Atomic Opportunities: Investing in the Nuclear Renaissance

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  Speaker 1:
  Nuclear is having its moment. It is a headline topic here in the United States, everywhere from the congressional floors to the executive boardrooms, and maybe even some dining room tables. It is also a headline here in the investor community. And that is what we are going to talk about today. Welcome everyone to Atomic Opportunities: Investing in this Remarkable Nuclear Renaissance. I am Pete Mathias , a partner here at Alumni Ventures. Alumni Ventures is one of the more active investors in nuclear over the last years, and we are one of the most active backers of American innovation on the planet. We are thrilled that today before all of you, we are welcoming four leaders, even luminaries, in the nuclear renaissance. These are builders, these are backers, and we are going to discuss everything from the transformative role that nuclear is playing in our collective quest for cleaner, more sustainable energy.

  We are going to discuss nuclear in the context of geopolitical tensions. We’re going to cover nuclear innovation categories from SMRs — small modular reactors — to fusion. We are going to discuss novel stresses on the energy grid, things that put extraordinary stress — like AI — onto our grid. And we are going to do so with a practical mindset. We’re going to discuss some of those hurdles from regulatory to safety, to waste management and commercial viability. So we are going to cover it all and because that’s a lot of ground, let’s get started.

  So first, some quick disclosures. This presentation is for information purposes only and is not intended as an offer to sell securities. So with that we can continue on to the agenda. We’re going to give a quick primer on Alumni Ventures and the team before all of you, and then we’re going to jump right into it — get into the panel discussion with our four very, very special guests and some questions from you all.

  So first and foremost, the team in front of you — you are seeing three individuals who have had lifetimes dedicated to U.S. interests. We are all investors. We are also inspired citizens. We’ve done everything from work with the State Department in Russia to help with the reunification and the rebuild of Germany at the tail end of the Cold War, even into building up entrepreneurial endeavors ourselves in the areas of policy and security.

  That is the U.S. Strategic team. Moving forward to the initiative and the community itself — we are part of the U.S. Strategic Tech Community and Fund here at Alumni Ventures. This is dedicated, laser-focused on backing critical areas of U.S. technological advantage and interests. All of the ventures that are part of this family of investments — they’re all fortifying national needs. They are all emerging tech sectors, and they are all built for lasting impact.

  So we will tell you a little bit later about how to get involved if this piques your interest as a potential participant, community member, investor — but it is a big and exciting initiative.

  So with that, now on to the main show. It is my pleasure and privilege to introduce four extraordinary guests — as I said, builders and backers in this new nuclear movement.

  Our first, Yasir Arafat, is the co-founder and CTO of Alo Atomics. Yasir is a recognized leader and pioneer in the field of microreactors. He is our voice today of the engineers and the scientists out there and a true luminary building in fission. Yasir, we look forward to welcoming you shortly.

  Next, we have an extraordinary CEO and founder in the AV portfolio — Thea Energy’s Brian Berzin. Brian is at the helm of one of the most exciting fusion startups out there. He is also the voice of not only an engineer mindset, but also the entrepreneur — the builder — as well. We look forward to welcoming Brian momentarily.

  Next up, we have Julia. Julia is our voice for the investor community. She is a senior associate at one of the most exciting national security funds out there, Decisive Point. And there she is focused on critical technologies that span defense, that span energy, and that span infrastructure. We’re really thrilled to have Julia in a moment.

  And last, our voice of the commercial market frontier — we have John. John is a former chief strategy officer for Energy and Resources at Microsoft, and just an extraordinarily versatile commercial mindset in nuclear.

  So with those four, we have an extraordinary group of perspectives for an exceptionally timely discussion about the nuclear renaissance. Our moderator today is Drew, and so I’ll hand it over to Drew to give some more context and a welcome to the four panelists and a thank you to everyone for joining.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, thanks Pete, and thanks again for everyone that’s joining. We truly have a great panel here, so I just want to make sure we get all of our panelists on — and it looks like we do. So let’s get things moving.

  We’re going to try to keep things pretty lightning fast and quick and give you this crash course in nuclear energy and where it stands in the global landscape — where we’re at today, kind of where it’s been, and where we’re going.

  So we’re going to save some of the technical details — there’s a lot of great resources out there. We’re happy to send out some materials afterwards if you really want to dive into how any of this stuff works. We’re going to skip that for today.

  A good anchor point for today’s discussion: we’re amidst this trillion-dollar energy transition that Pete mentioned. Corporations and governments are looking for cleaner, more sustainable forms of power generation. We’re also seeing governments and government agencies think about energy independence and resilient energy supply chains. And nuclear has the potential to play a major role in solving all of these challenges.

  So to kick things off, we’re going to do a question for the whole group. Give us one reason why nuclear. Brian, let’s start with you.

