Why the US Needs Nuclear Energy | Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares | Ep. 11

1. 0:00 – 0:22

   Intro

   1. JBJordan Bramble0:00

      It was really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We, we built something like a hundred, uh, reactors, uh, between, you know, roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three since in the US on the grid.

   2. JAJack Altman0:13

      Wow! [upbeat music] All right. Really excited to have this conversation with Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares. Jordan, thanks a ton for doing this conversation with me today.

   3. JBJordan Bramble0:21

      Thank you for

2. 0:22 – 6:50

   History of nuclear

   1. JBJordan Bramble0:22

      having me.

   2. JAJack Altman0:22

      Yeah. We're gonna talk all about nuclear today. Maybe before we get into it, could you give me, like, a little overview of, like, the nuclear market, the history in the US, you know, what's happened over previous decades, and kind of catch us up to speed on where we are today?

   3. JBJordan Bramble0:35

      Let's start from the beginning. So, um, the first, you know, artificial human-made nuclear reactor ever was, um, the Chicago Pile. So 1942, I think it was. Um, they actually built it at the University of Chicago, underneath of the football field, so, you know, right in the city, in the middle of Chicago. And the idea was you stacked, um, something like forty-five thousand graphite blocks in order to moderate neutrons. Um, I wanna say it was, like, fifty tons of natural uranium in order to sustain a critical reaction, and they actually only produced, like, a half watt of power. But that was the first, um, you know, first kind of academic research reactor ever built. Um, and the motivation behind it was, was really, um, uh, the Manhattan Project was going on, right? So we were exploring nuclear fission for the development of weapons, but then later, actually for the production of plutonium, because plutonium production is a by-product of nuclear fission, uh, uranium fission. So built, built a couple of reactors after that, um, and, you know, by 1945, um, '45, '47, so we're still in the '40s, um, we had pu- plutonium-producing reactors, both, um, at Savannah River and at the Hanford site in Washington, all to support the weapons program. And then in parallel, uh, an, a naval officer by the name of Hyman Rickover, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program in, I, I also want to say 1945. So, you know, all, all these things are happening really fast at this point.

   4. JAJack Altman1:59

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JBJordan Bramble1:59

      He eventually became Admiral Rickover, and is kind of the father of the nuclear navy. You know, 1952, we had the first nuclear submarine, so the Nautilus, which was a water-cooled reactor, and then in parallel to that, they built the, um, the Seawolf, which was a sodium-cooled reactor.

   6. JAJack Altman2:15

      That was the first non-weapon application of nuclear, was submarines?

   7. JBJordan Bramble2:19

      Cer- certainly first, first naval application. We'll actually get into it. The first, uh, kind of, you know, power-producing, civilian power-producing reactor was actually a, a spin-off from a naval reactor core that they didn't end up using. It was the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania. Uh, they built it in, like, eighteen months. So it's kind of a spin-off from, uh, the, the nuclear navy programs. It's actually only a sixty-megawatt reactor. Not long after that, we got the, uh, Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts, which, which I wanna say was, like, hundred megawatts, hundred and twenty megawatts, something like that. So significantly smaller than what we, um, what we build today. I imagine at some point, talk about small modular reactors. You know, one thing I would highlight is actually the, the kind of small concept is actually how we originally built reactors-

   8. JAJack Altman2:59

      Mm

   9. JBJordan Bramble2:59

      ... when we first started doing it. So the Seawolf and the Nautilus both ran for something like five years. Um, the Navy eventually settled on the, um, uh, the water-cooled reactor designs. Um, and, and, you know, in part for just pragmatic reasons, they were easier to build, um, it was easier, easier to conduct maintenance on. You know, also, sodium, like, reacts violently with air and water-

   10. JAJack Altman3:20

       Mm

   11. JBJordan Bramble3:20

       ... and submarines go underwater, right?

   12. JAJack Altman3:21

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JBJordan Bramble3:21

       So there's safety considerations as well. But, you know, maybe one of the things, kind of, kind of takeaways of all of this is, um, the history of atomic energy actually came out of government-led, sort of military-focused programs, and that's where the commercial sector, um, kind of originated from. So in, in parallel to all of this, um, you know, sort of mid-'50s going into the '60s, um, the Air Force and NASA also had their own nuclear program. So at the Nevada test site, which is where we test, uh, or historically tested our nuclear weapons, um, we had, uh, the NERVA program, which was a nuclear thermal rocket. So you circulate, um, hydro, uh, um, liquid hydrogen through a nuclear reactor and exhaust it out the back of a rocket engine. Uh, and, um, it's, like, twice as propellant-efficient as a chemical rocket, so you could get to Mars in half the time.

   14. JAJack Altman4:13

       Mm.

   15. JBJordan Bramble4:13

       So we were actually building this stuff and testing it in the desert in, in the '50s-

   16. JAJack Altman4:16

       Wow

   17. JBJordan Bramble4:17

       ... um, going, going through the '60s. We also had, uh, Rover and Pluto, which were, um, like, nuclear-powered jet engines. Um, the Air Force actually looked at developing a nuclear powered, um, uh, airplane, which could basically stay in the air indefinitely.

   18. JAJack Altman4:32

       Wow.

