00:43:12 · Chris Wright
[00:43:12] S1: I think all of these things get cheaper at scale. Scott's innovating. He's going to find a new way to enrich uranium. It's going to be different than it's done before. As he scales up his business, his cost to deliver his product is actually going go down. And the whole idea of small modular reactors is everything in our lifetimes that is built in a factory has become cheaper and faster to build. When you stick build something on location, those things have become more expensive and slower. That's a long story behind that. But the more you can build in quantity in manufacturing facilities, we're very good at driving the cost of those down. So to build nuclear systems and nuclear supply chain at scale, I think that's the road to lower cost. Why were the last two plants we built in The U. S, the Vogtle three and four expensive? Well, we hadn't built any plants in decades and we tried to stand up a supply chain to build two reactors and then all the jobs went away. So as we look at it long term, that scale you're talking about decades ahead, that's the way to build nuclear power plants cheaper. That's the way to build natural gas and fuel cells cheaper. That's the way to build energy storage cheaper. I think it's going to be the pathway to lower cost and certainly as a percent of people's incomes, think the cost of electricity and energy are going to decline meaningfully in the next ten or twenty years. Again, not a trajectory of the Biden administration, but that has been a mindset of the Trump administration, and I am seeing it bipartisan. Democrats in the Senate, Democratic governors, I think common sense is catching on that, you know, the worshiping at energy subtraction and energy fear mongering. That still exists, but it's more in small corners now. Most common sense is catching on. People realize Americans are mad at expensive electricity, and they're mad at their jobs going overseas. They just want lower prices and higher wages. You know? That's that's the Trump administration agenda, and it doesn't sound like it should be controversial.
00:45:08 · Scott Nolan
[00:45:08] S2: Yeah. I think the people... The thing people are also realizing is it's just really hard to predict what it's going to be. People wouldn't have predicted that fuel cells are going be used to harness energy from natural gas. They did predict that it would actually be much more about intermittent and renewables. And then it turns out that we need a lot more baseload, we need a lot of just energy growth. So I think the mistake is often in trying to overprescribe what the answer is without knowledge of what's coming next. It's just very, very hard to predict. And so you have to let the market figure it out for itself and let the market actually do these things, like scale the production. You know, the second Vogtle plant was much, much cheaper than the first, and the third would have been cheaper than that. And so how get do to a world where we're producing much more of these things and actually hitting the scale effects of factory built reactors, of factory built anything? This is the future that we're preparing for, so acknowledge it is very hard to predict what's going to happen if you're not driving it personally. The thing we're driving is nuclear. So our bet, to your question, like, what are we looking at ten, twenty years out if we're talking about 10x power consumption, another 10x, another 10x, I I... You know, I'm forced to acknowledge that one approach to this is orbital data centers. I worked at SpaceX early in my career. That's one angle is you just say, we're gonna go to an entirely new paradigm, and we're going orbital. We're gonna go sun synchronous satellites. We're gonna build them, and we're gonna do everything there and harness the sun's energy. That's a good approach if you can do it, and I think only SpaceX is set up to do that right now. I think for everybody else, the answer is going to be you do it on the ground, you find ways to get more baseload, and the thing we're trying to help with is nuclear. And so how do we scale nuclear? And so the thing the thing we're focused on is fuel in our case. And I think just to get to, like, the exponential numbers topic... Because you could say, well, okay. Can we get a second facility online? Right now, there's one in The US and New Mexico run by a European consortium. Makes about a quarter of what The US needs. And so you say, Okay. Well, maybe we'll have a second one.
00:47:21 · Scott Nolan
But now we're still only at half what The US needs. And then you look at US' allies. Our closest allies consume about as much nuclear fuel as The US does. And so we're at a quarter today, but we're really only at an eighth of what us and our allies need if we wanted to provide them with it. So now we're talking 8x. And then the Biden administration wanted to triple nuclear. A lot of countries signed up to do that by 2050. The Trump administration has said we wanna 4x by then. So now you're talking over 30x. And then you say, okay. Just to kinda meet US and its allies by 2,050, if we're gonna 4x, you have to 30x enrichment production in the country, which is the sort of thing we're trying to think through, how do we plan for that and how do we do that? But maybe forex isn't the real number. Maybe it's like... Maybe with with the energy consumption numbers we're looking at, maybe it's really like nuclear either works and the cost comes down and it's one of the cheapest sources of baseload or it's not. And if it is, is 4x the right number or is 10x or is 50x or is 100x? So you start thinking in these orders of magnitude and you realize, Wow, there's so much opportunity to just produce much, much more. Even in this niche piece of the nuclear supply chain that a lot of people don't think about, we have room for 10, 100x growth on U. S. Soil by European countries is doing today. So back to the exponential numbers, it's just dramatic what the opportunity looks like and how many areas there are going to be for people to build new businesses and just contribute to really getting that curve from flat the last few decades to just almost vertical.
00:48:55 · Chris Wright, Scott Nolan
[00:48:55] S1: Scott, repeat that punchline again. A lot of people look at me and say, we can't even enrich uranium. How are we gonna grow our nuclear power thing? And, well, if you if you can, you can produce enough for today, but you can't meet the future. You just said, and you're right. We don't know the future. If the demand is just awesome, very real possibility, it's 100x, you can do that. Right? Right? This is America. [00:49:15] S2: Yeah. No... I mean, no reason you can't. It's an immense amount of hard work. So you look at, like, space lines. [00:49:19] S1: You could 100 times increase the capacity to enrich uranium in The United States.
00:49:25 · Scott Nolan
[00:49:25] S2: Yes. Fantastic. Yep. I mean, you won't do it at one facility. You'll do it at a number of facilities. That's what we're planning out, thinking far ahead of where we're going and identifying those sites that we can build that sort of capacity. But, just as an example, you had The U. S. Back in early 2000s, something like 20% of global launch capacity. And we were launching, let's see, probably tens of rockets per year maximum. Not even that. Single digits many years. And then SpaceX came and said, Well, the issue is it's not cheap enough. The U. S. Is not competitive. Not just that. Okay, there's a baseline goal of make The U. S. Competitive again, bring it back. That's a good goal. That's very strategic for The US. But on top of that, the goal of SpaceX was let's make space actually something that we go do. Like, you look back to the fifties, sixties, it was supposed to be two things, nuclear and space. Those were the areas where you're gonna get an immense amount of growth and these new possibilities that people couldn't even imagine. So on the space side, it was, how do we do that? We make it much cheaper. And so SpaceX has gone from something like, I believe it was like 10 launches in their first ten years, roughly one launch a year, to now over 100 Falcon nine launches per year. And with Starship, the launch count will get to that level. It will eventually get to more than that level, but more importantly, the capacity is just dramatically, dramatically larger. So The US went from sub 20% of launch capacity worldwide to now over 90% of mass to orbit. I think we can do that in a bunch of industries. And the thing is, it's gonna come down to private sector thinking through how do we drop these costs down, how do we do this in a really commercial way where we can outcompete every country even if they may have subsidies. But it's gonna require a ton of innovation. And for SpaceX, that's been almost a twenty five year story.
00:51:14 · Ty Morse
[00:51:14] S0: Especially with Space Launch and Elon, he's kind of thought out a few years about where do we need to take this. And even if maybe there's not necessarily demand to ship, you know, thousands of satellites to orbit, We're just gonna build the capacity and then just believe that the demand will, like, materialize in effect. How do you kind of do things in parallel? You're turning on your first plant in 2030. Are you gonna start building a second plant or start, you know, working on the second plant now so that you can basically turn on the second one in 2032?