  Speaker 3:
  So at a fundamental level, nuclear — and I’m going to put the flag up for fusion here — is responsible for practically all energy here on Earth and everything that we know. All you have to do is look up in the sky — maybe days other than the eclipse — and see the sun working. And the sun currently has a monopoly on fusion in our little neck of the woods in our solar system. It works very efficiently at the center of the sun.

  When you have a ball of hydrogen fusion fuel burning at a hundred million degrees Celsius, it’s a little bit harder to make happen here on Earth. We’re working on it, we’re making some big breakthroughs. But when you can do that, you are able to manufacture energy using hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — in a safe and efficient and scalable way that you’ll fuel to last billions of years, readily available. And it’s incredibly energy-dense. And it really — it’s carbon free, that goes without saying.

  Another part of it that we can get into here is the geopolitics of energy. And fusion — and all of nuclear — can also solve for that, where you are separating natural resource constraints or limitations or reliances and have abundant and secure energy.

  Speaker 2:
  Fantastic. John, you want to go next?

  Speaker 4:
  Well, I was going to use my party trick of saying all energy sources are ultimately nuclear — well done, Brian. But I think the other answer that’s really relevant, particularly in the realm that I’ve been in, is we build a grid for it. We need clean, firm power that’s dense and can maximize our existing infrastructure and be dispatchable in high-density, low-real-estate areas. So it’s a no-brainer.

  Speaker 2:
  And we talk about low real estate, high density — Yasir, I’m going to pass it off to you. What’s your “why nuclear”?

  Speaker 5:
  Yeah, on that very point, I think the energy density is really the key factor here that enables us to really add a lot of capacity. And it’s not just in capacity, but it’s also in kilowatt hours. If you just compare with the fastest growing carbon-free energy source, where nuclear fission, for example, is 340 times more energy-dense in kilowatt hours. So that’s really the main driver here that we can tap into as far as fission is concerned.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, gotcha. And then maybe from a government/defense investor perspective — Julia, what’s your “why nuclear”?

  Speaker 6:
  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many good reasons for why nuclear, but especially spending time looking at what are the first-order, second-order, third-order effects for what’s going on geopolitically. Clean, cheap, abundant energy is the foundational layer that’s going to underpin any sort of domestic industrial growth.

  So realistically, looking at where we are in the world, we need to decouple from China. The era of globalization as we’ve known it is pretty much over — even if we haven’t quite felt the complete severance yet. But if we’re going to rebuild our own domestic industry, if we are going to continue powering the nation, if we are going to secure our own energy supplies — from Russia, from China, from other sources that have not traditionally been, one, clean, or two, secure — really at all, just completely dependent on international order, we need to have that capacity. And it needs to be homegrown capacity.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I think it’s a great point. It’s homegrown capacity, it’s energy density, it’s clean and abundant power — all great reasons.

  Yasir, I’m going to bump this one to you. So you’re an engineer. You’ve been a technical lead on some pretty high-profile nuclear projects. Considering the advancements in microreactors — and feel free to give a brief background on what you’re working on — how do you envision these technologies interplaying with our current energy infrastructure, right? Let’s contextualize this so it’s not just 10, 20 years from now, but in the next few years — how is the average American going to experience nuclear?

  Speaker 5:
  Right. So I mean, if you look at all the commercial nuclear right now, they’re mostly large, conventional power plants. And the industry has been focusing on shrinking them down because to build one giant thing and taking multiple years — that’s very complex.

  So we really wanted to figure out a different way of tackling this problem. So the concept is trying to make them smaller and more modular — hence the name “small modular reactor” — but it’s a very wide spectrum. So you’ve got small modular reactors that are hundreds of gigawatts, very similar to conventional plants, but the degree of modularity is still not quite there.

  On the micro side, which are tens of megawatts or single-digit megawatts — these are transportable energy systems. And really, when I was back in Westinghouse, we were working on some of the early designs of portable nuclear reactors. And I was part of the Vinci team and then came over to Marvel, which got even smaller — taking the learnings from those projects.

  Speaker 5:
  We’re trying to tackle a 10-megawatt system at Olive, and the real goal here is: let’s try to install the smaller gen sets where it’s needed — particularly remote locations where they’re really energy-starved — that go to what is called energy poverty. So one of the most challenging areas to actually provide energy because of the external environment. And also similarly, we can add those systems behind the grid. And the nice thing about the smaller micros is you can actually gradually grow them by demand. You don’t have to put in hundreds of megawatt systems all at once.

