sure you have a good plan going in. And y we all know what a good project looks like. You have to go through and have the design complete, have the supply chain lined up and most importantly, have a plan for attracting the labor you need. When you start and keeping the labor there for the three years you need it.

Um, and that's, you know, not that hard. You just gotta be able to as an owner admit that if I have to pay a person five dollars extra an hour to keep them working in my project as opposed to going down to the data center project down the road. Then you pay that because if you don't

The cost for delay is not five dollars an hour, it's ends up being five times that. So it it's really kind of um having a plan and sticking to it and working with labor because that's the most uncontrollable aspect of this because, you know, we're a free country. And labor can go where it chooses to go. Um, you're not gonna prevent that. So your best goal is to make sure you incentivize them properly and and treat them well and you should have a successful project.

All right. So that gets to our final question, which is how much and when. Um, not specific to elemental, but what's your view? I mean, you you did mention some timelines for projects you guys are working on where you expect commercial operation in the early 2030s. Uh realistically, given what you see out in the landscape in general.

How soon do you think we could or will have new nuclear operating in the United States? And and how much can we get in like the timeframe that that matters to today's customers? Yeah, so you know our goal was to have a gigawatt under construction by twenty thirty, ten by thirty five, and a hundred gigawatts by twenty forty. Uh we're now looking at four point two gigawatts um under by twenty thirty. So we've already like quadrupled that or halfway there to our twenty thirty five goal.

Um, you know, I think realistically for commercial deployment, it's gonna be the early thirties. Uh OPG, it's just in Canada, so it's not part of the United States yet. It's Ontario Power Generation. at that. Ontario Power Generation. Uh up in Canada, they're talking about their first uh plant being a GEH uh BWX three hundred uh starting construction, construction uh nuclear safety related construction.

this month or next is what they had announced. They haven't announced it yet. Um and then being operational by twenty twenty nine, twenty thirty. So North America, that's the time frame. Um you have others like uh Dominion, Duke, TVA. AP. uh whole tech with their uh plant out of palisades, all talking about uh light water reactors, small ones in the twenty uh early twenty thirties time frame. So I I think that's still uh a pretty good uh prognostication on it.

in terms of when we'd expect to see it. Um arguably some are further ahead than others. Um but again it's it you know, whoever starts first doesn't mean they always finish first. Um but I think for a number of reasons we can see these folks being uh available and working uh those projects in the in the early thirties. And in terms of the cost, you know, the the first ones are gonna be expensive, but you know, overall we're looking at

Uh once you get down the curve of probably, you know, ten thousand dollars a kilowatt. So if you have a six hundred uh megawatt plant that'd be about six billion dollars, the first one might be, you know, fifteen, twenty percent more than that. the follow-on is going to be less and less and less. So, you know, we expect these to come down uh fairly dramatically over time um as we get through it.

Um but getting through the first one is key and and you know, we have a plan for doing that to be successful. And we have great support from, you know, folks like Google who recognize that, okay, I'm willing to accept the first one's gonna be more expensive. But I'm sure as heck not going to accept that the second and the third one cost the same. And and they won't. We're comfortable with that.

All right, Chris. Great to finally be able to talk about this publicly. Excited to go on this uh new nuclear journey with you for the next hopefully decade and not decades. Yeah. Well I've already been at it for fifteen, so it's another twenty or so, right? But uh yeah, I'm with ya. I expect to have ten gigawatts by twenty thirty five and you can hold me to it. Plan to. All right. Thanks, Chris. This is great.

Chris Colbert is the CEO of Elemental Power. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at PreludeVentures. com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquan.

Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Kahn, and this is Catalyst.