Aalo Atomics and the Coming Nuclear Age

Mat Vogels (00:14)

everybody. Welcome to another episode of pirates only where we interview top early stage founders on what they're building and how they are going to change the world. And today I have two incredible founders. Yasir and Matt co-founders of Aalo Atomics.

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reinventing, re-industrializing everything at the front of the nuclear wave. And I think this podcast is going to be one of my favorites, if only because there is so much talk today on some of the things we'll talk about, certainly with nuclear and energy and data centers. And I don't think there's a better team to have on to talk about that than you guys. So thank you for being here.

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Do you wanna kick things off with maybe just a quick background on both of yourselves and then we'll go into the founding story of Allo?

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Matt Loszak (01:03)

Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, thanks so much, Matt, for having us on. You know, we've known you for a while and you've been a huge help to us over the course of the business. you know, thank you for everything you've done for us, including for those who might not know you, you made our website. So, yeah, it's so pretty, pretty beautiful. But yeah, so, you know, the astronaut, we both have a part of the story we want to tell here.

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Mat Vogels (01:18)

Woof. It's one of my favorites, yeah.

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Yasir (01:18)

you

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Matt Loszak (01:29)

And we both kind of got into nuclear from similar but different angles, kind of other sides of the world, both literally and kind of figuratively. So for me, I grew up in Ontario and Canada. First got interested in nuclear because I lived through the coal to nuclear transition. So we had a lot of coal plants. There were like 62 smog days a year. I had pretty bad asthma. And that went away when we turned off all our coal plants and went all in on nuclear.

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So lo and behold, Smog days went to zero. My asthma went away during the teen years when we transitioned off of coal onto nuclear. And so I thought, you my God, nuclear is incredible. And so, you know, studied engineering and physics with a specialty in nuclear in university. And then Fukushima happened. And this is where what's interesting and Yasir will get into his as well. But for me, you know, I was thinking about starting a nuclear company, but

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With Fukushima happening, it's like, not the best time to start a nuclear company, but still really wanted to try to do a startup. So taught myself to code, because I thought that'd be something easier to do as a solo founder to start off with, and did a 10-year hiatus in software companies. The first one was a learning experience. The next one, we sold for low nine figures. But around early 2021,

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the time started to feel right to maybe start the nuclear company. And it still wasn't obvious. We were shutting down gigawatt scale nuclear plants globally. And I was thinking, what are the odds we can have success if we can't even keep multi-billion dollar paid off assets alive? But it just felt too meaningful not to do. think Yasir and I both feel like nuclear is the ultimate underdog. It's just insane, the delta between public perception and all the realities of how amazing nuclear really is.

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⁓ and so, yeah, started to set out to re-inject myself in the nuclear space. started by meeting people from my ENGFIS program who had all gone into nuclear in Ontario. So OPG, CNSC, Hatch, companies like that. And around a hundred people into that list, met Yasir down the, the, the chain in, in the U S and, ⁓ he and I just hit it off instantly, similar values, similar vision for what nuclear should become.

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even similar sense of humor, which I think matters when you're spending so much time with someone. And so, yeah, the rest has been history. And I think that dovetails nicely into Yasir's background.

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Yasir (03:49)

Amazing well Matt I've heard you tell the story so many times. It's still like it's fun to listen to so yeah amazing It's crazy to ⁓ be in a podcast with two mats so when I see Yeah, just just diving into my background here and again Matt thank you for having having us over it's great. This is probably our first

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Mat Vogels (03:49)

Yeah.

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You can call me one T just say one T if you need my mean, yep

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Matt Loszak (04:05)

⁓

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Double T.

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Yasir (04:15)

podcast where Matt and I are, you know, co-participating together. So thank you for being the first there. I started, guess my journey in nuclear started when I was very, very young. I grew up in Bangladesh ⁓ where we had daily brownouts. Like every day the electricity would go out and I still remember studying in candlelight most of my, you know, early childhood when I was growing up. On top of that,

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Bangladesh is one of the most climate vulnerable countries. So, and it's very low lying compared to other countries there. So when the Arctic ice caps melt and you have slight increase in sea levels, it really washes away a significant portion of the land. So the country is shrinking. So by 2040, Bangladesh was lose like, you know, 50 % of its farmland.

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And that really affected me growing up. These two things. One was electricity shortage. One was, how can we, you know, stop the climate changing so drastically? So from that very young age, I understood two things. One, the world needs a lot of energy and two, it has to be clean. Right. And that was, you know, kind of a very personal experience for me growing up. So when I came to the U.S. for college,

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And I went to engineering school, I found out about nuclear and I was like, my gosh, this is one technology that can really, you know, ⁓ tackle both of my childhood curiosities. Nuclear is plenty safe, clean, reliable. It just, it was, it baffles me why we didn't have more of it, right? I mean, granted, 20 % of our electricity in the country comes from nuclear and it's amazing. So right when I was super excited to get full

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blown, know, just got, you know, excited to get into the nuclear industry at senior year, Fukushima happened. This was literally a few months before I graduated. And I was like, oh my gosh, and everyone's running away the opposite direction from all the way from nuclear. And they were going to have this massive Renaissance. And then that just tanked completely. And then after that initial shock, I was like, well, actually, if something like this could happen in nuclear, maybe there's

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a lot more opportunities for change where I can play a role and make an impact. So since then, I've spent 16 years preparing for creating that ultimate nuclear solution and ended up in that journey designing five reactors. This is my fifth reactor design. Went to grad school four times, dropped out of three, read hundreds of books just to figure out like, you know, what is that next thing I need to learn?