   19. JBJordan Bramble4:32

       Um, and then-

   20. JAJack Altman4:33

       Did that ever get built?

   21. JBJordan Bramble4:35

       Uh, ground tested. And, and we also... There are examples where we flew airplanes with operating nuclear reactors on them to, like, you know, shield the pilots and just kind of test all of that. Um, so there's some history there, but I don't think an actual nuclear powered airplane has ever flown, I'm pretty sure. G- going into the early '60s, so we had the SNAP program, which, uh, produced a reactor called the SNAP-10A, um, which at, uh, in 1965, uh, was actually launched into space and is still up there to this day. Um, so we, as Americans, publicly, you know, only ever launched one space reactor. Um, the Soviets did something like thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, um, even going all the way into the late '80s, early '90s, uh, where they would put, um, fission reactors in orbit, in very low Earth orbit, because they have lower drag than solar panels. Um, and they would do... And I believe it was, it was, it was radar, either for, um, uh, detecting missiles, uh, or tracking ships, um, uh, the, the RORSAT satellites. You know, going back to what I was saying earlier, really, the, um, you know, the pressurized water reactor designs that, that, um, ultimately ended up being commercialized originated out of the naval programs. Um, it's kind of, you know, generally what we have on the grid today, the light water reactors and the PWRs. It was really around the 1970s that, um-... you know, things slowed down. We, we built something like a hundred, uh, reactors, uh, between, you know, roughly nineteen fifty and the early nineteen seventies. I think we've built and turned on three since in the US on the grid.

   22. JAJack Altman6:06

       Wow! BWXT, the company that produced, I guess, all or the majority of those nuclear, you know, reactors for the Navy, when did that get going? Was that around the same time?

   23. JBJordan Bramble6:16

       So BWXT primarily fabricates the fuel and other components of the reactors, and the reactors themselves, um, have always kind of varied either between, um, uh, Westinghouse and General Electric, uh, that, that makes those. Um, but, you know, by the-- I want to say by the fifties or sixties, um, those, you know, those vendors were kind of baked in into those programs, and they've always sort of s- split back and forth who's, who's, who's making the reactors.

   24. JAJack Altman6:43

       And those companies are obviously much older-

   25. JBJordan Bramble6:45

       Yeah.

   26. JAJack Altman6:45

       -than that. Yeah.

   27. JBJordan Bramble6:45

       Like a hundred years old.

   28. JAJack Altman6:46

       Right.

   29. JBJordan Bramble6:47

       General Electric may even be, like, a hundred and twenty years old or something like that.

   30. JAJack Altman6:49

       Yeah.

3. 6:50 – 10:51

   Radical decline in development

   1. JBJordan Bramble6:50

      Yeah.

   2. JAJack Altman6:50

      And so, so we had this period where we're building a ton.

   3. JBJordan Bramble6:52

      Yep.

   4. JAJack Altman6:53

      Since then, we've slowed down wildly-

   5. JBJordan Bramble6:55

      Yeah.

   6. JAJack Altman6:55

      -obviously.

   7. JBJordan Bramble6:56

      Yep.

   8. JAJack Altman6:56

      What was the climate like? Why, why-

   9. JBJordan Bramble6:58

      Yeah

   10. JAJack Altman6:58

       ... in your sort of, you know-

   11. JBJordan Bramble7:00

       Yeah

   12. JAJack Altman7:00

       -telling of the history-

   13. JBJordan Bramble7:02

       Yeah

   14. JAJack Altman7:02

       ... why did that happen?

   15. JBJordan Bramble7:03

       You know, there's a lot of different reasons that people will cite, and I almost think it's, like, overdetermined in a way. It was kind of all of these different things happened at the same time. Um, so one, you know, w- we had, um, you know, a co- a couple of safety incidents and, um, the, you know, what was-- So we didn't have a Department of Energy. We act- actually had the Atomic Energy Commission. So all... You know, what is now the DOE, all they did was nuclear energy.

   16. JAJack Altman7:29

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JBJordan Bramble7:30

       And they were, um, you know, for most of their existence, actually, all of these programs that I cited, they were involved, right? So they were both, um, the regulator and the builder at the same time. Eventually, you know, Congress decided that's probably not the best from a safety perspective, and then, you know, the AEC became the Department of Energy, and then they created a congressionally, uh, an independent agency, the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to have regulatory oversight over nuclear energy development. At the same time that we were getting a new regulator, we were also losing demand for nuclear. So historically, uh, n- you know, nuclear had kind of been catalyzed by the government, by government funding. And if you, if you go back in time to the nineteen sixties, nineteen fifties, like, R&D spend as like an overlay of the entire federal budget, was something like, you know, it would fluctuate between twelve and fifteen percent or something like that. Today, it's probably around three percent, and those cuts really came in the early nineteen seventies, and it was, it was, um ... Some ways, it's like nineteen seventy-one, we went off the gold standard. Not long after that, we had the-- or, or really at the same time, we had the, like, Iran energy crisis with the hostage crisis. Uh, interest rates were skyrocketing, you know, service payments on the federal debt went up, and so this was like just budget austerity.

   18. JAJack Altman8:48

       Mm.