  I think there’s a lot of opportunities for behind-the-grid applications — for EV transportation, data centers — and scale it up. And the part that is the most intriguing part is mass manufacturing. For the first time, we’re actually able to build reactors that are not just moving away from the traditional construction platform to mass production. And if there’s one thing the U.S. is kind of good at, it’s really mass-producing things: jet engines, chips, cars — you name it. And we really want to tap into that and really move away from construction to mass production. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities in terms of growth with that particular model.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, no, I think that’s fantastic. And this is typically when I got to the point when I was learning about nuclear — of this all sounds great, there’s this huge demand, governments want it, companies want it, it’s clean, abundant power — and you start scratching your head: why isn’t this more widely available and widely used?

  I’m going to pass this one to Brian. I know you’ve had the perspective — both kind of a finance and operational side within energy — and then now you’re building your own company. We’re in this interesting point here where there seems to be kind of a changing public sentiment. What is it like building a nuclear company as an entrepreneur, some of the challenges you face? And then I saw John smile a little bit when I was explaining my reaction — so maybe you talk from more of a commercial perspective, kind of how things are changing.

  Speaker 3:
  So I joined the privately funded fusion field in about 2016, 2017. Those were the early days of it spinning out of the national lab environment to focus on commercialization and really connecting the dots from a science project to: how do you put this on the grid in a power platform?

  And since then, in not too many years, we as a fusion industry have already received, I’d say, significant clarity and made significant progress on what the regulatory infrastructure will look like for fusion specifically. And the perks of fusion — fundamental to the science of it — really carry through, which is: fusion fails safe. And we have to put a tremendous amount of energy in a very specific way through superconducting magnets to hold a plasma — a ball of fusion fuel — in a specific confinement. And there’s now a fraction of a gram of fuel in there — that’s hydrogen. When we want to stop the reaction, or something in the system happens to cause it to disrupt or something else, the reaction stops.

  So fusion fails safe. There’s no long-term radioactive waste, and there’s minimal risk of proliferation. And as such, the U.S. NRC has already come out and said that fusion will be regulated very similar to particle accelerators. And look, this has been a burden — and rightfully so — to protect population safety, industrial safety. Nuclear has more things to think about than, call it, a fossil fuel plant where you’re just burning something. So the fact that fusion already, I think, has regulatory clarity means that I think we have a very straightforward path to commercialize.

  On the other hand, as you mentioned, public acceptance is a very big part of it as well. We are fortunate to have spun out of Princeton Plasma Physics Lab at Princeton University, where there have been fusion projects running for close to 70 years. So I’d say within this environment — and not just on the political level but on a societal level — there is high familiarity with fusion that will need to continue for fusion to be able to be sited as it should be. Based on the, call it, health and safety — where the risks are minimal — you should be able to get to a place where fusion can be sited near demand, wherever.

  However, to do that, the work ahead of us will be to continually educate the public and the end users of this electricity on the risk profile for acceptance.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I think that’s actually a great foray. John, you’ve had experience in a number of different big tech companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, to name a few — where you’ve been kind of working on these large-scale projects. I won’t go into detail on those, but you have that perspective as kind of the end user, the buyer. I think for a lot of these early fission and eventually fusion projects — your perspective on commercialization and some of the risks that we’re seeing in the market?

  Speaker 4:
  Yeah, thank you. And I love Brian’s point about the fusion regulatory vision, and your point about prefabrication and scale deployment.

  Look, the tech companies — the big data center industry broadly — I think globally, the last number I saw public was 2 to 3% of global consumption of power. That’s roughly a little bit more than Spain — the data centers were consuming in 2023, before the advent and growth of the AI curve. So just to make that real.

  And these are companies — you mentioned, I’ve worked at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. All three have large sustainability commitments, big balance sheets, strong budgets toward acquiring power at a premium to meet these sustainability targets, and are increasingly power-constrained in their strategy. They’re pretty public about that. So they’ve kind of moved from a real estate-constrained to a power-constrained growth environment.

  So if we’re trying to deliver a global energy transition — if I’m an African country or some other country in the Global South or wherever, and I’m being told, “Hey, don’t build coal, buy carbon-free power at a premium” — I don’t know if I can do that. But if I’m a large global technology company, I can. In fact, I have a commitment to that, and I run on trust and public license to operate.

  So this is the moment where the consumer side is saying, “Alright, not just give me all your clean electrons and I’ll buy them at some premium — I’m in the game to help bring the commercialization curve closer to the left, closer to the present.”

  So what can we do on the technology side? And you’ll see — I mean, Microsoft I think is very much on the front foot of doing that. I’ve lived through that and can talk about it. But it’s a really special and important moment.

  But the challenges across commercialization are abundant, and they all need to be addressed kind of simultaneously. We’re here talking about U.S. Strategic — if we want to be private sector-led, public sector-enabled, with innovation driving commercialization, we kind of need to be in the ecosystem together. And I think that’s the thing that’s changing right now.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I think you brought up a great point of this interplay — especially in this industry — is government is going to have to take a larger role in making sure that these technologies are rolled out, they’re safe. And then also, I think, pushing adoption, reducing some of those barriers that have kind of led to the industry stagnating a bit.