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to get to the finish line and all of this, know, throughout all of that journey, I got to work on some of the best and the cutting edge nuclear programs in the country. AP1000, one of the early SMR programs. And then I started and led the one of the earliest microreactor programs in the US called Ifinchi. And then right before COVID, it was Marvel. But all of these different programs, you know, I was learning from one to the other.

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Just to essentially answer one question, how do we mass manufacture nuclear reactors at scale? When I was working on the gigawatt scale plan designs, I realized, these are plenty reliable and safe. But where it really sucks is that we can't build fast enough. We need to essentially come up with a different model. So Marvel was the first program that kind of spinned off the bulk of the microreactor industry.

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at a time when nobody thought we could actually build real reactors in a amount of time. So we started off Marvel and by the time we got the approval from the regulator it was less than 30 months, less than three years. And everybody in the industry was like, how are you guys doing this so fast in a national lab environment? And I led the design for that and I was very, very proud of the team that we have built there.

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What really Marvel proved out was that you can still move fast in nuclear and still get regulatory approval. That was the main epiphany in Marvel. And that same lesson and the same DNA we brought over with us when we started off Aalo. But then Marvel also taught us what could not scale. For example, the original fuel that Marvel was using, that was our starting point.

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But we knew that if we wanted to scale from one reactor to hundreds of reactors, we had to pivot, right? So halfway through the program, I met Matt, and Matt was the seventh entrepreneur who reached out to me saying, hey, everyone's talking about advanced nuclear. You guys are actually building it. And all the previous ones, you know.

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They were great people, you know, something was off about some of those individuals. Like they were not in it for the right reason or they didn't want to see the right future for nuclear or they were, you we were not complimentary in nature. So when I talked to Matt and I was like, my gosh, this guy's great, you know, he's coming from the software world. This is third company and he wants to get his vision for what he wants to see in nuclear. It's very similar to mine. We both loved

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you know, good, beautiful aesthetic design. was another thing we jived on very nicely because, you know, when you look at our nuclear power plant, it looks super scary and you want to just not look at it. You know, what if we created nuclear systems that is so beautiful that people want to have them in people's backyards and also make it so safe that people won't have to worry about it, right? So we really jived in many levels along with the sense that we're extremely complimentary.

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Mat Vogels (09:41)

You

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No.

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Yasir (09:50)

⁓ So we do have a lot of overlaps ⁓ in what we do, but we have a lot of complementary skill sets. And so here we are, two and a half years in. ⁓ have. Yeah.

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Mat Vogels (09:59)

Which is unbelievable. Yeah, that you've been able to move that fast.

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Could you for before we dive in, we'll dive into certainly some of the the industry and some of the benefits there. But could you describe or explain in the most layman way possible? What is a nuclear reactor? How does a nuclear reactor work? Because as we go into some of the safety things or why what's changed over the last decade or two in the space?

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We kind of need to know at least at a high level, how does a nuclear reactor work in like the simplest way possible for folks that don't know anything about it?

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Yasir (10:32)

Yeah, totally. No, that's fun question. So in the most simplest term, a nuclear reactor is not so different than a coal power plant, right? All a nuclear reactor is trying to do is generate heat from splitting atoms instead of combustion, right? And then that heat is taken away from the reactor into a space where we generate steam.

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And with that steam, you drive a turbine, right? That's essentially it. It's basically a heat generation device using, you know, the power of fission. And for those of the audience who's not familiar with what fission is, so unlike combustion, where you basically have a fuel and oxygen, they're going through a chemical reaction and combining and making CO2 and water, we go into a subatomic level

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⁓ interaction where we're basically sending in a high velocity neutron into a very big atom like uranium and you hit the nucleus and it basically like you know breaks that nucleus into other pieces while it does that it creates three more neutrons and those three neutrons can go and hit other uranium atoms and that essentially can propagate into a self-sustaining chain reaction right so

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A nuclear reactor is basically trying to balance how do you control that overall cloud of neutrons that's interacting and causing fission. And the next thing is when you split the atom, you release immense amount of heat. And that's the heat that we try to harvest.

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Matt Loszak (12:00)

Ahem.

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Maybe one thing that might surprise people if you compare what's happening in a nuclear reactor to something like a natural gas plant, coal plant, or even the gas tank of your car, it's kind of like alien technology because in the gas tank of your car, for example, you start with a bunch of fuel and you're kind of depleting it and that's going into the air we breathe. In a nuclear reactor, when you take, when you kind of

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spent, when the fuel is spent, it actually looks basically the same as when it went in. And yet it magically produced energy for three years for, you know, thousands or millions of people. So it really is like this alien technology. And there's a lot of misconceptions because people, you know, sometimes think that when the fuel is spent, it's like a green goo or something. But that's just not, not the case. Yeah. So it's, really interesting.

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Mat Vogels (12:49)

Yeah, toxic waste, yeah.

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Yasir (12:51)

Yeah

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Yeah, and if you take all of the used nuclear fuel, we don't even call it a waste in the nuclear industry, right? You put them together for every commercial nuclear power plant that generated maybe roughly about 20 % of the country's electricity from the last 70 years to now, it will all fit in a football field. That's how compact and small it is. And it does not go around in the environment like most people think. It's very well contained.

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That's one of the biggest myths of nuclear.