   19. JBJordan Bramble8:48

       Right? Um, so like, you know, we sometimes talk about how did we do all these things in the fifties and sixties? Well, you know, if you adjust what we spent on nuclear thermal rockets back then to today's dollars, it would have been, like, ten billion dollars in today's dollars. We just-- we're not doing large government-led programs of that scale anymore. Um, in fact, the naval nuclear program, as it exists today, I would, I would almost view as a little bit of a remnant of that era, where, you know, it's tens of billions of dollars, you know, earmarked for those programs. They have dedicated nuclear energy labs, where we have national lab employees that are solely focused on serving the Navy. Um, Oak Ridge and Idaho National Lab, both, both also have a dedicated workforce focused on naval reactors. They come up with the designs in-house, then they bring in their vendors, and it's like, you know, billions of dollars to make these, right?

   20. JAJack Altman9:33

       Yeah.

   21. JBJordan Bramble9:34

       Um, it's kind of unlike the broader discourse around defense tech now, where, um, you know, it's more like, how do we get venture capital into this so that, so that, you know, private capital is sharing some of the cost of tech maturation with the taxpayer?

   22. JAJack Altman9:45

       Yeah.

   23. JBJordan Bramble9:46

       You know, that's happening for the first time in nuclear now.

   24. JAJack Altman9:49

       Yeah.

   25. JBJordan Bramble9:49

       Um, it's actually... You know, I would be hesitant to say that, like, you know, nuclear is g- y- y- you know, startup nuclear is gonna look just like SpaceX, where y- you know, you've got these companies building rockets. It- it's, it's, it's a very different technological development arc, but, you know, sort of the starting point is very similar, right? Where we had the Apollo program in space, just like we did with the Manhattan, uh, pr- project, largely government-led, right? Lots of taxpayer dollars that go into this, uh, and then, you know, for various reasons, we just stopped doing it.

   26. JAJack Altman10:18

       Yeah.

   27. JBJordan Bramble10:18

       Right? And so we stagnated in our ability to send tonnage to orbit, to send people to space, and it took decades for SpaceX to come along and finally recatalyze that, right? Largely funded by private capital.

   28. JAJack Altman10:28

       Yep.

   29. JBJordan Bramble10:28

       I've seen a lot of people have talked about regulation in nuclear. They've talked about, um, kind of public sentiment, right? Like, environmentalists killed nuclear. But I've seen very few people really comment on the, the kind of financial changes that we went through in the seventies-

   30. JAJack Altman10:45

       Yep
4. 10:51 – 20:53

   Current appetite for funding

   1. JBJordan Bramble10:51

      carry this, right?

   2. JAJack Altman10:51

      Yeah. I want to get into the technological arc that we're kind of on, but maybe right before that, now fast-forward to today, it does feel like there's now, like, a much, you know, bigger drive for nuclear. You hear it in the sentiment, in the ether a lot. You see it in-

   3. JBJordan Bramble11:06

      Mm-hmm

   4. JAJack Altman11:06

      ... how venture is operating now.

   5. JBJordan Bramble11:08

      Yep.

   6. JAJack Altman11:09

      What's sort of the lay of the land at the moment in terms of, like, what the appetite is for investment from, you know, the, the public sector, both in terms of, you know, the demand for it and, like, the willingness to sort of fund these efforts and things?

   7. JBJordan Bramble11:23

      Yeah, I would say we're seeing may- maybe three different drivers of this. One has kind of arisen more out of the, like, what is going to be our solution to climate change? I think we've, as a society, we've gone f- far enough down that path that we've realized net zero is probably not possible without significantly more nuclear energy, right? Um-

   8. JAJack Altman11:44

      Probably fusion, or-

   9. JBJordan Bramble11:46

      Fission.

   10. JAJack Altman11:47

       But-

   11. JBJordan Bramble11:47

       Uh, well, fission i- is here today, right?

   12. JAJack Altman11:49

       But do we need fusion to get there, or even fission has a path to get us to that kind of environmental impact?

   13. JBJordan Bramble11:54

       Oh, we can certainly do it with just fission, right? Um, I mean, fission is carbon-free power.

   14. JAJack Altman11:59

       Can do it on a large scale.

