# The company building America’s uranium supply from scratch

- **Show:** Cheeky Pint
- **Published:** 3 Nov 2026
- **Source:** https://share.transistor.fm/s/69a09d0c
- **Transcript:** https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/cheeky-pint/the-company-building-americas-uranium-supply-from-scratch-4375e8/
- **Provider:** OpenNash Podcasts (machine-generated)

## In brief

The US once dominated uranium enrichment but let it lapse after the Cold War, and now depends on Russia and Europe for reactor fuel. Scott Nolan argues that this fuel gap, not reactor design or licensing, is the key bottleneck for new nuclear power. His company, General Matter, is building a fresh enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, to supply HALEU and ordinary reactor fuel by 2030.

The tension is between a hard deadline and a hard business. A US ban on Russian uranium imports begins on January 1, 2028, while General Matter will not deliver fuel until about the end of the decade. Nolan says the real challenge is not the physics, which is old and well understood, but making enrichment cheap enough to compete globally, using a clean-sheet design and SpaceX-style speed.

## Key insights

1. **Fuel supply, not licensing, blocks advanced reactors** Nolan says reactor startups told him their biggest problem was getting HALEU fuel, since only Russia sells it commercially. Congress's ban on Russian uranium imports from 2028 makes that gap urgent.
2. **Smaller reactor cores need higher-enriched fuel** A small factory-built core burns through its fissile material faster, so it needs fuel enriched to just under 20% to keep running. That also allows refuelling every 5 to 10 years in remote sites.
3. **Nolan blames cost and interest rates for nuclear's decline** He argues slow builds, no economies of scale and 1970s-80s interest rates mattered more than accidents. He says about 20% of Vogtle's cost overruns were interest payments.
4. **Enrichment is hard because of cost, not physics** Enrichment is a gas separation with no chemical or nuclear reactions, and many techniques are known. The difficulty is making it scalable and cheap enough to compete with Russia, Europe and China.
5. **Cost-plus contracting breeds stagnant industries** Nolan says his Boeing internship showed that when contractors are paid costs plus a margin, adding people is rewarded over moving fast. He saw SpaceX's speed as the reason small teams can beat incumbents.

## Questions this episode answers

### Why does the US need a new uranium enrichment company?

The US shut its Cold War-era enrichment plants because they were not cost competitive, and now gets fuel from Russia and Europe. Nolan says that supply is at risk because Congress banned Russian uranium imports from January 1, 2028, which covers about a quarter of US demand.

### What is HALEU and why do new reactors need it?

HALEU is high-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched to just under 20% uranium-235, versus 3-5% for today's large reactors. Nolan says smaller, factory-built reactor cores need this stronger fuel to keep running longer between refuellings.

### Is the AI data center boom driving demand for General Matter's fuel?

Not directly, according to Nolan. Most of the company's near-term contracts are with utilities running existing large reactors, and he expects any near-term data center power to come largely from natural gas, with nuclear growing in importance over about five years.

### Why did nuclear power become so expensive?

Nolan says it was not mainly due to accidents like Three Mile Island. He points to slow, one-off construction, high interest rates in the 1970s and 80s, and utilities paid cost-plus that had little pressure to cut prices.

### How is General Matter funding and building its plant?

Nolan says it won a $900 million US government award for capacity building, and is building at a former Department of Energy enrichment site in Paducah, Kentucky. It submitted its NRC license application and is using its own in-house construction, procurement and engineering teams.