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Mat Vogels (13:21)

It feels like there's so many myths. And one of the questions I definitely want to touch on was on the safety side, you guys already mentioned Fukushima. People think of Chernobyl. They think of the toxic goo coming out of the back of a of a factory and poisoning places. What are some of those misconceptions about nuclear? And then what are some of the biggest changes in safety today that kind of make it so that nuclear is safe? But I think a lot of people, if you were to ask them on the street, would be caught off guard by that.

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So is it that there's been technological changes that have made that happen? Has it always been a misconception

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Matt Loszak (13:55)

Well, I think that the important thing to realize there is nuclear is statistically as safe as solar and wind if you look at the actual stats today. But at the same time, the technology has evolved in the past 75 years. So, for example, in Chernobyl, Chernobyl is kind of like a car with no seatbelt. Like it didn't have what's called a containment dome. And so if something went wrong and the design was flawed as well,

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then there was nothing to contain that issue. The other thing to kind of realize is nuclear has really been mischaracterized as uniquely dangerous. And the interesting thing to kind of look at here is from oil and gas, there's around 2 million premature deaths per year from PM2.5 particles that go into the air. And in nuclear, there were 42 deaths from Chernobyl immediately, and then maybe a few thousand on the order of

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you know decades later from people in their 80s or 90s passing away slightly early. you know it's even Chernobyl which is the worst case nuclear accident of all time is a significantly lower kind of health impact than oil and gas has by orders of magnitude every year. So it's really interesting ⁓ the kind of discrepancy in psychology on this whole thing. ⁓

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Mat Vogels (15:05)

every year.

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Why

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is that? Why the branding, I guess then? Was there like an industry movement towards it or what is the reason why it carried that fear for so long? Because it set back the industry decades.

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Matt Loszak (15:21)

So

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it seems to be kind of two main things. So there were folks that were anti-nuclear weapons and they were trying to basically throw the baby out with the bath water in the 1970s and 80s. And then there was also the oil and gas industry. And today this might sound like a conspiracy theory, but there is a lot of evidence pointing to in the 70s and 80s, people in oil and gas trying to cast fear and doubt and uncertainty about nuclear energy. There is some good evidence that that happened.

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⁓ It's kind of one of those things, it's kind of like a porcupine quill where, you know, it's easier to go in than to undo that kind of misconception. But I think we are seeing it happen. So in the past five or 10 years has been an immense amount of pro-nuclear kind of narratives propagating around social media and the press. And that's really helping to right the wrongs of all these misunderstandings that came out in the first atomic age. But yeah, I think it'll all get right sized and, you know,

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We're optimists. think we, know, Yasir and I both believe that in the long term, the truth does surface. And the truth is that nuclear and current technology is as safe as solar and wind. And what we're building at Aalo is a mass manufactured smaller nuclear product, which has even some extra kind of safety characteristics that allow you to mass manufacture it and make nuclear ubiquitous while maintaining that high level of safety.

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Yasir (16:46)

Yeah. One thing I want to add there is if you really take a step back and you look at the data, the performance data of nuclear power plants, it's actually mind blowing how, even though despite this few accidents we can name, those were the generation one plans. When nuclear first started being, you know, producing power, right? Today's nuclear look very, very, very, different from how things were built in the past.

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⁓ So things have evolved significantly. One thing that I want to just throw out there is if you look at the nuclear industry in the United States, the commercial industry, the worst accident was Three Mile Island and nobody died out of that accident. And we built like what, nearly 100 plus reactors so far. And if you look at how many nuclear submarines were built, there are like more than hundreds of nuclear subs, not a single accident there too.

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So even though there were first generation systems and people freaked out when Three Mile Island happened, nobody really died. And it really is such an amazing stats that people don't focus on. If you look at some of the reactors today, one, getting into the technicality of things, how are they different from the first generation and why they're called advanced reactors is because the level of safety they approach is not that like the current reactors are not safe. They are very safe.

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They're very reliable. But what's really different is how that safety is achieved. In the first generation reactors, you would achieve safety by human. You would rely on the proper actions of humans. And you would rely on a lot of engineered systems in case there are human errors, right? Whereas a lot of the advanced reactors that, like the ones that we are designing today, we don't rely on

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humans or machines for the safety of the reactor we rely on the fundamental physics to ensure the safety of the reactor. So the physics ensure it and you can't there's no force in this world that can go against physics essentially. So that's how benign some of these advanced reactor look like and if you just to give you an example if you go around the country there are 20 plus

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university research reactors and we don't and they're tucked away in some engineering basement building right and we don't worry about day in and day out what's going to happen is the middle of the city should I send my kid over there to study we don't worry about this because those reactors were designed to be so safe that it can be in somebody's basement and it's okay that's the level of physics-based safety that we're bringing in to our technology as well

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Mat Vogels (19:20)

That's one of the things I think was so surprised of when I first was talking to you guys was how many reactors are already in operation in the United States and in some cases like college campuses, where you would think that that would be the last place that people would want a nuclear reactor. Before we go, we're going to go into kind of some of the more the benefits, but

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At a high level, think what we're experiencing right now is not only is nuclear becoming safer and all these things, but it's also like a necessity. We need it. It might be the only solution that we have going into the next decade of energy consumption. Could either of you explain maybe a little bit at a high level, some of the numbers and demand that we are seeing, particularly with AI data centers, but really just energy consumption, demand and requirements that we will need as a whole over the next five to 10 years.