   15. JBJordan Bramble11:59

       Yeah. Yeah, the benefit of fusion is, uh, we'll set aside whether I agree with it or not, but the claimed benefits of, of, of fusion are, um, you can have aneutronic, uh, fusion reactions. So, um, you-... you know, a lot of the problems that you get from nuclear fission, like, uh, how do you shield against radiation? Um, uh, what do you do with the waste products? Um, y- y- you don't have as much of that in fusion, right? Problem with fusion is that it's, you know, perpetually thirty years away, and y- you're working with novel materials in order to withstand the temperatures. Um, and those are kind of all unsolved technical problems that exist, right? You know, the kind of answer to climate change is, is sort of the first part of that. The, the second one is, um, you know, just growth, right? So if you look- if you, if you look at, like, GDP per capita, historically, it correlates directly with, um, how many kilowatt hours of, of energy we're able to consume per capita. Um, and we, as Americans today, actually consume less energy per capita than our grandparents did. So we've gotten more efficient, um, but we actually haven't really been able to drive new progress through unlocking new things with energy. You know, some would say we've picked all of the low-hanging fruit, but, like, I would disagree with that. Um, you know, like, like, Peter Thiel has spoken a lot about this. We, we actually travel slower on airplanes than we did in the 1970s. Like, we used to have supersonic travel, now we don't, right? So n- you know, nuclear energy, in many ways, is another example of that. Like, what we're seeing right now is in artificial intelligence, there's this new demand for infrastructure. We're gonna need, you know, this large-scale data center build-out throughout the US, and the fundamental question is: how are we gonna power it? Are we really gonna build out all of this transmission? Uh, we're not gonna do it with solar and wind because the energy density is just not high enough to support that level of infrastructure, so people are looking at nuclear again, right? And now you're seeing companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, they all have internal programs focused on, you know, how are they gonna partner with the advanced nuclear industry and buy and deploy these reactors. And then the third maybe driver, I would say, is national security. So when the Cold War ended, w- we also went through this arc of, you know, cutting back federal programs. So when Clinton was president, you know, really cut back a lot of defense spending from where it was historically, and nuclear was actually particularly affected by that. Um, and then we ended up in the war on terror, where, um, it, it-- you know, in a lot of ways, um, like, energy resilience, uh, was just not really a focus, right? We'd, like, fly diesel around on helicopters and stuff and, you know, just kinda do whatever it would take. But now, you know, we've reshifted our orientation, where China is, uh, kind of the pacing factor for the war in the future, and, um, it's forcing us to think a lot about energy resilience here in the homeland. So, like, the way we would conduct operations, uh, or the way we would defend this country, most of the assets for that are here inside of the US. And so, you know, an example I'll give is, like, our nuclear weapons, right? The ICBM silos were built in the '70s. We didn't have the internet back then, so, like, planning for a cyberattack on the civilian grid wasn't really a thing that you had to plan for. Now you do. You know, all of our targeting and command and control, those run on, you know, compute facilities that also have to be able to operate, even if there is no commercial power.

   16. JAJack Altman15:15

       Yep.

   17. JBJordan Bramble15:15

       You know, Vandenberg Air Force Base, uh, we host our ground-based interceptors there, which is how we would defend against incoming missile attacks. Same thing, right? That's also where national security space launch takes place. We launch things to space there. We need to be able to do that, um, you know, even in times of whether it's a natural disaster or a cyberattack or something, um, you know, you need that mission assurance. You know, broadly, the DoD has started to think a lot more about energy resilience. You know, one of the things I would highlight about that as it pertains to nuclear is, like, the DoD is spending dollars on supporting tech maturation in this industry today, right? Um, which you aren't really seeing yet from some of these other markets. So there's a lot of hype about the data center nuclear opportunity. I think it's a great opportunity, but they're not really spending real money yet, right? Whereas the DoD is. So, yeah, I would say that's, that's, you know, broadly what's driving... Um, and a- actually, I would add a, a fourth to that, which is, so I mentioned space nuclear earlier and how we did some of it in the '60s. Um, we are seeing a lot of activity in space nuclear power and propulsion again, and, um, in my view, the thing that is driving that is the weaponization of space.

   18. JAJack Altman16:24

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JBJordan Bramble16:24

       Right? So we started the Space Force in 2018. It's now 2025. You know, we went from, like... The, the kind of first, um, iteration of the Space Force was: we're gonna send a lot of mass to orbit so that, like, y- you know, if our adversaries take out our critical assets on orbit, we can reconstitute. We've got redundancy, we've got survivability in numbers, and now it's very much moved to, like, you can publicly talk about putting weapons systems in space, which-

   20. JAJack Altman16:51

       It's funny 'cause when Space Force was announced, I remember, like, a lot of people kinda-

   21. JBJordan Bramble16:54

       Yeah.

   22. JAJack Altman16:55

       I feel, at least my memory of it, is people kinda made fun of it. Now it seems obviously important, not that many years later.

   23. JBJordan Bramble17:01

       Yeah.

   24. JAJack Altman17:01

       There were all sorts of memes and stuff.

   25. JBJordan Bramble17:03

       Yeah, if you go back to twenty, twenty eighteen to twenty twenty, what was one of the best, like, federal government decisions we made? I think creating the, the Space Force was, was, was probably one of them, if not the best one. Space is absolutely going to become a war-fighting domain, right? Like, if, if, if we went to war with another great power, the first thing they would do to us, and one of the things we would try to do to them is, you know, we do targeting from space, right?

   26. JAJack Altman17:26

       Yeah.

   27. JBJordan Bramble17:26

       We detect inc- incoming missiles from space, communications, GPS, everything that you rely on to fight a war is in space now.

   28. JAJack Altman17:35

       Yeah.