  Julia, you have a little bit of this — both an investor mindset and then a little bit more of a government/defense mindset as well. How do you see that interplay? How is the government, DOD, thinking about nuclear — and then just your perspective as an investor in this space?

  Speaker 6:
  Yeah, totally. So looking at the nuclear space, there’s the regulatory side of what’s going on with the government, and then there’s the collaboration side.

  And focusing a little bit more on the collaboration side, the one thing I’ll say is that there is no new nuclear technology that is being developed in a vacuum since starting at day one. And I’m sure Yasir and Brian and John can speak to this as well — the DOE, ARPA-E, the DOD to an extent — all of the national laboratories are very, very involved, especially basically just from day one in the R&D process and then leading up through that licensing, regulatory backend of everything.

  For example, we are invested in a micro nuclear reactor company called Radiant, and they recently received a contract from the DOE to test their reactor technology at the DOME testbed at Idaho National Laboratory. And through that process, they will be able to get the performance and safety data that they will need to take to the NRC to ultimately go through the commercial licensing process with them.

  So it’s very much a coordinated dance — both between, on the collaboration and the funding side, as well as the regulatory side. But functionally, across the board, whether you’re looking at fission, whether you’re looking at fusion, whether you’re looking at things like radioactive isotopes, radiation testing — anything that’s coming from just the core nuclear industry as a whole — you’re going to have a lot of government entities that are involved with it.

  And over the past couple of years, we have seen tremendous support pouring in from DOE — everything from the federal level down to states. There are a lot of different large, big-ticket, keystone funding programs that have been coming out over the past couple of years, but you’re seeing a lot of stakeholders that maybe traditionally have not spent a lot of time focusing on these companies.

  So for example, you see a lot of involvement from the Air Force on the R&D side. They’re coming in to help fund the early-stage development for components of different new reactor technologies. You’re seeing the national labs and ARPA-E taking an outsized role and really bringing those through the process.

  So it’s definitely a great signal — especially as an early-stage investor. And Pete and Drew know this as well. But for early-stage venture capital, the goal is to identify and invest in these technologies before the rest of the world believes in it. And we’re at that stage with nuclear, where we have such amazing talent that is in the space, we’re bringing up new technology, we’re expanding into different business models that are making these companies venture-fundable in ways that traditional nuclear reactors were not.

  So we’re in a really interesting crossroads, but it’s definitely still going to take a lot of concerted effort from the government. There’s still a lot of coordination with the private sector, but we’re at a really exciting time for all of that to be happening. And government support is probably one of the biggest signals to the private sector that this is an investable industry.

   

  Speaker 2:
  I think it’s a great point. It definitely feels like this inflection point — not just in public sentiment — but also where there’s almost these unlocks of capital coming in. Venture capitalists being one, and then of course touched on the government perspective. I’m sure all the panelists here have worked in some capacity with the DOE or different government agencies. Yasir, I know you’ve worked intimately with some of these groups — Idaho National Lab as well. Maybe if you could — I’m putting you a little bit on the spot here — but just an example of how government is working with these private companies to get these technologies to market.

  Speaker 5:
  Yeah, totally. And again, I’m going to put my previous jobs hat on — as part of the Idaho National Lab group there. INL, for example, they built a lot of reactors in the past. That really is the genesis of the commercial nuclear industry that we see today. They built 52 reactors in a very short amount of time, and we see that proliferation going not just in the States but also throughout the world. So that legacy kind of continues.

  Still today we see a lot of action going on, as Julia was mentioning with the example on the DOD side. We’re seeing a stream of activities happening on the commercial side as well. For example, Marvel — we have not really built a new advanced reactor for quite some time in this country. There’s a lot of development, a lot of irons in the fire, but Marvel’s going to be the first advanced reactor essentially that will turn on in over 50 years.

  So there’s been a lot of investment that went behind it from the government side — especially from the Department of Energy. Marvel is fully funded by DOE, and so there’s close to a hundred million dollars of investment that went into that program. Similarly, there’s activity going on in the PALLE program, which is on the DOD side of things at the INL. And again, we’re seeing a lot of alignment of organizations.

  For example, we took the Marvel technology at ALO and we’re scaling it up. But we’re seeing smaller utility companies like Idaho Falls Power and others who are saying, “Hey, you know what? You guys demonstrated technology and you’re very well into the path in creating electrons from it — we want to get the next reactor.” So we’re working with them to say, “Hey, we want five units — not in a national lab, but in somebody’s backyard,” essentially in Idaho Falls Town, in a 150-acre site.

