Uncapped #11 | Jordan Bramble from Antares

Jordan Bramble is the CEO of Antares, a nuclear energy company that has raised over $50M to become America’s industrial base partner for special-purpose microreactors. Antares focuses on high-value use cases in power-constrained environments that wouldn’t be possible without nuclear power. They are developing resilient fission-based power systems for critical assets for the Department of Defense on earth and in space. Unlike grid-scale reactors, these use cases primarily favor kilowatt-scale systems. This focus on non-commodity energy applications with smaller scale reactors will enable Antares to develop its first deployments on faster timelines with less research and development and capitalization risk. Antares also partners with commercial companies in extractive industries, edge computing, and space power, in turn bringing the benefits of commercial scale back to the DOD. We covered: History of nuclear Demand for nuclear Small modular reactors Government collaboration Building in hard tech Scaling nuclear reactors A few highlights: First nuclear reactor built under UChicago’s football field A nuclear powered airplane that could fly indefinitely Net zero not being possible without nuclear Powering the AI demand for data centers The Golden Dome and lasers in space Working back from the mission effect Interdisciplinary problems attracting talent --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:22) History of nuclear (6:50) Radical decline in development (10:51) Current appetite for funding (20:53) Small modular reactors (30:11) Selling to defense (34:30) LA becoming a hard tech hub (37:13) Fostering a culture in hard tech (43:42) How to scale nuclear reactors --- More on Antares: https://antaresindustries.com/ https://x.com/jordanbramble More on Uncapped: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod https://x.com/jaltma --- Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It was really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors between roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three cents in the US on the grid.

• 0:13Jack Altman?

  Wow. All right. Really excited to have this conversation with Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares. Jordan, thanks, Tom, for doing this conversation with me today.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:22Jack Altman?

  Yeah, we're going to 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?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Let's start from the beginning. So the first, you know, artificial, human-made nuclear reactor ever was the Chicago pile. So 1942, I think it was. 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 something like 45,000 graphite blocks in order to moderate neutrons. I want to say it was like 50 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, you know, first kind of academic research reactor ever built. And the motivation behind it was, was really the Manhattan Project was going on, right?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  So we're exploring nuclear fission for the development of weapons, but then later actually for the production of plutonium, because plutonium production is a byproduct of nuclear fission, uranium fission. So built, built a couple of reactors after that. And, you know, by 1945, 45, 47, so we're still in the 40s. We had plutonium producing reactors, both at Savannah River and at the Hanford site in Washington, all to support the weapons program. And then in parallel, a naval officer by the name of Hyman Rickover, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, and I also want to say 1945. So, you know, all these things are happening really fast at this point. He eventually became Admiral Rickover and is kind of the father of the nuclear navy.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  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 Sea Wolf, which was a sodium cooled reactor.

• 2:15Jack Altman?

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

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Certainly first naval application. We'll actually get into it. The first kind of, you know, power-producing, civilian power-producing reactor was actually a spin-off from a naval reactor corps that they didn't end up using. It was the shipping port reactor in Pennsylvania. They built it in like 18 months. It's just kind of a spin-off from the nuclear Navy programs. It's actually only a 60-megawatt reactor. Not long after that, we got the Yankee Row in Massachusetts, which I want to say is like 100-megawatts, 120-megawatts, something like that. So significantly smaller than what we built today. I imagine at some point, talk about small modular reactors. You know, one thing I would highlight is actually the kind of small concept is actually how we originally built reactors when we first started

• 3:00Speaker 00

  doing it. So the Sea Wolf and the Nautilus both ran for something like five years. The Navy eventually settled on the water-cooled reactor designs. And, you know, in part for just pragmatic reasons, they were easier to build. I mean, it was easier to conduct maintenance on. You know, also sodium like reacts violently with air and water. And submarines go underwater, right? So there's safety considerations as well. But, you know, maybe one of the things, kind of takeaways of all of this is the history of atomic energy actually came out of government-led, sort of military-focused programs. And that's where the commercial sector kind of originated from. So in parallel to all of this, you

• 3:42Speaker 00

  know, sort of mid 50s going into the 60s, the Air Force and NASA also had their own nuclear programs. So at the Nevada Test Site, which is where we tested, or historically tested our nuclear weapons, we had the NERVA program, which was a nuclear thermal rocket. So you circulate liquid hydrogen through a nuclear reactor and exhaust it out the back of a rocket engine. And it's like twice as propellant efficient as a chemical rocket. So you could get to Mars in half the time. We were actually building this stuff and testing it in the desert in the 50s.