   29. JBJordan Bramble17:35

       Right? And so you would wanna be able to take that out. Doing that by launching missiles from the ground is bad, creates debris fields, which can disrupt the commercial sector in space. It's also really expensive. You wanna be able to drive down the cost of that and do it in maybe a way that has less long-term lasting impacts, right? And so that means increasingly being able to generate those effects, um, from orbit and orbit. You're now seeing General Whiting and General Saltzman stand up publicly and speak at conferences and say, you know, uh, "We need offensive capabilities in space. We need space fires, you know, weapons in space," um, and they even specifically say non-kinetic effects, so things like lasers-

   30. JAJack Altman18:14

       Yeah
5. 20:53 – 30:11

   Small modular reactors

   1. JAJack Altman20:53

      a little bit about, um, the technology of, like, small modular reactors? Just like, you know, this is obviously what you're building, but can you give us a little bit of the context on what this size-

   2. JBJordan Bramble21:04

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JAJack Altman21:05

      -you know, this size of power delivery is?

   4. JBJordan Bramble21:07

      Right.

   5. JAJack Altman21:07

      What's the technology going into them? What needs to-

   6. JBJordan Bramble21:09

      Right

   7. JAJack Altman21:10

      ... happen from here to make this sort of feasible, you know-

   8. JBJordan Bramble21:13

      Yep

   9. JAJack Altman21:13

      ... repeatedly?

   10. JBJordan Bramble21:14

       Yeah, maybe I'll take it back to the history again. So o- one thing I mentioned in the beginning is, so you'll hear different definitions from different people on what is a small modular reactor. Um, yeah, maybe we'll just kind of say sub one hundred, a hundred megawatts and below is, is, is an SMR.

   11. JAJack Altman21:29

       A hundred megawatts and below?

   12. JBJordan Bramble21:30

       Yeah. And you know what we're doing, um, we like to refer to it as a micro reactor, which, um, again, there's different definitions from different people. Some people will say, like, below twenty megawatts is a micro reactor. Some people will say below ten megawatts is a micro reactor. You know, you're seeing people develop it, you know, single-digit megawatts now. We're, we're actually a kilowatt scale system, so targeting between two hundred and three hundred kilowatts, um-

   13. JAJack Altman21:51

       Which is the equivalent of that, you know, a hundred... the football field of solar panels got you a hundred kilowatts.

   14. JBJordan Bramble21:56

       Yeah.

   15. JAJack Altman21:57

       Okay.

   16. JBJordan Bramble21:57

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. JAJack Altman21:57

       Yeah.

   18. JBJordan Bramble21:57

       I mean, nuclear energy is one of the most power-dense forms of energy that, that, you know, known to man, right, that we have available to us.

   19. JAJack Altman22:03

       And this thing's how big? Just to put it in contrast to the football field.

   20. JBJordan Bramble22:07

       You could fit it on a truck bed.

   21. JAJack Altman22:08

       Truck bed.

   22. JBJordan Bramble22:08

       An eighteen-wheeler truck bed.

   23. JAJack Altman22:09

       Yeah. Okay.

   24. JBJordan Bramble22:10

       Yeah. Um, so about the size of a sedan.

   25. JAJack Altman22:12

       So it's a truck bed versus two to three football fields of solar.

   26. JBJordan Bramble22:15

       Yeah.

   27. JAJack Altman22:16

       Yeah.

   28. JBJordan Bramble22:16

       For space, we would actually be developing something even smaller than that. Solar is something like sixty acres of land per, per megawatt, if I recall correctly. So micro reactor, you could do something similar in, like, an acre to a half an acre. Y- you know, going back to, um, the original question on, like, SMRs, so, you know, the, the, the basic idea is, um, in order to drive down the cost of electricity and make it competitive, um, you know, what we did in, in sort of the first arc of, um, like, grid-scale deployment of nuclear, was we just made these plants bigger and bigger, right? So the AP One Thousand is a gigawatt-scale plant. What's kind of plagued the industry, and so this sort of goes back to, like, what killed nuclear originally. I would argue that, you know, we had, like, a multi-decade loss of demand, which really killed a lot of the workforce and, you know, we lost the ability to, to do these things. And we've never had enough demand since to do things in quick enough succession that, like, you can cultivate the workforce needed to do them efficiently.

   29. JAJack Altman23:13

       Mm.

   30. JBJordan Bramble23:14

       So you get cost overruns. Construction, you know, takes two to three times as long as, you know, it's originally planned to be. If you look at grid-scale nuclear, like, financing costs and the construction costs end up being like, the vast majority of, you know, the, the total plant costs, right? Um, so as you're selling electricity, like, really what you're doing is paying up-- paying down that upfront CapEx. So, um, how do you solve this problem? One idea is, uh, you make these systems much smaller, such that they can just be fabricated in a factory and then sent out to the site with minimal site prep and construction, right? So that's generally the idea around, um, SMRs. I would say with the larger SMRs, it turns out that they're generally not all that different than, um, like, you're s- still end up doing a construction project. And so microreactors are sort of a recognition that, "No, let's make them even smaller, such that they can be truly factory manufacturable, like the way we make cars," right? There are some people that, that, that, you know, would maybe make the claim that, um, making reactors in that way is actually going to make them cost competitive against grid-scale nuclear. It's really heavily dependent on the fuel cycle, because in a grid-scale reactor, the fuel cost is like a single-digit percentage of, of the total plant cost. In a microreactor, it's probably more like forty to fifty percent of the total cost. So, you know, we're not really sold, um-... um, us at Antares, we're not really sold on, you know, you can do microreactors at, like, ten cents a kilowatt hour anytime soon. But what we're convicted about is, like, there's actually a very, very large market for expensive power-
6. 30:11 – 34:30

   Selling to defense

   1. JAJack Altman30:11

      So as you think about, like, selling to defense, I'm curious what you've learned, what goes into this.