  And we’re talking about building five ALO-01 reactors there. And there’s construction companies, EPC companies, and siting and others that are all coming together in a consortium to make this happen. Similarly — not just us — there are a ton of other private companies that are working with the Idaho National Lab, both in DOME and outside, trying to deploy their first reactor so we can gain operational experience. And from there we transition into the commercial space.

  And I think the Department of Energy is very active in this area — not just on the reactor technology funds — also on fuel development. Supply chain is a huge challenge in this sector. So I think we’re going to see something coming out before the end of the decade as real, tangible products that can get into the market.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And all of this — again, we keep talking about almost this point in time we’re at now — where we call it this renaissance. There are all these companies working with national labs, there’s great government funding, there are private investors now jumping into this market. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we ignored the last few decades of — I would say — public sentiment around nuclear.

  So I’m going to open this one back up to the group, and feel free to just grab the mic here: biggest misconception about nuclear that people have faced. Maybe you still hear it around the Thanksgiving table or in a conversation — but biggest misconception that you’ve seen, and your counter to that — and what you’d want the attendees on this webinar to hear.

  Speaker 5:
  Can I jump in?

  Speaker 2:
  Go for it.

  Speaker 5:
  So I think from my perspective, probably the biggest misconception — particularly around the area that we work in, which is nuclear fission — is waste. Anywhere I go — to a conference, nuclear or non-nuclear — I give a talk and someone stands up and says, “Oh, but what about the waste?”

  And this may go a little bit against the thesis on the fission side of things, but let me explain what I mean by that. I think, first of all, we contain all of our waste. And then again, every energy sector — no matter what you think about solar, PV, fission, fusion — there is no energy source that does not create waste.

  But if you look at the history of nuclear fission waste from commercial nuclear power plants, there has not been any harm to any humans or trees. We know how to fully contain it. In fact, if you take all of the nuclear waste from every single power plant and every submarine and put them together, it fits in less than a football field–size area. Right?

  It’s very, very compact. We know how to contain it. The best part is — of all that nuclear waste that we define — only 5% is really waste. The rest — 95% — is actually recoverable, recyclable, and can create more energy out of it.

  So at ALO, we are trying to build reactors and really nail down the economics — that’s our main thesis — but we don’t want to toss that waste. In fact, we want to keep that waste and collect it because in the future — maybe 10, 20 years from now — we want to build reactors that can use this used fuel, as we call it, from our current reactors and fuel the future reactors.

  So I think there’s a lot of education that we need to portray to the general public and really explain to them what waste really is. We don’t want to undermine the dangers, obviously, of radioactivity — we have to be good stewards of this material. So there’s a lot of educational themes that we particularly want to focus on at ALO as well in the next couple of years.

  Speaker 2:
  And it’s not the bright green slime that you see in The Simpsons…

  Speaker 4:
  Yeah, I want to jump in because I love those points about waste — which I’m starting to call “spent fuel,” for the points you already made.

  The other point I’ll say on that is: it’s the most traced fuel chain out there, right? No one’s tracing the molecule of natural gas coming out of the ground to what happens after it’s burned or any of that.

  So that’s one thing. The other misconception I want to get into — or sort of mention — is this misconception that we don’t need it or that it’s not going to happen. You kind of have to ask someone, when you start a conversation around nuclear, what are we talking about here?

  Are you talking about the nuclear atomic reaction? Or are you talking about global energy transition, geopolitics? Because what’s humanity going to do if we don’t figure this out? And what nation-state is going to do it if we don’t?

  And the free West — commercial, private sector–led, public–enabled — because there are floating nuclear power plants out there. Look at Russia. There are advanced reactors being built by China that are going into geopolitical conversations. So we have to figure this out.

  And any misconception around, “Well, it’s either this or we…” — no, sorry, we have to figure this out.

  Speaker 7:
  Hey everyone, I want to take a quick break and share more about Alumni Ventures and our U.S. Strategic Tech Fund.

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  If you’d like to learn more, click the link below or visit AV.vc. Back to the presentation.

  Speaker 5:
  Maybe just to tail on what John is mentioning — if you look at current growth in carbon-free energy sources, I mean, we all know it’s solar PV at this stage, but it’s still only less than 5% that is captured in terms of clean energy generation throughout the world.

  And from a geopolitical perspective, you look at the supply chain — 80% of that is owned by China. The U.S. only owns 1 to 2% of that supply chain. So I think that’s really, really important — that we actually have an opportunity, both in fission and fusion space, to for once have a real good — from a geopolitical perspective — control of the supply chain and overall demand of this and supply of this material throughout the world.

  Speaker 3:
  Perfect. Yeah, I think those are really important points that lead to the startling statistic that approximately 84% of the world’s energy — electricity being one part of it — energy generation mix is from fossil fuel, carbon-emitting sources.