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in the United States.

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Matt Loszak (20:11)

so it's a pretty immense amount of demand that we're seeing. So initially when we started the company and we kind of decided we'd focus on data centers, the forecast was around 40 gigawatts in the next five years in the US alone. Now that's been bumped up to 100. So this is pretty insane. This is like 100 new cities worth of power. ⁓

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Mat Vogels (20:31)

That was gonna say is a gigawatt

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relative to like a city is that kind of the best way people can can think about it? Yeah

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Matt Loszak (20:35)

Yeah, yeah, roughly. Yeah. So, and

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the really striking thing is if you look at load growth in the, in the U S or really in largely in the West, the kind of growth of the total energy generation on the grid, it's really somewhat plateaued, especially in the U S in the past couple of decades. but now the level of growth you're seeing is, is surpassing anything that's ever been done before. and the really interesting thing is it's, largely from this one type of customer.

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AI data centers and the way that they're getting powered today is with a lot of low hanging fruit natural gas. So there's existing pipeline, existing fracking, and that is now getting tapped out. And so what you're seeing is there's this real scramble and Jensen and Nvidia are selling more and more powerful GPUs, power hungry GPUs each year. And there's going to be this kind of crossover point where in the next couple of years, there's simply not enough

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available energy to power these GPUs. So you're starting to see a lot of tension where this friction and this tension is causing power prices on the grid to go up. locals are not happy about that. You're seeing certain types of energy generation and data centers maybe use a bunch of water for these local communities and so on. And the beauty of nuclear is it's kind of this holy grail solution for these data centers.

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So if you compare it to renewables, we use 100 times less land. If you compare it to geothermal or hydro, those are very geography constrained. So they only work in some places where there's like magma pocket or fast moving water. And if you compare it to natural gas, there are a lot of communities that are pretty pissed that the air quality is getting ruined by all these gas turbines. For example, one in Memphis where XAI was going with Elon's work.

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They brought in these mobile gas generators that skirted air permit laws by being mobile. And the locals were like, what the heck? the air is visibly worse. And so with nuclear, it doesn't ruin the air that we breathe, which is a pretty major selling point. So it's almost this counterintuitive thing, is nuclear is now the answer to NIMBYism instead of causing NIMBYism because it uses way less land, doesn't poison the air we breathe, and doesn't require water.

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and it just works sun or night, windy or not. So it's really exciting time for nuclear. ⁓

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Mat Vogels (23:03)

Yeah. And in some cases, I know

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that you've talked about this where the reactors that you would build on these data centers might even be an excess and then therefore make energy cheaper in some of these communities too. So not only is it safer, not only does it take up less of a footprint, but in many ways in some of these communities, it would end up leading to cheaper energy, which is great. So it's win, win, win.

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Yasir (23:22)

Yeah.

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Yeah. There is a bit of a challenging situation that almost all hyperscalers are going to or are facing right now. If you think about like the number that Matt just referenced earlier, 100 gigawatt in the next five years. Just to think about that for a second, that's 100 Houston worth of electricity and the grid is not able to handle that. But if you look at all the hyperscalers, they are going and building data centers

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Mat Vogels (23:40)

100 cities. Yeah.

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Yasir (23:52)

where there is grid power. Why are they doing that? If the grid cannot handle it, why are they going chasing the grid? It's because they want these ⁓ data centers to run 24-7. They want 99.9 % reliability or 5-9 % reliability that only the grid can provide. So when we are thinking about a solution, a power generation solution for the AI data centers, we're not trying to be like, how can we beat natural gas or some of the other nuclear solutions?

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We are thinking about like, okay, how do we really solve the problems of what AI data center companies are facing with the reliability they're looking for as far as their growth is concerned? So, and as a result, our product looks very different from a architecture perspective than any other nuclear solutions where the plant has five small reactors connected to a multiple turbine set. You know, that's kind of a very weird

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architecture for a power plant and that's because that configuration alone can give us that N plus one reliability. If one of the reactor is down for maintenance or refueling, the other ones can operate at max power and generate the same amount of electricity. If a turbine is down, there's two other turbines to back it up. And if you think about

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that plan and you copy and paste that over a larger area for let's say a gigawatt or a gigawatt and a half or two, whatever power the data center needs, now all of a sudden you don't need to rely on the grid to achieve 5.9 Reliabilities, right? No technology today can essentially solve that problem the way we can for a firm, clean generation source. So we're not necessarily designing our product to solve

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the issues of the hyperscalers are necessarily facing today, we are designing for tackling the problems they're gonna face in the next two to three years from in the future. So that's a very big deal. mean, we are a strong believer that there is something that's called a ideal product market fit in nuclear. If we're trying to build a generation device that can make electricity for everybody, we're not.

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making it ideal for anyone. our product is really looking at what hyperscalers are looking for, what AI data centers are looking for, and making sure that we are solving exactly what their challenges are today.

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Mat Vogels (26:19)

Yeah, you mentioned this already, but there's definitely a lot of players that are coming into the space to help solve this problem.

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Could you talk in layman terms, understand the, ⁓ like one of the reasons being modular and having the ability to have one turbine or piece of the system go down and still operate. those some of the bigger differences between what you guys are building and maybe some of the other competitors? We're not, we don't have to name any names, but from a high level, what makes Allo unique compared to maybe some of the other modular nuclear reactor companies that are starting right now as well.