   2. JBJordan Bramble30:17

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JAJack Altman30:17

      You know, obviously, this is like, um, a very hot area right now.

   4. JBJordan Bramble30:20

      Yeah.

   5. JAJack Altman30:21

      Probably second after AI is, like-

   6. JBJordan Bramble30:23

      Yep

   7. JAJack Altman30:23

      ... defense and-

   8. JBJordan Bramble30:24

      Yeah

   9. JAJack Altman30:24

      ... American dynamism, and obviously the way that you need to work, both with the product you're building and who the customer is, it's very different than, like, building a SaaS app and selling it- [chuckles]

   10. JBJordan Bramble30:32

       ... to a SaaS customer, you know? So, like, what, what have you sort of experienced so far, and what does it take to sort of work with, like, the DoD?

   11. JAJack Altman30:39

       You know, it's funny that you mention SaaS apps, because, um, I actually do think there is-

   12. JBJordan Bramble30:45

       ... an opportunity to bring more like, kind of like product style thinking that exists in SaaS to hard tech. So like one of the things that we found to be very successful is, you know, we don't just come in and like, sell a box of power and, you know, try to get someone to figure out what to do with it. Like, we actually invested a lot of upfront effort with many of the folks we work with in the military and like, understanding what problem that they're trying to solve in the first place. We actually started doing this before we even had a reactor design, right? Um, which is hard, by the way, because, like, how do you get people to talk to you-

   13. JAJack Altman31:16

       Totally

   14. JBJordan Bramble31:16

       ... when you don't have a technology yet, but like, you also want to build the right technology for them-

   15. JAJack Altman31:20

       Yeah

   16. JBJordan Bramble31:20

       ... in the first place? For, for us, that was kind of like an iterative, like credibility-building exercise, where like, y- you know, you start out, you ask some questions, and then you come back with something, and then, like, over time, people get comfortable with you, where they can kinda chart your progress, right? So I would just say, like, obsessing over the problem, the end user, is, is extremely important. You know, working backwards from like, what, what mission effect is trying to be created here. The hard part about selling to defense is, is, like, there is no like, customer persona.

   17. JAJack Altman31:48

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   18. JBJordan Bramble31:49

       Right? There literally is not one. There's, like, an end user who is a beneficiary of your product. They may, you know, either benefit from it or use it in some way, but they're not the person that buys it.

   19. JAJack Altman32:00

       Mm-hmm.

   20. JBJordan Bramble32:00

       Right? Someone else is going to be responsible for buying it. Um, and then there's probably people in the Pentagon that have some kind of policy or regulatory oversight, or they serve some planning function that decide when those budgets exist for, uh, you know, ultimately an office to be able to buy it. Uh, and then Congress has a say in that, too. And so a lot of what you do is actually you connect the dots, right? Which, um, there, there's kind of different philosophies on defense tech. One is all of that is really, really hard. So rather than like, have to do all of that, what y- you do is you just, you know, you look at the budget justification books that get published every year, and there's kind of a three-year budget forecast in there, and you just look at what is the DoD already going to be spending money on, and, you know, which of those programs do you think have lasting effect, and you just go build something that you can sell to one of those, right? There's a lot less market risk in doing that. Problem, though, is, um, once those markets are baked, there's like fifty other companies that are trying to do the same thing. And I tend to think if you look at, like, the history of companies that have been really awesome, like venture returns, they were doing something transformational, right? Like, that's the only... Like, that's the only predictable way to win, is you just do something absolutely transformational.

   21. JAJack Altman33:12

       Yeah.

   22. JBJordan Bramble33:13

       So I, I tend to think the way to do defense tech is you definitely don't just, like, show up with the best product in the world and say: You know, "How do we spend years getting someone to buy this?" Because that doesn't work. But rather, you, you develop an information edge where you have some insight into how the budgets are gonna evolve in years to come, uh, and then you can be developing a product before the, be- be- before the market is really there, right?

   23. JAJack Altman33:35

       Does the fact that it sort of like, starts with like, a mission that they're trying to accomplish, and then you're working backwards, does that lead to you naturally building multiple products over time?

   24. JBJordan Bramble33:46

       I think you really have to, yeah. Um, I, I, I actually think this is really important in defense tech because one way to think about a program office in the DoD is, like, you just think of it like, um, like sales channels. There's a lot of work that goes into getting your foot in the door, but, um, once you've established a relationship, you know, they could be ten, twenty, thirty-year relationships that you're compounding on top of, right? It's actually like, high value and smart to find a way to get your foot in the door, start solving a problem for them-

   25. JAJack Altman34:16

       Yeah

   26. JBJordan Bramble34:16

       ... and then figuring out what the synergies are between that and other things that you're doing.

   27. JAJack Altman34:19

       That's what it seems like 'cause so much of the work is not just about this product at this time. It's about partnering with them to, like, really-

   28. JBJordan Bramble34:26

       Yeah

   29. JAJack Altman34:26

       ... help them solve some large set of problems, probably around some center.