• 4:16Jack Altman?

  Wow.

• 4:17Speaker 00

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

• 4:31Jack Altman?

  Wow. Did that area get built?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Ground tested 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. So there's some history there, but I don't think an actual nuclear powered airplane is ever flown, I'm pretty sure. Going into the early 60s, so we had the SNAP program, which produced a reactor called the SNAP 10A, which in 1965 was actually launched into space and is still up there to this day. So we as Americans publicly, you know, only ever launched one space reactor. The Soviets did something like 37, 38, 39, even going

• 5:15Speaker 00

  all the way into the late 80s, early 90s, where they would put fission reactors in orbit in very low earth orbit because they have lower drag than solar panels. And they would do, I believe it was, it was, it was radar either for detecting missiles or tracking ships. The RORSAT satellites. You know, going back to what I was saying earlier, really the, you know, the pressurized water reactor designs that, that ultimately ended up being commercialized originated out of the naval programs. 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, you know, things slowed down. We built something like 100 reactors

• 5:59Speaker 00

  between, you know, roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three cents in the US on the grid.

• 6:06Jack Altman?

  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?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  So BWXT primarily fabricates the fuel and other components of the reactors. And the reactors themselves have always kind of varied either between Westinghouse and General Electric that makes those.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  But you know, I want to say by the 50s or 60s, those, you know, those vendors were kind of baked in into those programs and they've always sort of split back and forth who's, who's, who's making the

• 6:43Jack Altman?

  And those companies are obviously much older than that.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, like 100 years old.

• 6:46Jack Altman?

  Right.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  General Electric may even be like 120 years old or something like that.

• 6:49Jack Altman?

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

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:53Jack Altman?

  Since then, we've slowed down wildly.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:55Jack Altman?

  Obviously.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:56Jack Altman?

  What was the climate? Like, why, why in your sort of, you know, telling of the history?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:02Jack Altman?

  Why did that happen?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  You know, there's a lot of different reasons that people will cite, and I almost think it's like over-determined in a way. It was kind of all of these different things happened at the same time. So, one, you know, we had, you know, a couple of safety incidents and the, you know, what was, so we didn't have a Department of Energy. We actually, actually had the Atomic Energy Commission. So, all, you know, what is now the DOE, all they did was nuclear energy. And they were, you know, for most of their existence, actually, all of these programs that I cited, they were involved, right? So they were both 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.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  And then they created a congressionally, 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, 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 1960s, 1950s, like R and D spend as like an overlay of the entire federal budget was something like, you know, it fluctuate between 12 and 15% or something like that. Today, it's probably around 3%. And those cuts really came in the early 1970s and it was, it was, um, some ways it's like 1971,

• 8:31Speaker 00

  we went off the gold standard. Not long after that, we had the, 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, right? Um, so like, you know, we sometimes talk about how did we do all these things in the 50s and 60s? Well, you know, if you adjust what we spent on nuclear thermal rockets back then to today's dollars, it would have been like $10 billion 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,

• 9:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:33Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:45Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 00

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

• 9:49Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Um, it's actually, you know, I would be hesitant to say that, like, you know, nuclear is going to, you know, startup nuclear is going to look just like SpaceX, where you, you know, you've got these companies building rockets. 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, 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.

• 10:18Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  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 re-catalyze that, right? Largely funded by private capital.

• 10:28Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  I've seen. A lot of people have talked about regulation and nuclear. They've talked about

• 10:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:45Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  And how we went from being something that was government-led to not really having a true private sector to to to kind of carry this, right?

• 10:51Jack Altman?

  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, the ether a lot. You see it in how venture is operating now.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:09Jack Altman?

  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?

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say we're seeing 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 far enough down that path that we've realized net zero is probably not possible without significantly more nuclear energy, right?

• 11:44Jack Altman?

  Probably fusion.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Or fusion. Well, fission is here today, right?

• 11:49Jack Altman?

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

• 11:54Speaker 00

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

• 11:58Jack Altman?

  Can do it at a large scale, yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, the benefit of fusion is, we'll set aside whether I agree with it or not, but the claimed benefits of of fusion are you can have a neutronic fusion reactions. So, you know, a lot of the problems that you get from nuclear fission, like how do you shield against radiation?