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Matt Loszak (26:52)

So maybe just to carry the baton from where Yasir said there is, we really fundamentally believe that product market fit is a very real thing in nuclear. And the challenge is a lot of other nuclear companies started five, 10, 15 years ago, and they designed their product for fundamentally different markets. And so you might've started maybe around 2010. And at that time, again, Yasir and I already spoke to it about how Fukushima had just happened.

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Mat Vogels (26:56)

Yeah.

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Matt Loszak (27:19)

That was an anti-nuclear era. And so for them, they said, well, the only way to get social license to build our technology is if we can use nuclear waste as the fuel. But doing that requires a special fuel that's a higher level of enrichment. And the supply chain for that fuel is called HALU. It was from Russia. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, that supply chain went away and that decision became stale. So if you're trying to power a hundred Huston's to Yasir's point,

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with a fuel supply chain that doesn't exist, that is not a good product market fit. And then similarly, let's say you started maybe five, six years ago, again, before data centers were growing, you might've thought, okay, the best way to market is remote diesel military. The military could help you maybe go faster. And so the best product for the military for a forward deployed base is a very small reactor, very expensive.

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Yasir (27:51)

Mm-mm.

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Matt Loszak (28:13)

using a very special form of fuel that again is very low supply chain. For example, it's called Triso. And so, Triso is inherently more expensive and will lead to higher LCOEs. And is that a good fit for remote diesel military? Yeah, that's a great product market fit, but that is not the right product for data centers. basically what it boils down to is we almost have this advantage in having started a bit later

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and timing things and really ⁓ focusing on making the best product for data centers from the beginning, because we could do what a startup is meant to do, which is go talk to customers and ask what they want and design around that. And so that's kind of how we've been able to make this holy grail product for data centers.

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Yasir (28:58)

Yeah. So coming back to your question, Matt is how are we different? And it's going to tie nicely with where Matt ended is if you think about the overall spectrum of nuclear today, you basically have bigger watt scale plants that usually takes about 10 plus years to build in the West today. then you have exactly. then, and that is all mostly built as a project on the site, mostly a stick build approach. And that takes a very long time.

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Mat Vogels (29:15)

That would be to power a city, basically.

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Yasir (29:25)

And and that's relies on the technology of the past right and then on the there's another category called micro reactors Those are the you know single digit megawatt level like one to five megawatt perhaps and those are mostly good solutions for remote power Supply right for remote communities or mines or for military bases applications, but then there's a

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Mat Vogels (29:47)

military base, like Matt said.

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Yasir (29:51)

You know, you have this small modular reactor which a lot of people heard about. But if you look around, there are no small modular reactors being built today because they're neither small nor are they very modular. They're basically one third the size of gigawatt scale reactors. And as Madwell was saying, these were built or designed, not built, they were designed in an era where they were challenges with financing this really gigawatt scale plant. So they wanted to make it smaller. It is not an ideal fit.

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for AI data centers. So when we looked around and said, you know what, what is that unit block of data center power source that would be ideal that we can copy paste the way data centers copy and paste into a larger data center? What does that look like? Then we came up with the 50 megawatt pod. But the next challenge was, well, if there are five reactors in each pod, what should those five reactors be made out of? What is that ideal technology we should be selecting? So,

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Most small reactors, they suffer from not being economically feasible. They're very expensive. It works in remote areas, but when you come think about, you're trying to compete with power on the grid, you have to make sure it's economically feasible. So we put a lot of effort and thinking trying to figure out what is that ideal technology that we can build in a factory that we can transport in modular fashion, but it's also have a very superior economics.

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Right. And the two of the most important element of that tech choice is one is our fuel selection. We don't use any exotic fuel that does not exist today. Commercially, we use commercially available uranium dioxide fuel that does not use HALU. are where maximum is eight percent enrichment. Right. That is commercially available today. When we build hundreds of reactors, we don't have to worry about where the fuel is going to come from, because

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That supply chain exists in the US. That's one key unlock. The second unlock was our choice of coolant. So most reactors that you find commercially today are based on water-based technology. And if you want to get high temperature out of it, you have to pressurize the heck out of that vessel so it can operate high temperature without turning into vapor, right?

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And that's why all of these systems are made with very thick walls to be even containing that pressure. So we decided not to have any pressurized system whatsoever. So we selected a coolant that can operate at high temperature without turning into a gas. So instead of water, we use liquid metal. And in our case, it's sodium. And sodium is an amazing

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coolant, we have a lot of experience from previous prototype reactors built in this country and everywhere around the world, is it's 100 times more thermally conductive than water and the chemistry between sodium and structural steel is so good that you can run for decades without having any chemical issues. And so from a compatibility perspective, it's really awesome. And that is to me the biggest unlock of

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what enables us to build our reactors in a factory is with a non-pressurized coolant, everything is thin-walled. So instead of using forging that can take two to four years for our pressure vessel, we can make our vessels like the one behind Matt in a matter of two weeks in our factory here, right? So that's a huge game changer for everything that we're doing on the tech side. ⁓

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Mat Vogels (33:10)

Yeah.

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Matt Loszak (33:25)

it

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Yasir (33:26)

So I think, you know, while most small reactors are like, oh, well, you know, it's too expensive. I'm going to go in remote areas or military base who's going to pay me higher for the energy. We're not doing that. We're coming up with a solution that initially is going to be within the range that hyperscalers are willing to pay today. But once we make hundreds of these and we can come down the cost curve, it can open up other markets like.