  And you look at solar, wind, battery storage, whatever technologies and how quickly they’ve grown and been adopted — which is great, and I only hope that continues to grow at a higher rate — all that considered, though, over the trillions of dollars — it’s a couple trillion dollars worth of spend on clean generation technologies over the past decade or two — a couple trillion dollars have moved that needle by 2%. That really puts the problem of decarbonization and energy security into perspective, and how much work is still left to be done to decarbonize the growth.

  Speaker 5:
  And at this rate, by 2050, we can only get to 60% carbon-free energy — not more than that. That’s what the trend shows. So for us to really move that needle quite far away by 2050 — can we really hit net zero? I think we need to pick some really big guns here in terms of carbon-free energy, and that’s fission and fusion.

  Speaker 6:
  On that as well — when you look at how much has been spent in the U.S. and then globally on the more traditional clean energy technologies like solar, wind, etc. — developing enhanced nuclear capabilities actually seems pretty cheap in comparison. And I think that’s one of the biggest holdups, especially when you go a little bit more downstream in the capital stack. They get a little bit more iffy about it right now: “Oh, it’s so expensive. It’s such a cost upfront to build these reactors. That would take so much time.”

  But I think the estimated number right now is $176 billion to bring all of the current in-development micro nuclear reactor, SMR, and fuel supply chain technologies to the market operationally. And if you compare that to the trillions that have already been spent on technologies that have only moved the needle a little bit — that’s actually a great deal.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, that’s perfect. Four great perspectives on that and love the interplay there. We’re touching on this a bit — so that’s kind of the misconceptions. And now let’s bring it kind of looking forward — the next five, ten years — mass adoption, nuclear energy, getting those numbers that we’re trying to get to. Biggest hurdle in your mind. And again, we’ll go around — maybe the same order. Biggest hurdle to getting there — what are we facing up against? Is it public perception? Is it education? Is it capital? I’m guessing it’s a mix of all of those — but to you, the big reason there. Let’s go in reverse order — Julia, if we want to start with you.

  Speaker 6:
  Sure. So something that, looking forward five years, perhaps we’re not going to completely feel the effects of yet — but we should have been looking at ten years ago — is fuel availability.

  So for the majority of the new SMR designs, they use a fuel called HALEU. And currently, that entire fuel supply chain is concentrated in Russia by one company called Tenex that is owned by the Russian state. So you can imagine — we’ve seen what Russia does when they get upset geopolitically. And in addition, when you just look at all of the enrichment infrastructure there and how many delays and supply chain issues they have from things like sulfuric acid, it’s just not a stable base. And they’re not going to be able to supply the amount of fuel that we need to actually have all of these new reactors operational online — and operating at a cost that makes it justifiable to invest and bring them online.

  So that’s one part of it — we need to really build up that domestic supply chain for both HALEU and then also, as well, just looking more broadly at the uranium industry. It’s a very illiquid market. That market has fluctuated a lot in price. The price of uranium has gone up a lot — that is a big concern for the more traditional light-water reactors that we already have in operation.

  But if you look at the supply of where that uranium is coming from, we don’t really produce a whole lot of it here. Most of it is concentrated in Kazakhstan, it is in Africa, it is in Australia, it is in South America. And if you look at the entities that have been actually buying up the majority shares in all of those different mines — backtrack a couple entities down — you will find that China and Russia, or Chinese and Russian state entities, are quickly buying up the majority ownership in the majority of these mines.

  What happens with that is: one, they are doing that because they are building out their own nuclear fleets and they need the fuel themselves. And two, it’s a geopolitical lever. So you can only imagine — if you just look at any other critical industry that is concentrated in those two countries — those are usually the first levers that get pulled when they’re trying to make the United States or Europe or any other nation that they are not too happy with hurt.

  And those are issues that will, one, stunt the growth of all of the new technology — but it’s also something where if we just don’t have fuel, the entire nuclear industry is dead in the water. So that is something that is going to take a lot of government effort to try and fortify that. It’s not something that the private sector can do alone. It’s not something that the government can do alone.

  It’s going to take the efforts — and a lot of money — from basically everyone across the board to really rebuild that capability — or build it for the first time — in the United States. But the DOE is aware of it. DOD is aware of it. White House is aware of it. People are starting to talk about it, and people are starting to become more aware — especially on the public side as well.

  This is a major threat to national security. This is a major threat to technological innovation. And this fuel is what underpins the entire energy transition — if we actually want it to happen. So that’s a big concern, looking at how that entire orchestration is going to happen.

  Speaker 2:
  Perfect. Thank you for that. Brian?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, so we were very fortunate that, spinning out of the lab, we had government support to get us through that stage of scientific R&D — that allowed us to focus on better engineering of our systems. And we’re working on that currently, and we’re going to build and operate a fully integrated system using our technology. That’s not a pilot plant — it’s still subscale — but really will show technical and execution level of this integrated system.