• 12:19Speaker 00

  What do you do with the waste products? You don't have as much of that in fusion, right? Problem with fusion is that it's, you know, perpetually 30 years away and you're working with novel materials in order to withstand the temperatures. 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.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  You know, just growth, right? So if you look, if you, if you look at like GDP per capita historically, it correlates directly with many kilowatt hours of, of energy we're able to consume per capita. And we, as Americans today, actually consume less energy per capita than our grandparents did. So we've gotten more efficient, 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. 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, you know, nuclear energy in many ways is another example of that. Like what we're seeing right now is an artificial intelligence.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  There's this new demand for infrastructure. We're going to need, you know, this large scale data center built out throughout the US. And the fundamental question is, how are we going to power it? Are we really going to build out all of this transmission? We're not going to 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 going to 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, we also went through this arc of, you know, cutting back federal programs.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  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. And then we ended up in the war on terror where, you know, in a lot of ways, like energy resilience was just not really a focus, right? We'd like fly diesel around on helicopters and stuff and, you know, just kind of do whatever it would take. But now, you know, we've reshifted our orientation where China is kind of the pacing factor for the war in the future. And it's forcing us to think a lot about energy resilience here in the homeland. So like the way we would conduct operations or the way we would defend this country, most of the assets for that are here inside of the US.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  And so, you know, an example I'll give is like our nuclear weapons, right? The ICBM silos were built in the seventies. We didn't have the internet back then, so like planning for a cyber attack 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.

• 15:15Jack Altman?

  Yep.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  You know, Vandenberg Air Force Base, 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, you know, even in times of whether it's a natural disaster or a cyber attack or something, 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? Which you aren't really seeing yet from some of these other markets. So there's a lot of hype about

• 15:57Speaker 00

  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, you know, broadly what's driving. And actually, I would add a fourth to that, which is, so I mentioned space nuclear earlier and how we did some of it in the 60s. We are seeing a lot of activity in space nuclear power and propulsion again. And in my view, the thing that is driving that is the weaponization of space, right? So we started the Space Force in 2018. It's now 2025. You know, we went from like the kind of first iteration of the Space Force was we're going to send a lot of mass to orbit so that like, you know,

• 16:38Speaker 00

  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 weapon systems in space.

• 16:51Jack Altman?

  It's funny because when Space Force was announced, I remember like a lot of people kind of, I feel at least my memory of it is people kind of made fun of it. Now it seems obviously important, not that many years later.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:01Jack Altman?

  There were all sorts of memes and stuff.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you go back to 2018 to 2020, what was one of the best like federal government decisions we made? I think creating the Space Force was, was, was probably one of them, if not the best one. Space is absolutely going to become a warfighting 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.

• 17:26Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 00

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

• 17:35Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Right. And so you would want to 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 want to 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 from orbit in orbit. You're now seeing General Whiting and General Saltzman stand up publicly and speak at conferences and say, you know, we need offensive capabilities in space. We need space fires, you know, weapons in space. And they even specifically say non-kinetic effects. So things like lasers, high-powered microwaves, particle beams.

• 18:16Jack Altman?

  Just zapping each other in space, basically.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And, you know, physics will tell us that once we are doing that, the way that you gain a competitive edge is to have more powerful beams. Right. And the way you do that is you generate more power.

• 18:31Jack Altman?

  Do they need to be more powerful than the ability? Like, once you can fry a satellite, like, why do you need to get more powerful at some point?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  You can engage over longer distances.

• 18:39Jack Altman?

  Got it.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:40Jack Altman?

  How far can these things go in space? Like thousands of miles kind of thing?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, about a thousand kilometers. So, you know, depending on how much power you're generating and the size of the spacecraft and 10 kilometers up to 1,000 kilometers. So, and actually, the president signed an executive order on, at the time, it was called Iron Dome for America. Now it's called Golden Dome. So it's sort of this return.

• 19:05Jack Altman?

  The Iron Dome of space.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's, it's, it's probably land, space, you know.

• 19:12Jack Altman?