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you know, industrial sector, desalination, or, you know, small towns and municipalities. And then one day, when we can get it down to even lower cost per energy, it's going to be even more competitive than the natural gas or like close to, you know, so and so that one day we can actually provide power to any countries that are struggling with power and bring them out of energy poverty as well as real poverty, right?

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Mat Vogels (34:07)

Yeah. Be in neighborhoods.

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Yeah, that's incredible. I love that.

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Yasir (34:21)

That's the ultimate goal.

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Mat Vogels (34:24)

One of the things that a lot of people are excited about right now, the Department of Energy created a program which essentially elected or nominated a bunch of companies to challenge themselves to go critical by our birthday country's birthday later this year in July. Could one of you talk a little bit about what that is?

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why it's important and then maybe some how all of fits into that.

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Yasir (34:49)

Yeah, totally. Maybe I can start with that. if you think about, so last year, President Trump, you know, after he took office, he said, OK, we've done a lot of paper reactor designs. It's time to build something real. So there was an executive order that basically said, I want three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4th of this year, which is America's 250th birthday. Very monumental, historical year. And so

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Most of the industry was like well, that's not how nuclear works. It takes a long time Majority of them kind of like backed out from the whole whole approach only a few applied including alo and we were like well, you know one of our moat and our strength in alo is the fact that We are the fastest company in nuclear. What better way to demonstrate that? Than this mission and by the time when all of got selected for this program We only had ten months to pull this off, right?

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But just to back up a little bit, know, Allo is only a two and a half years company. And, you know, was just me and Matt in late 23 when we started off, we're 150 people right now. And since then, we have built our factory right behind me here, 40,000 square feet, you know, six months after we put the team together. And when we started the Reactor Pilot program, we took 36 days.

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to build our first nuclear reactor building. We took four weeks to build the reactor itself in the factory and one week to install it. So in an industry where it takes many, many years or decades, that's the norm, we're essentially flipping the script and saying, can we do that in less than one year? And we're demonstrating that, right? So I think that's an amazing opportunity for us as a company to show what our speed looks like.

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And this year is kind of an interesting year because, you know, lot of great things are happening. Like, for example, Artemis 2 just sent astronauts around the moon after like over nearly 50 years, you know, since the last time. And if you think about if, you know, they're trying to solve the issues on the moon and here in the desert of Idaho. Bless you,

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Matt Loszak (36:57)

Thanks.

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Yasir (36:59)

In the deserts of Idaho, we're building, you know, the first new nuclear facility in over 50 years, trying to unlock energy abundance on Earth. So it's kind of a very ⁓ historical year where we're heading towards.

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Matt Loszak (37:14)

so in our estimation, there are three other companies that will achieve criticality by July 4th. But what we are doing is really apples and oranges compared to what everyone else is doing. So if you look at those three other companies, they are respectively doing a one megawatt, 500 kilowatt, and 100 kilowatt test reactor. Whereas,

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Mat Vogels (37:34)

Those would be

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what Yasir was saying earlier, the microreactor kind of space.

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Matt Loszak (37:38)

Yeah. Whereas we're doing a 10 megawatt, you full scale system, initially zero power criticality, and then going to full power operation soon thereafter. you know, ours is really the only one that's actually commercially relevant, kind of, you know, full scale, all the fuel, all the controls. And then also, two of the others are actually going into existing buildings. We had to build our own building from scratch because this is our whole model. We want to show that

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Like Yasir said before, nuclear can be licensed quickly, built quickly from a green field. So I think this is insane if you consider that, you know, where we're actually turning this reactor on in a matter of just a few weeks, it was a green field just a few months ago. And we built this whole building, did all the policies, procedures and, you know, security controls, operations procedures from scratch and doing it so quickly, so efficiently while maintaining safety.

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is a huge deal. And one more thing is in a very capital efficient way. In fact, as a whole company, we've actually only spent around 70 million so far to not only go to criticality, but also build a factory that can actually produce these modules. So I think that is unheard of. If you asked people three years ago whether that was possible, they'd say, it'll take you a billion dollars to get to criticality, 10 years. And in fact, many investors laughed when we said we'd achieve criticality on this timeline.

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but we're doing it. So we're really proud of that.

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Yasir (39:04)

Yeah. One thing I want to add to what Matt is saying is I think if all the companies that we project to achieve criticality, including Aloe, I think we took the most difficult scope, the largest scope to get to that line. And that is because vertical integration is a key part of our company. Right.

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Mat Vogels (39:04)

That's a huge feat,

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Yasir (39:27)

We designed the entire building, the entire reactor, all the control systems, all the shielding material, reactor vessels, all of it. Our design, our team designed it, built it, they're testing it, they're operating it. We're not bringing in operators from other places. all of the different, so building the reactor in itself is half the challenge. The other half of the challenge is creating all of the safety management programs

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that is needed to prove to the regulator, hey, the way Idaho National Laboratory next door is operating as a DOV contractor, ALO can also be a DOV contractor. we have to, so the amount of work was like a ton. And the reason we did that is because we want to build that muscle so we can do a lot of these things in-house because we're not worried about just building one reactor. We're thinking about, okay, after this one, we're going to build a full-powered system next door.

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And we want to do vertical integration on that as well. After that, build hundreds of reactors and scale it up. And that's where the rubber meets the road. If we just do a small scope just to achieve criticality, that's pointless in our mind.