   30. JBJordan Bramble34:29

       Yep,

7. 34:30 – 37:13

   LA becoming a hard tech hub

   1. JBJordan Bramble34:30

      exactly.

   2. JAJack Altman34:31

      Why do you think LA has become such a hub for hard tech? Is it related to this at all, where there's, you know, some deep set of learnings and relationships that are required or some set of people, or is it an ethos, or like, what's happening that's making LA seem to become, you know, such a hotbed for hard tech companies right now?

   3. JBJordan Bramble34:49

      I would say it's, it's kind of all of the above. Um, a lot of people will say SpaceX is there, and you've got spin-a, spin-offs from SpaceX, but I would say actually go back further, like, why was SpaceX there, right?

   4. JAJack Altman35:00

      Primes.

   5. JBJordan Bramble35:01

      Well, that, uh, but, you know, it's Hughes Aircraft was started there, right? Um, the South Bay of LA has just always sort of been a, a hub, uh, Boeing, right? Always been a hub of aerospace and defense. The workforce is already there, right? It's like one of the... You know, if you look for, like, a machinist, weld- welding workforce, it's, like, one of the largest in the country, in the South Bay of LA. The availability of industrial real estate that's zoned for manufacturing-

   6. JAJack Altman35:27

      Mm-hmm

   7. JBJordan Bramble35:27

      ... um, is one of the best places in the country. A lot of people don't think that when they think LA, but, like, it's just-- and it's been that way since, since, you know, the Cold War, the end of World War II. Um, you've got the Port of Long Beach there, right? So SpaceX and other companies are making rockets. They're sending them down to the port. They go through the Panama Canal, and then they make it to the Cape. You know, it's workforce, it's industrial real estate, it's, you know, some of the other just, um, kinda key advantages that the, the city has, right? I, I think if you really studied it, like, probably even like, the roadways and the interstate highways there are just, like, better for trucking than, like, doing it in San Francisco, for instance, right? You know, I think there's some really interesting history, uh, in, in LA, even as it pertains to nuclear. So we talked about the NERVA programs, the nuclear thermal rockets.

   8. JAJack Altman36:09

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JBJordan Bramble36:09

      Those, the rockets were actually built by, um... So Westinghouse made the reactors, but Aerojet made the rockets, uh, at the Azusa plant, um, you know, kind of in the LA suburbs, and then sent them out to the Nevada test site. Uh, I also mentioned SNAP-10A, the reactor that went to space, that was actually built in the Santa Susana Hills. Uh, and they did other ground-tested reactors there, too. Uh, we didn't really get into this, but the Army actually had a nuclear power program that ran, um, from, like, the '50s into the early '70s. Um, and it was another one that was kinda cut when, when we had budget austerity. Um, one of the things they prototyped was a potential mobile reactor called the ML-1.... it was, uh, brought to Idaho National Lab, but either the reactor or, you know, at least a significant amount of the componentry was also built by Aerojet at the Azusa plant. So there's just always been a-

   10. JAJack Altman36:59

       Yeah

   11. JBJordan Bramble37:00

       - kind of a deep history around these things that, you know, we've, we've probably both heard people talk about the history of Silicon Valley and why it has such staying power, and it's really just, like, the network effects and the natural advantages that compound, right?

   12. JAJack Altman37:10

       Yeah.

   13. JBJordan Bramble37:10

       It's really hard to undo those things.

   14. JAJack Altman37:12

       Totally. I guess

8. 37:13 – 43:42

   Fostering a culture in hard tech

   1. JAJack Altman37:13

      maybe that kind of goes into my next question, which is around, like, the type of company culture.

   2. JBJordan Bramble37:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JAJack Altman37:18

      You know, and I, uh, you know, Lattice was a software company. I spent a lot more time with software companies than here, and there's a certain cadence to those companies. There's a certain culture, and obviously each one's different, but there's things in common.

   4. JBJordan Bramble37:29

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JAJack Altman37:29

      When you think about, you know, building a hard tech company-

   6. JBJordan Bramble37:33

      Yep

   7. JAJack Altman37:34

      ... working with defense, you know, doing nuclear energy, there are all these things that are really different. Like-

   8. JBJordan Bramble37:39

      True

   9. JAJack Altman37:39

      ... the timelines are very long, the stakes are very high.

   10. JBJordan Bramble37:41

       Yep.

   11. JAJack Altman37:41

       It's serious work. There's science involved. There, you know, there's engineering involved. What are the things that you found most notable about building the team, the culture-

   12. JBJordan Bramble37:51

       Right

   13. JAJack Altman37:51

       ... the operating cadence?

   14. JBJordan Bramble37:52

       You know, our market, defense, typically slow. Nuclear, also typically slow. And it's the total opposite... Like, maybe the extreme other end of the spectrum is like if you work at a marketplace business, like Doordash or something, and, like, when those kind of companies work, the pace of the company is largely dictated by the customer, right? Like, the customer is just pulling you to move as fast as you possibly can to keep up.

   15. JAJack Altman38:13

       Yep.

   16. JBJordan Bramble38:14

       Um-

   17. JAJack Altman38:14

       It's like you get a network effect going, and you're just, like, holding on for dear life.