  God, it's the whole thing.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Above, right? And we should actually get some guidance on what that architecture is going to look like in kind of the coming months or so. But one of the things that calls out in that executive order is space-based intercept. And the history of space-based intercept going back to the eighties was you would use things like particle beams or lasers in space to shoot down the reentry vehicles from ICBMs, right? So you disable them. You could make nuclear weapons obsolete. A lot of that same technology that was kind of, it was infeasible in the eighties because we didn't have the launch capability, the directed energy itself was too immature back then. If you shrink some of that down, you know, by like an order of magnitude, by a factor

• 19:56Speaker 00

  of 10, you know, it could be viable in the near term as like an ASAT, an anti-satellite capability. So you can talk about these things now. The military is starting to speak publicly about them. It becomes a no-brainer that you would want a nuclear power source to scale this technology up. And actually, again, if you look back at the history of it in the eighties, the vision was always kind of space reactors would be used to power these systems because if you look at a solar-powered system, how does mass scale against kilowatts of power generated? It's like a linear relationship with a solar-powered system. It's sublinear with nuclear. So, you know, as you get to like around 175 to 100 kilowatts or so, you end up with a

• 20:38Speaker 00

  spacecraft that's much more mass inefficient or much more mass efficient than doing it with solar.

• 20:43Jack Altman?

  Where you just start to get huge solar panels, basically.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, the International Space Station is about 100 kilowatts and it's like the size of a football field.

• 20:49Jack Altman?

  Wow.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And we had to construct it on orbit.

• 20:52Jack Altman?

  Right. Can you talk a little bit about 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, you know, the size of power delivery is, what's the technology going into them? What needs to happen from here to make this sort of feasible, you know, repeatedly?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe I'll take it back to the history again. So one thing I mentioned in the beginning is, so you'll hear different definitions from different people on what is a small modular reactor. Yeah, maybe we'll just kind of say. Sub 100 megawatts and below is an SMR. 100 megawatts and below? Yeah. And you know what we're doing, we like to refer to it as a microreactor, which again, there's different definitions from different people. Some people will say like below 20 megawatts is a microreactor. Some people will say below 10 megawatts is a microreactor. 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 200 and 300 kilowatts. Which is the equivalent of that, you know, 100, the football field of solar panels got you 100 kilowatts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  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. And this thing's how big? Just to put it in contrast to the football field. You could fit it on a truck bed, an 18 wheeler truck bed. Yeah. So about the size of a sedan. So it's a truck bed versus two to three football fields of solar? Yeah. For space, we would actually be developing something even smaller than that. Solar is something like 60 acres of land per, per megawatt, if I recall correctly. It's a microreactor, you could do something similar in like an acre to a half an acre. You know, going back to the original question on like SMRs. So, you know, the, the, the basic idea is in order to drive down the cost of electricity and make it competitive.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  You know, what we did in, in sort of the first arc of like grid scale deployment of nuclear was we just made these plants bigger and bigger, right? So the AP 1000 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 sense to do things in quick enough succession that like you can cultivate the workforce needed to do them efficiently. 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

• 23:25Speaker 00

  end up being like the vast majority of the, the total plant costs, right? So as you're selling electricity, like really what you're doing is paying up, paying down that upfront capex. So how do you solve this problem? One idea is 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. So that's generally the idea around SMRs. I would say with the larger SMRs, it turns out that they're generally not all that different than, like you're still end up doing a construction project. And so microreactors are sort of a recognition, no, let's make them even smaller such that they can be truly factory manufacturable, like the way we make cars.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  There are some people that would maybe make the claim that 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 the total plant cost. In a microreactor, it's probably more like 40 to 50% of the total cost. So we're not really sold, us at Antares, we're not really sold on, you can do microreactors at like 10 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 to do things that you can only do with nuclear. Right. And then there's all these factors where it's valuable that are not just about it being cheap. Yep. Resilience.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that's really what we've chosen to focus on as a business. Nuclear really struggles to compete in commodity markets. And also, I tend to think, this is just my philosophy, but like, spending a lot of capital to develop a product, then to turn around and sell it as a commodity is just not really an exciting business anyways. So what we've done is we've really tried to say, what are the use cases? What are the opportunities where there's some mission effect, some outcome that's really valuable to the end payer, and you can only do it with nuclear. And you will pay a premium to have that. And that's really been our focus. And commercial applications, we're a dual use company, there's commercial applications, but in the near term, we're really excited

• 25:35Speaker 00

  about military and DoD nuclear, both earth and space. What we found by and large when we were getting started is a lot of the mission critical facilities or critical assets on our military installations are actually kilowatt scale. Or you need megawatts of power, but it's distributed in some way. And so you would actually benefit from having multiple hundreds of kilowatt systems deployed on an installation.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Generating power close to the point of need. You know, it's very unlike what a lot of the other sort of commercial or other developers that came before us are focused on, right? The use cases that we're most excited about broadly, what I'll say is a lot of it is missile defense related.