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Mat Vogels (40:37)

It's almost as though a lot of folks might be looking at this criticality test as the finish line. In a way, you're looking at it as like the starting line. It's like, as soon as that gun goes off, we've done that, we've reached that milestone. That's actually where the next phase of work begins, which I think is what makes all of us so exciting. Could you paint a little picture on what that scale actually looks like? What does that timeline actually look like? So if you do hit criticality and up to or before July,

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What happens after July for Allo?

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Matt Loszak (41:09)

Yeah. Well, we're going to take a data to celebrate and cry and high five. ⁓ But right after that, the focus immediately turns to basically turning our Olox site into the world's first co-located and co-built nuclear plants and data center. So we do have a partner that was announced on a podcast. It's Crusoe. They're one of the two main developers behind Stargate. And they're going to be putting a data center right next to this power plant we're building.

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Mat Vogels (41:14)

Yeah.

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Matt Loszak (41:37)

at the All OX site. So that'll be the immediate next step. In parallel, we are now about to build out our million square foot factory. And this will be our gigawatt factory. A million square feet, yes. It's called a gigawatt factory, not to be confused with a gigafactory, these are totally different things. But it'll have the capacity to produce 100 reactors a year, totaling a gigawatt per year, and then we'll scale it up from there. But we think...

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Mat Vogels (41:46)

million square foot.

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Matt Loszak (42:03)

Roughly that's the ratio. like Yasir said, what we're creating here is fundamentally a new nuclear product. So if you think about ⁓ nuclear, what hasn't existed before is affordable smaller reactors. You started off with smaller reactors that were expensive because they were the first time humanity built nuclear in the 1950s. And then we made nuclear cheaper by making it bigger.

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We built big reactors that were actually as cheap as coal in the 1970s. And then unfortunately we forgot how to build them. So now we're making expensive big reactors like Vogel. But there's two main ways to make something cheap, right? You can make it bigger or make it more numerous. And in nuclear, we've never made it cheaper in that latter methodology, like making it more numerous. So that's what we're doing. And the beauty, and Yasir already touched on this.

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is that unlocks all these markets that were just not accessible to nuclear before. Like things like desalination, industrial process heat, small utility. You know, they don't want a gigawatt. They want 10 to 100 megawatts. But if you tell them you're going to be, you know, 15 cents, 20 cents, 30 cents a kilowatt hour, they say, come back and talk to us when you're below 10 cents. So that's the whole beauty of what we're doing is the hyperscalers have a slightly higher willingness to pay.

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not too much, but slight. And that opens the door just enough to start to come down the cost curve in our factory and then go after all those other markets. And like Yasir said, the ultimate goal is to go after developing nations, help bring the world out of energy poverty. So that's our kind of top secret master plan, ⁓ those three steps. yeah. ⁓

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Mat Vogels (43:40)

I love it.

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Yasir (43:43)

Yeah, Matt

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and I, have a ⁓ habit of not pushing our timeline, but bringing it closer. Our original plan was, by 2028, we will unleash this ⁓ gigawatt factory where we can build hundreds of reactors a year in this million square feet facility. We looked at each other and we're like, that's too long. Let's bring that backwards. Now, so we are really, you know, basically, ⁓

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Mat Vogels (43:50)

Yeah.

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Thank

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Yasir (44:09)

Approaching the gigawatt factory in three phases the first phase going to be this year from this 40,000 square feet Which by the way is not a factory really if you think about it. It's not an assembly line It's basically this is the place where we try to figure out how to build our reactors and build the first couple of them right But to truly unlock what Henry Ford has done in cars We need to build our first assembly line

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And that we're doing this year in the phase one of the Gigawatt Factory where we're getting like about 250,000 square feet just to make sure we can make multiple allopods and tens of reactors a year learn from it, do as much vertical integration as we can. And then from that learning, we'll go to phase two next year, which is let's go maximize vertical integration. And then phase three would be up to the million square feet.

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where we're maximizing the production out of that massive factory space here in Texas. So yeah, we're super excited about it. And one of the biggest challenges in the nuclear industry, particularly advanced reactor, is the lack of a robust and reliable supply chain. we know that, hey, we call ourselves a vertical integration company. And we are.

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Mat Vogels (45:19)

Yeah.

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Yasir (45:24)

We build all the things that nobody else builds in our reactor, but there are common commodities like pumps and turbines or sensors that we will still need to buy from others. So we've been working very closely with more than 140 suppliers across 35 US states and six countries bringing in like 100,000 plus people's brains together, trying to make sure that when we scale from one reactor to hundreds of reactors a year,

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There's an entire industry and ecosystem that scales with us. So we're not just like saying, hey, let's just go and grow wallow to the max and leave everybody behind. We are actually helping other companies grow and really building rebuilding that muscle that US have lost in building large scale. I mean, numerous amount of reactors that we used to be able to do in the past.

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Mat Vogels (46:20)

You it's incredible. I think I want to touch on two kinds of things in more layman ways there. think what gets me really excited about what you're doing is you mentioned volume and producing some of these at scale. But then I also think what maybe a lot of folks listening don't quite understand is that the 10 to 15 megawatt reactor.

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is also 10 times bigger than some of the micro reactors that are looking to do the same type of scale. So you guys are kind of in this middle ground of being able to not only produce at a high scale, but reactors that are also a multiple bigger than some of the other companies that are coming through as well.

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Matt Loszak (46:54)

Ahem. Ahem. Ahem.