## Facts

- **Scott Nolan** [0:04:52]: "Congress passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. That ban goes into effect January 1, 2028. Right now, they're still importing under a waiver."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:03:25]: "So in the U .S., we get about a quarter from Russia, still imported. That's going to keep going until 2028."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:02:08]: "Most of the reactors in the grid today, they go at 3 % to 5%."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:01:39]: "you then separate the gas to enrich it, meaning get more density of U-235, the fissile material. You then turn it back into a solid and then you make your fuel pellets."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:03:55]: "Most of U .S. supply will come from Kazakhstan and Canada."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:16:06]: "20 % of Vogel's cost overruns were interest rate overruns, interest payment overruns."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:16:41]: "you had interest rates that peaked, I think, in 1981 on mortgages, like 18 % mortgages at that point."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:21:44]: "the Biden administration went into triple nuclear production in the U .S. by 2050. The Trump administration wants to quadruple it."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:24:52]: "Submarines care even more about refueling cycles. So when you refill a submarine, you have to cut it open and remove the reactor."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:25:44]: "The facility that we're building is in Paducah, Kentucky, so Western Kentucky."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:38:29]: "We went to over 10 states, looked at over 1 ,000 plots of land."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:34:32]: "We were down selected under the Biden administration, awarded under the Trump administration earlier this year for a $900 million award for capacity building"
- **Scott Nolan** [0:40:10]: "So uranium out of the ground is 0 .7%, 0 .711 % U235. That's what you want."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:00:00]: "It was nicknamed megatons to megawatts. So we imported Russian warheads, blended them down, ran our reactors on it"
- **Scott Nolan** [0:42:15]: "We were over 90 % of supply globally. And ultimately that approach, that specific design and technology, was not cost competitive"
- **Scott Nolan** [0:33:17]: "at today's market prices, it can be."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:30:24]: "SpaceX, when I started, I was just an intern in 2003."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:55:42]: "we copied the Tesla playbook of build your own in-house construction EPC team."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:25:44]: "We just submitted our NRC license last week."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:44:55]: "the last time anyone's done a clean sheet redesign was decades ago."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:48:16]: "before SpaceX, I did work at one of the aerospace incumbents as an intern. Which one? Boeing."
- **Scott Nolan** [0:37:49]: "our technique is one that we'll unveil first half of next year when we'll talk about it."

## Transcript

**[0:00:00] Scott Nolan:** The US did a first generation technology to win World War II to stay dominant in the Cold War. We were over 90 % of supply globally. It was nicknamed megatons to megawatts, so we imported Russian warheads, blended them down, ran our reactors on it. Congress passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. That ban goes into effect January 1st, 2028. And so our first mission is produce HALEU before the end of the decade for all these reactors.

**[0:00:27] John Collison:** Scott Nolan is General Matter, an advanced uranium enrichment company. His ultimate goal is to slash energy costs so dramatically that entirely new capabilities become cheap and routine. Cheers. Cheers. Good to see you. Cheers. So, General Matter, what are you guys trying to do?

**[0:00:44] Scott Nolan:** We are enriching uranium. You know, when we started, not many people were talking about uranium. Not many people were talking about nuclear energy. This was mid-2023. and I'd been doing investing at Founders Fund for 10 years and investing in some of the reactor companies. I asked them, what's the hardest thing you have to do? And I was like, licensing, obviously. And they said, no, it wasn't licensing. It's actually getting the fuel. We have to get all of our fuel from Russia.

**[0:01:08] Scott Nolan:** It's very hard to import. And so I said, well, you know, why don't the U .S. companies that make all the fuel for the existing fleet of reactors, 94 reactors on the grid, 20 % of U .S. power, why don't they make the fuel that you need? And they said, what U .S. companies?

**[0:01:25] John Collison:** Okay, so this is both new nuclear companies like startups and existing nuclear plants in the U .S. Both require enriched uranium and both have to source it from Russian companies? Russian or European. Okay, but non-U .S. companies.

**[0:01:39] Scott Nolan:** Non-U .S. So let's run through the big picture on where fuel comes from. So reactors like any engine or anything producing power does consume something that consumes nuclear fuel. the nuclear fuel is made with five steps. First you get uranium out of the ground, you then turn it into a gas, you then separate the gas to enrich it, meaning get more density of U-235, the fissile material. You then turn it back into a solid and then you make your fuel pellets.

**[0:02:08] Scott Nolan:** So five steps. All reactors in the U .S. run on this stack for making nuclear fuel. the more modern reactors, SMRs, advanced reactors, those will use fuel that's enriched to a higher level. Call it 20%, just under 20%. Most of the reactors in the grid today, they go at 3 % to 5%. And so the big difference that that unlocks is if you're going low enriched, 3 % to 5%, you generally want a much bigger reactor vessel, a core.