• 26:15Jack Altman?

  Uh huh.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  So, you know, I think I mentioned earlier, like Vandenberg, you know, we have our ground-based intercept silos. Those need to be able to launch regardless of whether there's commercial power or not.

• 26:23Jack Altman?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Uh, in the Arctic, we have our missile warning radars. So we have the, the long range radar sites that, that dot the Arctic.

• 26:31Jack Altman?

  And Arctic, this way you don't have to like bring diesel up and down all the time.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you even look at like civilian communities in those regions, they often, many of them rely on diesel and they pay like 60 to 80 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. You can definitely do microreactors that are competitive with that. So it's like, even though it's premium power, it actually is competitive with like the commercial markets and some of those environments. One of the things that we found was when we really indexed, you know, kind of as much of these different assets as we could find in the DOD, um, there's really an opportunity to build like thousands of these one day. That's, that's the scale of, of what's out there. Um, and then, you know, you add in space and other opportunities as well, where we kind of hit on it earlier, right? Like if, if, if you want to power, you know, a hundred kilowatt laser, uh, or something like that on orbit, nuclear is really the best technology that you have to do it.

• 27:18Jack Altman?

  In the word, you know, SMR, there's like modular.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:22Jack Altman?

  I'm curious about like, what are the like the breakpoints of the technology? You know, like the company that makes something that does a hundred kilowatts, you know, you could do 200, like 300, like where do you, where are the moments where you switch over and say like a whole different architecture is best?

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:37Jack Altman?

  When you get to a different size of like energy delivery.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  It does depend on the design itself. Um, so in our case, we're a heat pipe cooled design. And I would argue it is single-handedly the best technology for, you know, very small reactor designs like ours, the best coolant technology.

• 27:54Jack Altman?

  Can you share what that is? The heat pipe?

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a heat pipe, um, they were actually invented in the, and I want to say 1958, um, maybe it was the early sixties, but, um, they were actually invented at Los Alamos National Lab specifically for space nuclear. So the idea is, uh, it's a pipe with a vapor chamber and then in the, in the inner lining of the pipe, there's, um, like a WIC structure. And there's a working fluid in it. So in our case, it's sodium. Reactor heats up, sodium vaporizes, which causes it to travel down the pipe and move heat as it does so. And it gets to the cool end of the pipe, it condenses again and capillary forces, so surface tension in the wick actually brings it back. And that cycle just repeats and the pipe gets to one consistent temperature and you're just relying on phase change to move heat.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  So there's no pumping. There's kind of no active mechanism to do that. It's like a fascinatingly simple technology, yet the physics is complicated. And the other thing I think is really cool is despite being invented for space nuclear, there's copper water heat pipes in your laptop. They're in our smartphone. Like it's like a ubiquitous technology. Heat pipes are being used in radiators on satellites in space. You know, it's kind of started from nuclear and then branched out into many different applications. But another thing that we really like about it is, you know, we build them ourselves and test them ourselves. And it's fast and iterative. It's very unlike, you know, going out and having to design a new turbo pump every time you want to change something in your design.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  So it allows us to iterate much faster on electrically heated prototypes. You know, the issue with them is as you scale these designs up, you end up with just a lot of metal in your core that eats neutrons. And it just becomes less efficient. So the reactor size just kind of explodes as you go to larger, larger sizes. And so you typically want to move to another coolant. So different reactor designs have a different degree of scalability in them themselves. But what we can do is we can actually pair these systems up into a bank of systems as well. Right? So if you needed a couple of megawatts of power, you know, we could put, you know, let's call it three to six of them together, right? In a, in a bank. Those are kind of the options that you have.

• 30:09Jack Altman?

  Cool.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:11Jack Altman?

  So as you think about like selling to defense, I'm curious what you've learned, what goes into this? You know, obviously this is like a very hot area right now.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:21Jack Altman?

  Probably second after AI is like defense and American dynamism. And obviously the way that you need to work, both with the product you're building and who the customer is, is very different than like building a SaaS app and selling it 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?