  From there is, I think, where it becomes exciting — but also really tough. Because going from one pilot plant — which, call it 250 megawatts electric — to scaling to actually make a difference in decarbonization and geopolitics — that’s tough. How do you crank out — how do you mint and manufacture — thousands of power plants? That’s no easy feat for fusion, where there are no fusion power plants on the grid.

  You’re creating a new industry. You’re creating a new supply chain for some of these parts. And that really is core to what we’re doing at Thea — and why we’re taking, already years before this deployment, some certain steps to build our systems differently, in modular ways, with smaller components that can be mass manufactured.

  And I’ll make a counterpoint to a panelist earlier — which is: I think there are lessons for nuclear to learn from predecessors not just in energy, but across the United States. I’d say the United States is fairly poor at manufacturing big technology infrastructure at scale. Most of it has left the country. There are a couple parts of aerospace and the like that are good at it — and those are the shining beacons. But the rest of big, expensive machinery — you name it — in the United States, is, I think, an example of what we can’t do as a growing industry if we actually want to make thousands of power plants cost-effective and on-time, on-budget.

  Speaker 2:
  That was fantastic. One of the last times we did that was probably the advent of fission — and eventually fusion, for those of you that have seen Oppenheimer. John, you want to go next?

  Speaker 4:
  Yeah, I mean, I’ll try to be brief here. I’ve spent the last eight months working in partnership with an NGO in this space. It’s all about: how do we unlock and move this thing faster?

  And the challenge is that everything needs to happen at the same time — and they’re sort of independent of each other, right? There’s the fuel point that Julia made — very savvy, looking a few paces down the chessboard. But we need to get financing to figure things out, to understand that supply chain ramped up. We need regulatory to come together.

  If I’m Microsoft with a checkbook, I’m saying: this is great — innovation, proven technology, been around forever, the labs, the narrative’s there, we understand the fuel side, at least near term — I’m ready. How do I buy one?

  And you can’t — at least not at scale, not yet. Where are the projects? How do we unlock the commercial side of this?

  I think that — I’ll just say — a number of levers have to happen at the same time. And that requires an industry sort of unlearning itself a little bit. It’s been at it the same way — pouring concrete and focusing on safety narratives for engineering upgrades of existing megaplants. That is not the industry that we’re talking about anymore.

  So it needs to unlearn itself and learn how to talk to entities in a different way about scale deployment.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, perfect. I think a great foray — and I don’t want to steal your thunder, Yasir — but some of that unlearning and almost kind of going back to first principles of how would you design that is one of the things that I think of when I think of ALO as well.

  And so we’ll kind of wrap this up with you again — kind of big hurdle, next five to ten years.

  Speaker 5:
  Yeah, I think it’s a summary of what Julia and Brian and John kind of talked about. You need a lot of different pieces to come together to really make it happen. But they’re absolutely correct — supply chain is the number one challenge. That’s both on the fuel side — which Julia covered very eloquently — and also the supply chain of components, hardware — right? That’s what Brian also mentioned very nicely — about we have to create the infrastructure to do both of those things.

  And so at ALO we’re trying to think about — well, those two big giant challenges exist — how do we think about solving them as a small startup company, for example?

  So for example, fuel — the challenge of uranium and Russian supply chain is big enough even for this current nuclear fleet, let alone for HALEU. So what we are trying to do as an advanced reactor company is say, “Well, let’s not try to use HALEU. Can we use LEU+,” which is about 10% or below, “and really get to a fuel — still get to an advanced reactor?”

  So that’s one part of the solution base that we’re trying to tackle on the fuel challenge.

  Supply chain–wise and on the manufacturing — most of our approach is, “Well, we cannot wait forever. We need reactors today — in the next five years. If we don’t deploy fission on a wide scale — large scale — it’s not going to happen.”

  So how do we solve that problem?

  We try to leverage technologies that are already available in the marketplace with existing supply chain — either we buy things that are available, or we select technologies that we could easily make ourselves. So majority of those “ourselves” technologies — we have to vertically integrate those.

  So ALO is essentially trying to say, “Well, you know what? Let’s move away — everyone’s trying to shift to refractory fabrication — but how do we effectively do that?”

  So we look into industries that have actually done a good job at mass manufacturing — the automotive industry, jet engines, Boeing 787s — we make engines in factories and then components that are complex. So we’re bringing in talent and learning from those industries and saying: what worked? What did not work?

  And we’re trying to pull all of this together and say: can we, by the end of this decade, have a pilot scale for both the fuel and the factory — and build, let’s say, ten reactors a year at the pilot scale annually?

  And that’s really what our short-term mission is.

  And to John’s point — there is demand, and it is very strong. We’ve actually seen an RFI that came out from Microsoft, Nucor, and Google on the 18th — which is a fantastic demand signal. And so we’re saying: by 2030, how many can we build — and how do we get there, really, from a pragmatic perspective?

