'This is a huge opportunity' to fuel reactors sooner and faster, says Oklo's CEO

? (Anchor) 00:00.150

joining us now to discuss is oklahoma CEO jacob dewitt so you gotta explain this to us jake we hear plutonium from the cold war and wonder is that a good thing is that safe

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 00:11.040

it's great that's one of the things we demonstrated and showed is you can do it very safely what's really important about it is this is a huge opportunity to fuel reactors basically to build them sooner and faster one of the big challenges i think is we've looked down the path

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 00:24.680

over the next few years about how quickly we can build new power plants new nuclear power plants specifically is a fuel shortage this solves it we were going to basically spend as a country twenty billion dollars to take thirty tons plus of this material and i'm not kidding you

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 00:37.240

mix it with sand and kitty litter i'm not kidding you and barry in the desert it's kind of silly because you could instead use that to power several gigawatts of new nuclear power and so we've been working since well since the summer to sort of help build out the case for how

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 00:50.350

you can do it and why you can do it we have a history of doing this successfully around the country and we just hit some big milestones in this week to to prove out some of the inherent safety features of a of a fast reactor with plutonium in it

? (Anchor) 01:00.270

so just explain it so so so is it that plutonium is just scarce and hard to come by and and it's and it's old or that it's been destroyed

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 01:10.230

yeah so think of it like this we made a bunch of it in the cold war we don't need it anymore so we were going to get rid of it through a couple different patterns it's a finite resource it's really a bridge fuel to think about it like this it's a replacement for our shortages

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 01:21.990

and our normal uranium fuel supply chain and it can replace that in the near term as a bit of a bridge so then we can build we can basically make fuel out of plutonium that looks the same more or less out of the fuel you would use with low enriched uranium for our reactors and

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 01:35.310

then we can just build plants sooner because this material is more or less pretty much ready to be fabricated today compared to building up the fuel supply chains that right now are about twenty percent under supply to the US market and less less than or i should say more

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 01:47.950

undersupply than that looking at the growth forward so to me this is a actual massive change in getting rid of one of the big growth bottlenecks for a new nuclear which is that fuel sort of supply chain build out because we can now bring in this bridge fuel that the plutonium

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 02:02.510

that we have as a leftover material we're going to get rid of anyway can be used as again it's a finite resource it's not going to be replaced it's just use it to kick start this buildup of new nuclear it's kind of maybe not the best analogy but it's a little bit like a fire

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 02:15.630

starter in a fireplace you can just get more going sooner that then you can gradually replace into as as the rest of the commercial fuel supply chains fully kick in all right

? (Anchor) 02:24.590

we'll take your word for it not being a nuclear scientist so clearly you you sound excited about it i guess the question that investors really want to know is does it accelerate your your stated timeline for building these reactors

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 02:38.360

it totally does you look at the biggest challenge you know this is one of the things that now we have enough fuel that's coming forward from these programs i say we as i mean we as a society right because the country is making this available to build more than two gigawatts of

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 02:50.870

new nuclear power capacity and that fuel is available today whereas we're not going to be getting much commercial fuel until twenty eight twenty nine kind of at best so while we can build our first couple plants this doesn't really change our first couple plan schedule but it

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 03:02.790

changes the growth after that and that's what's so important it means more plants sooner by twenty thirty twenty twenty one twenty two and it literally stopped fills a gap of about two gigawatts of fuel capacity that we would otherwise need over the next we think you know sort

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 03:16.430

of seven to ten years so it accelerates building out that much capacity faster it changes the economics because it can be much more economically attractive by using this material and it it basically gets rid of this supply chain bottleneck that you know doesn't hinder inhibit

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 03:31.150

things it just slows down growth now that's going away with this program and what we did in nevada earlier this week was pretty cool because we actually took a system critical we ran it for a little bit we proved out these great inherent stabilization kind of safety and

Jacob DeWitte (Co-Founder & CEO) 03:44.270

inherently stabilizing features of the system it was pretty dang cool to see all that go