   18. JBJordan Bramble38:18

       Yeah.

   19. JAJack Altman38:18

       Yeah.

   20. JBJordan Bramble38:18

       And, like, you go to sleep, and then you wake up the next day with more work than you had the day before.

   21. JAJack Altman38:22

       Yeah. Or there's a fire overnight or something like that.

   22. JBJordan Bramble38:23

       Yeah, you just do whatever you can to keep up, right?

   23. JAJack Altman38:26

       Yep.

   24. JBJordan Bramble38:26

       Businesses like ours, I think the locus of control is actually much more internal, right? Like, you set the pace, right? You dictate it. And, you know, maybe the mindset shift is like, you have to be doing ev- things every single day, small things, to, like, make things go faster. So, you know, we have long timelines to develop a product. We want to turn a reactor on by end of twenty twenty-seven. Um, you know, very ambitious. Um, we talk about that timeline every single day.

   25. JAJack Altman38:49

       Sound- you know, and some of... twenty twenty-seven sounds futuristic, but it's not that long from now.

   26. JBJordan Bramble38:52

       It's not that, not that far away, right?

   27. JAJack Altman38:53

       Yeah.

   28. JBJordan Bramble38:54

       Um, we talk about it every single day. We, um, break down a lot of our technical development into smaller milestones that we're using to just create a constant sense of urgency. So a lot of the culture building is really around creating and cultivating this sense of urgency. One of my favorite values that we have is, um, we say: Just make it happen. And it's kind of a recognition that, like-

   29. JAJack Altman39:14

       It's good

   30. JBJordan Bramble39:14

       ... the industry is slow. The customer is not going to drive our pace. It's actually up to us to come in and do something every single day to drive the pace. Um, the interesting thing about this too is, you know, what I've come to really believe is, like, why is there not already more money for nuclear in the federal budget? Why has Congress not already appropriated more funds? Why is the DoD not already doing more to buy this technology? And overwhelmingly, you know, the feedback that we've received and what we think the answer is, it's actually just the tech isn't built yet. It's just not mature enough for them... Like, when you're planning your budgets three years out, you're not really gonna set aside large amounts of money until you know that you're gonna be able to buy something, right? And so the speed at which we move is what is ultimately going to cultivate our market. Um, and I think there's something, like, really powerful and exciting about that, to come in and think about that every day.
9. 43:42 – 45:53

   How to scale nuclear reactors

   1. JBJordan Bramble43:42

      of people.

   2. JAJack Altman43:42

      On that pacing thing, once you get a nuclear reactor turned on for the first time, does scaling up go quickly from there, or do you need, like, a lot of time then to, like, get into, like, the manufacturing side? And is that, like, a whole another problem for, like, you know, three years from now, Jordan?

   3. JBJordan Bramble43:58

      Definitely another problem, but one of the things that, um, you know, I'll just kind of tie it back to the customer. The, the reason, um, for small reactors, the reason we're seeing this new customer demand, um, is, you know, it's resiliency, right? And what that, what that often means is... Like, when someone says: I want resilient energy, and they want nuclear, uh, to be the solution to that, what that often means is they're familiar with the fact that our grid-scale nuclear power plants have, like, ninety-three percent capacity factors. It's, like, the highest uptime of a- of any energy production method that we have, right? So the expectation is microreactors are gonna have that. They're not gonna have that right off the bat, right? We're gonna have to have, like, iterative development cycles to get to that. Um, so, you know, we see ourselves building multiple test reactors and using the first test reactor to actually drive down the cost and the timeline of doing the second and the third, which, by the way, is another huge benefit of building such a small-scale system, is we can build our first reactor and iterate to the second and third with, like, sums of money that are very reasonable to raise with venture capital. If you start with, like, the, you know, SMRs, hundreds of megawatts, um, kind of large grid-scale reactors, you can't really do that, right, because you might need, you know-

   4. JAJack Altman45:11

      Billions

   5. JBJordan Bramble45:12

      ... ten billion dollars-

   6. JAJack Altman45:12

      Yeah

   7. JBJordan Bramble45:12

      - just to get to a first-of-a-kind. It's really hard to then say, "We're gonna turn around and then do the next thing after that," and, you know, maybe this time we won't need ten billion, but we're still gonna need, like, five, right?

   8. JAJack Altman45:21

      Yeah.

   9. JBJordan Bramble45:21

      But in parallel to that, y- yeah, we see ourselves scaling up manufacturing as well. Um, and we eventually wanna be able to make, like, you know, over a hundred of these a year, um, which, you know, again, for us is, you know, that's like thirty megawatts a year of production. So it's, it's, it, it, you know, it's crazy kind of in volume of assembly, but not crazy in terms of the size of, uh, you know, power that's being produced.

   10. JAJack Altman45:42

       Yeah. Awesome.

   11. JBJordan Bramble45:42

       Yeah.

   12. JAJack Altman45:42

       Well, it's, uh, it's very inspiring. Yeah, this conversation was awesome. I really appreciate you making time to, to have it. And yeah, thanks for spending the hour.

   13. JBJordan Bramble45:49

       Thanks for having me. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 45:53