• 30:39Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny that you mentioned SaaS apps because I actually do think. There is an opportunity to bring more like kind of like product style thinking that exists in SaaS to hard tech. It's 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? Which is hard, by the way, because like, how do you get people to talk to you when you don't have a technology yet? But like, you also want to build the right technology for them in the first place.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  For us, that was kind of like an iterative, like credibility building exercise where like, you know, you start out, yeah, some questions and then you come back with something. And then like, over time, people get comfortable with you where they can kind of chart your progress, right? So I would just say like, obsessing over the problem, the end user is extremely important. You know, working backwards from like, 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. Right? There literally is not one. There is 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. Right? Someone else is going to be responsible for buying it.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  And then there's probably people in the Pentagon that have some kind of policy or regulatory oversight where they serve some planning function that decide when those budgets exist for, uh, you know, ultimately an office to be able to buy it. 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'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 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?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  There's a lot less market risk in doing that. Problem though is, um, once those markets are baked, there's like 50 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 predictable way to win is you just do something absolutely transformational.

• 33:12Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  So 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 develop an information edge where you have some insight into how the budgets are going to evolve in years to come. And then you can be developing a product before the market is really there, right?

• 33:35Jack Altman?

  Does the fact that it's 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?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  I think you really have to. Yeah. I actually think this is really important in defense tech because one way to think about a program office and the DOD is like you just think of it like, like sales channels. There's a lot of work that goes into getting your foot in the door. But once you've established a relationship, you know, they could be 10, 20, 30 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.

• 34:15Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 00

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

• 34:19Jack Altman?

  That's what it seems like. So much of the work is not just about this project at this time. It's about partnering with them to like really help them solve some large set of problems, probably around some center.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Yep, exactly.

• 34:30Jack Altman?

  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?

• 34:48Speaker 00

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

• 35:00Jack Altman?

  Primes?

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Well, that, but. You know, Hughes Aircraft was started there, right? The South Bay of LA has just always sort of been a hub of 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 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 owned for manufacturing.

• 35:27Jack Altman?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  It's 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. 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 kind of key advantages that the city has, right? 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 in, in LA, even as it pertains to nuclear. So we talked about the NERVA programs, the nuclear thermal rockets.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Those, the rockets were actually built by, so Westinghouse made the reactors, but Aerojet made the rockets at the Azusa plant, you know, kind of in the LA suburbs and then sent them out to the Nevada test site. I also mentioned Snap10A, the reactor that went to space, that was actually built in the Santa Susana Hills. And they did other ground tested reactors there too. We didn't really get into this, but the army actually had a nuclear power program that ran from like the 50s into the early 70s. And it was another one that was kind of cut when, when we had budget austerity. One of the things they prototyped was a potential mobile reactor called the ML-1. It was brought to Idaho National Lab, but either the reactor or at least a significant

• 36:54Speaker 00

  amount of the componentry was also built by Aerojet at the Azusa plant. So there's just always been a, 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?

• 37:10Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  It's really hard to undo those things.

• 37:12Jack Altman?

  Totally. I guess maybe that. Kind of goes into my next question, which is around like the type of company culture, you know, and I, you know, last was a software company. I've spent a lot more time with software companies and 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. When you think about, you know, building a hard tech company,

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:34Jack Altman?

  Working with defense, you know, doing nuclear energy. There's always things that are really different, like the timelines are very long, the stakes are very high. It's serious work. There's science involved or, you know, there's engineering involved. What are the things that you found most notable about building the team, the culture, the operating cadence?

• 37:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:13Jack Altman?

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

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:18Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 00

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

• 38:22Jack Altman?

  Or there's a fire overnight or something.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just do whatever you can to keep up, right? 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 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 2027. You know, very ambitious. We talk about that timeline every single day.

• 38:49Jack Altman?

  So, you know, in some 2027 sounds futuristic, but it's not that long from now.

• 38:52Speaker 00

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

• 38:53Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  We talk about it every single day. We 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 we say just make it happen. And it's kind of a recognition that like

• 39:14Jack Altman?

  It's good.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  The industry's 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. 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 is Congress not already appropriated more funds? Why is the DOD not already doing more to buy this technology? And overwhelmingly,

• 39:40Speaker 00

  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. And I think there's something like really powerful and exciting about that to come in and think about that every day.

• 40:03Jack Altman?