  So a lot of exciting things happening, and I think we’re getting there.

  Speaker 2:
  Perfect. Thank you. And that’s going to wrap our panel section here. Our goal was to educate and inspire — and I think we did that. I don’t know — I’m educated and inspired after talking with all of you. Absolutely. This was great.

  We’ll ask our panelists to — you guys can hop off. Thank you so much for your time and energy.

  Speaker 5:
  Thank you.

  Speaker 2:
  Thank you. And we’ll bring Laura and Pete back on here, and Daran.

  Speaker 1:
  So over to Laura — she’ll come on right now and give a little bit on venture investing for those who are curious.

  Speaker 8:
  Yeah, that was amazing. Wow, I learned so much. It was terrific. So here is your call to action, everybody on the call. If you love nuclear, if you love this topic of investing in innovation, if you feel like the kinds of topics we’ve talked about today are the kinds of things you’d want to back — well, the invitation is to join us as an investor in the U.S. Strategic Tech Fund.

  So, putting a little perspective on venture investing — it is an amazing way to build diversity into your portfolio. It is a category that has outperformed pretty much every public market equivalent over 5, 15, 25 years — in an interesting way, uncorrelated to the public markets. But it also has been blocked to the average accredited investor. That is why Alumni Ventures exists — to democratize access to this venture class.

  So, as Pete mentioned, we’re the single most active VC in North America. We are the third most active globally. We’ve raised $1.3 billion from individual accredited investors.

  So here is the opportunity — a portfolio in the U.S. Strategic Tech Fund from Alumni Ventures that is diversified by stage and sector, but really covers this theme of U.S. strategic tech — covering things like cybersecurity, space tech, everything nuclear (which we’ve talked about today), even homeland security.

  So that’s the invitation. Karen, why don’t you walk through the specifics for folks about how they can invest?

  Speaker 9:
  Absolutely. I’ll give you kind of a quick overview on how the funds work — sort of nuts and bolts wise.

  So for this fund — very flexible. The minimum investment is $25K, the max is $3 million, and any denomination within that range works. And we have a lot of flexibility. Folks invest directly into the funds with after-tax dollars. About a third of our investors invest via self-directed IRAs, so it’s a nice fit for a lot of folks for their timeline, for their retirement. We also have folks that invest via an entity or trust. And then we also have a vehicle available for folks that are non-U.S.–based investors as well. So a lot of flexibility in the way that you can invest into the fund.

  The way the funds work — these are all structured as 10-year funds with one investment in. So one capital call. Whatever you invest, that’s your total commitment to the fund.

  The fund will be deployed over the course of about 12 to 15 months into about 25 companies. And further, some reserve is held as well for follow-on rounds into some of those companies down the road. And then as those companies exit throughout the life of the fund — generally through acquisition, sometimes IPO — we’ll get the proceeds from those sales and return the money along the way back to the investors.

  So think about one investment into the fund, distributions throughout the life of the fund — but we don’t know what the dates of those will be, of course. And the fund will end when that last company exits.

  So in terms of the fee structure — like I said, we charge one capital call to get in. We charge the equivalent of a 2% annual management fee. So for 10 years, the total management fee is 20% for the life of the fund. That’s paid with your initial investment. 80% of your investment is invested in the companies.

  And then, as the companies exit, that capital is returned to the investors. And if it’s a profitable exit — meaning you as the investor get back the cost of capital in that company plus any management fee eligible to that investment — anything over and above that would be profit split: 80% to you, 20% to us for profit share.

  So a really simple process. You get a K-1 — one K-1 per year — that’s going to summarize any gains or losses from the prior year. So we try to make it easy for folks to invest and provide pretty flexible ways to do that.

  In terms of timing — this fund is going to be closing at the end of October. But we do have a first close at the end of August. So if you decide you want to invest and you commit to the fund before the end of August, you’ll actually get a 10% reduction in your fees. So more of your investment would actually be invested in the companies; less would go to our fees.

  We’ll send some information along afterwards as well. We’ll send a follow-up email to folks that are attending with information on the fund — and of course, the fee schedule as well. And then I would welcome anyone that wants to learn more to schedule a call — we’d love to talk to you more about it.

  Speaker 1:
  And if you would like to schedule a call, there is a link in the chat. So go ahead and click through to that — as well as additional materials for those interested.

  So with that, we thank everyone for joining this programming from the U.S. Strategic Tech Fund and community here at Alumni Ventures.

  Wow — what a broad, sweeping, educational — in many ways inspirational — discussion of atomic opportunities and the nuclear renaissance. Do not hesitate to reach out, find us, schedule a call. We are here for you.

  Thank you everyone for joining, and that concludes today’s webinar.

  Speaker 8:
  Thanks, everybody.