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Yasir (46:57)

Yeah, I mean one of the goals that we had internally when we were designing our reactor was, know, yes it should be factory manufactured, yes it can be transported by road as a module, but what is that technology that can give us the highest power that we can put on the back of a truck? That was our design. Exactly.

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Mat Vogels (47:13)

Yeah, and work backwards from that almost.

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Matt Loszak (47:17)

Yeah, and also to dive into one thing Yasir touched on earlier, know, why sodium? So Yasir mentioned it's low pressure, high boiling point. That means thin walled vessels easier to roll. So that's a big advantage. But also it's 100 times more thermally conductive than any other nuclear coolant, water, molten salt or gas. And so what that means is the vessels can then be two to five times smaller for the same energy.

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And if you're really thinking about doing for nuclear what Henry Ford did for cars, you got to make sure that you're optimizing for the most compact, most mass-manufacturable system. Because it makes a big difference on the economics when you can make two to five times more revenue with the same amount of hardware. So that's what a lot of other designs might struggle with.

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Yasir (48:03)

think ultimately what we're solving here is how to scale nuclear in a way that we haven't before. Yeah, we can go to a building a gigawatt scale plan one at a time, and it takes a decade at a time to build. But ultimately the solution that we are trying to bring to life is we can make multiple gigawatts from a factory build system every single year. And if you think about what is the model that can get us to a hundred

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Houston's worth of power in the future. This is the only scalable way of achieving that, not how we have done things in the past where we stick-built every single system from ground up.

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Mat Vogels (48:41)

Yeah. Maybe the last question here, you mentioned obviously down the road, this is something that on a global level could bring people out of energy poverty. Could you paint a picture at what that would actually mean? I mean, both internationally, but also here in the U S like what is, what does this utopia kind of look like? What does it actually unlock, uh, at a global level when you achieve this?

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Matt Loszak (49:03)

Well, feel like, yeah, Yasir and I both have lots of thoughts on this. I think one way to frame the question is kind of, know, what do we help to enable and what do we help to avoid? you know, one thing is it's pretty incredible that the whole global economy right now is propped up on oil and gas. And this is like dead plants and dinosaurs that will only last us like another hundred years. So all of civilization is propped up on this thing that's going to run out in a hundred years.

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Mat Vogels (49:13)

Ooh, I like that.

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Matt Loszak (49:28)

We have to, like we're driving a million miles an hour towards a brick wall and nuclear is the answer. So I mean, nuclear is going to save us from that because it's clean. Not only will it not mess up the planet, but also it'll last us millions of times longer because there's nuclear is way more energy dense. There's way more fissile and fertile fuel around the earth than there is oil and gas. So there's that, but the kind of positive framing of that is think about all the wealth and wellbeing that oil and gas has brought us. know, as much as people

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like to hate on it, it brought us an incredible quality of life, a lot of wealth, a lot of well-being. Imagine multiplying that by millions. What does that look like? I'm not even going to sit here and pretend to imagine all the incredible things that can be unlocked by a million times more energy abundance. So that's a huge angle. And then the other side is AI. Right now, AI is a little bit controversial. Some people think it's going to unlock the utopia for humanity.

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Some people think it'll be a Terminator scenario. At all though, we're optimists. We really believe that it's gonna be this bright, optimistic future and we want to enable that. But just thinking through what AI can do for humanity, can solve disease. It can solve some fundamental big problems that humanity has like poverty. It can create abundance for everyone. It could, in theory, do things like do vertical farming to return a lot of the farmland back to nature.

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and kind of allow us to create more humans, but then also be better for the planet, return nature back to the planet. Anyway, Yassir probably has some good ones too.

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Yasir (51:00)

Yeah, beautifully said, Matt. think what I would want to complement with that is if you think about the world today, there's developing nations who don't have the capability to essentially make their own power. They're reliant on other countries ⁓ to import the energy. And then if you look at developed nations like the US,

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Mat Vogels (51:18)

Yeah.

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Yasir (51:25)

You know, we're looking at, you know, energy security as a big deal, right? So almost everybody wants abundant energy for one reason or another, right? But that's great. I mean, we're creating an energy generation technology. But ultimately, if you take a step back and if you look at Earth, right, and there's a lot of people that are super excited about exploring other planets and settling humanity there, which is awesome, great. But if you look at Earth itself,

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there's so many untapped potential. 50 % of the population live in only 3 % of the land. And that's because there's a lot of areas on planet Earth that are uninhabitable. Either they're too dry or too wet or, you know, they don't have access to the national grid. But with this energy solution, Matt and I had this vision that, you know, one day perhaps with our systems, ⁓

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Mat Vogels (52:01)

Wow.

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Off the grid. Yeah.

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Yasir (52:21)

you can unlock all of these uninhabitable places and make them habitable and really allow humanity to grow and foster on this planet before we even think about embarking on another one. So that's what we can unlock here ultimately is make uninhabitable places habitable with nuclear.

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Mat Vogels (52:26)

That's cool.

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I love it. You guys, this was awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I hope that folks are even more excited about what you're building now after listening to this. We'll put some links, obviously, in the show notes. Folks can continue to follow both of you and Aalo, but thank you again for being on and ⁓ we'll talk again soon.

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Yasir (52:57)

Sounds good. Thanks for having us. Yeah, you too.

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Matt Loszak (52:58)

Thanks so much for having us, Matt.

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Mat Vogels (52:59)

Have good one.