  For sure.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  The other cultural thing I think about a lot is what we do is incredibly multidisciplinary. So, um, yes, there's nuclear engineering, but there's material science, there's thermodynamics, turbo machinery, electrical engineering, structural engineering. Like if you can, I mean, we develop in-house software. If you can name an engineering discipline, you probably have to do it to build a reactor. There's competing priorities between all of those different disciplines, right? So like, the reactor design that's the best on paper from an economics or performance perspective, when you just look at neutron economy from a nuclear engineering perspective, is almost never, perhaps universally never, the reactor

• 40:48Speaker 00

  design that's going to be the most manufacturable and the quickest to build, right? So you always have a tension between those different groups. So one thing that's, um, we think a lot about is like, you know, how do we make sure that, um, like there's no like priest class, right? Like everybody has an equal voice. We also have this cultural value that we say let great ideas beat great arguments. And so like, we really try to deliberately bring things back to the, yeah, the, you know, the, the idea itself, the merit.

• 41:17Jack Altman?

  It should be how well somebody argued something.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 41:19Jack Altman?

  Yeah. I used to always say that like, uh, a very persuasive person with a bad idea is super dangerous.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  A hundred percent agree. Yeah. Especially in something like this where there's so much like interdisciplinary complexity, you know, you almost have to force yourself to argue like the other person's perspective, right? And I think you just make better decisions when you do that. So we've really tried to be deliberate about that.

• 41:40Jack Altman?

  How do you find and assemble like the teams for all of this? It's so interdisciplinary. There's such, you know, deep knowledge in various areas. There's government, there's, you know, there's all this different stuff. Like how are you, how are you spending time figuring out how to assemble these teams, given the wide range?

• 41:57Speaker 00

  So we talked earlier about like, what are the things that are driving this new interest in nuclear, right? So one of the things that I think is just amazing, so rewarding, so inspiring about what we're doing is, you know, this technology has great national security implications. It's going to make us a safer, more powerful country, you know, it will be a part of the solution to climate change. It's also going to expand, you know, humanities reach into space. Can you name another technology that allows you to do all of those things that you get to come in and work on?

• 42:31Jack Altman?

  Pretty hard.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Pretty hard, right? So the mission is like incredibly inspiring to a lot of people.

• 42:36Jack Altman?

  Yes, that I have a company where you don't have to work very hard to explain why this is important versus, you know, with other companies, you have to like really go to great lengths to get the mission to resonate. This one, it sort of speaks for itself.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of the people that we get that show up are default missionary, right? Like they, they, they want to work on something that's incredibly inspiring and motivating. And you often want to do it at the intersection of like hard and interesting technical challenges, which I kind of got at earlier, like the interdisciplinary nature of this and the complexity of it is a lot of what makes it really fun to come in and, and, and work on every day. So, you know, we did an onsite interview recently where someone works at a really awesome company currently, but like the technology problems are kind of already solved, like not the best use of a skill set anymore and loves that like there's true novelty in what we're doing. We lead with that a lot. And then the other thing is, um, you know, we're a two-year-old company at this point.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  I'm incredibly proud of the progress that we've made in a really short amount of time. You can look at our momentum and compare it to some of the other like options in the nuclear industry and we kind of stand out in that regard, right? So I think that's like pretty exciting and appealing to a lot of people.

• 43:42Jack Altman?

  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 nother problem for like, you know, three years from now, Jordan?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  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. For small reactors, the reason we're seeing this new customer demand 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 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 93% capacity factors. It's like the highest uptime of it of any energy production method that we have, right? So the expectation is microreactors are going to have that. They're not going to have that right off the bat, right? We're going to have to have like iterative

• 44:40Speaker 00

  development cycles to get to that. So, you know, we see ourselves building multiple test reactors and using the first test reactor to actually drive down the costs in 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, kind of large grid scale reactors, you can't really do that, right? Because you might need, you know,

• 45:11Jack Altman?

  billions.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  $10 billion just to get to a first of a kind. It's really hard to then say, we're going to turn around and then do the next thing after that. And, you know, maybe this time we won't need 10 billion, but we're still going to need like five, right?

• 45:20Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  But in parallel to that, yeah, we see ourselves scaling up manufacturing as well. And we eventually want to be able to make like, you know, over a hundred of these a year, which, you know, again, for us is, you know, that's like 30 megawatts a year of production. So it's, it's, you know, it's crazy kind of in volume of assembly, but not crazy in terms of the size of, you know, power that's being produced.

• 45:42Jack Altman?

  Awesome. Well, it's a, 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.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.