**[0:02:41] Scott Nolan:** If you're going up to 19%, 19 .75%, 20%, it unlocks a much smaller core that lets you do a factory-built reactor. So a lot of what you're hearing about with advanced reactors is a combination of safety, enhanced passive safety that doesn't exist in the existing fleet, and then a form factor that could be built in a factory modularly that lets you bring the cost down.

**[0:03:05] John Collison:** When people talk about small modular reactors, the modularity is that you can mass produce it in a factory rather than needing to build it custom on a site, and you have a bunch of shipping containers that you hook up. Exactly. More or less. Trying to minimize the construction aspect of the project. Yes. Okay. But both, so where do, you know, Diablo Canyon, where do they get their enriched uranium?

**[0:03:25] Scott Nolan:** From existing suppliers. That's, you know, a combination of Russia and Europe. So in the U .S., we get about a quarter from Russia, still imported. That's going to keep going until 2028. And then the rest from European providers. That's France. And then a European consortium called Uranco. Does the U .S. mine uranium?

**[0:03:44] John Collison:** We do, small quantities. So the problem you're trying to address is that uranium is mined in the U .S. or Canada. It is then shipped across an ocean to be enriched and then ultimately shipped back as fuel.

**[0:03:55] Scott Nolan:** More or less, yeah. Yeah. So most of U .S. supply will come from Kazakhstan and Canada. And then where it's turned into a gas varies. Got it.

**[0:04:04] John Collison:** And I presume if you talk to a nuclear startup that wants to get 19 % enriched uranium, they agree with you on the geopolitics of this. It would be valuable to unshore this stuff, but they probably have more acute problems that you're solving beyond just it would be good to re-unshore the supply chain.

**[0:04:24] Scott Nolan:** Right. For them, it's mostly about availability. So as they think about their very first deployments and then scaling up in the early 2030s to tens of deployments, it's all about where are we going to get the enriched uranium, the 19 .75 % enriched uranium, also called HALEU, high assay, low enriched uranium. So that's all about availability. That was the first problem that I heard of. And that was the question of, okay, only Russia makes this today commercially.

**[0:04:52] Scott Nolan:** How are we going to import it? In mid-2024, Congress passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. That ban goes into effect January 1, 2028. Right now, they're still importing under a waiver. but January 1st, 2028, that ends. And so all these companies are wondering, who's going to produce HALEU? And so our first mission as a provider is produce HALEU before the end of the decade for all these reactors. Part two is bringing the cost down.

**[0:05:21] Scott Nolan:** So that'll be the other big lever that we work on.

**[0:05:26] John Collison:** How is this regulated? Can you give us the map of enriched uranium? Where does weapons grade uranium start to happen? and who do you have to work with as a regulator for all this?

**[0:05:36] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, so if you're doing commercial sales of nuclear power or fuel, that's going to go through the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In the US, that's your regulator. If you are selling to the government, there's potential Department of Energy paths or if you're an R &D reactor, you could go through a DOE path. But it's primarily NRC if you're doing commercial operations. How have they been to deal with it? Great, great. So, like I said, I think the investment community, the startup community, the whole tech community, historically has just heard, oh, the NRC is really difficult or something.

**[0:06:12] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, the NRC is a bad brand. Yeah, that would be the blame is often placed in the NRC. I actually don't think it's deserved. They've been great to work with. Ultimately, they care about two things, safety and security. And then there's an environmental consideration as well. And so all their licensing focuses on those things. This was the answer we got from the SMR company that I knew. We asked them, hey, how hard is it to get the NRC licensing?

**[0:06:38] Scott Nolan:** And they said, it's pretty straightforward. You do the safety analysis. You do the security analysis. You show low environmental impact. And it's a straightforward process. It's a lot of paperwork and analysis, but it's doable.

**[0:06:51] John Collison:** Can you give us a bit of a map of nuclear reactor designs? So the traditional designs installed in plants operating today. and then you're talking about these newer startups that are pursuing SMR type approaches and I presume like there are a bunch of different technical approaches there but can you just ground us in what everyone's trying to do and presumably there's some even that don't use uranium as a fuel so they're outside of the scope for you but are maybe relevant to this discussion yeah so most

**[0:07:21] Scott Nolan:** of the US grid virtually all of it runs on light water reactors these are reactors with uranium enriched to low enriched uranium levels, LEU levels, three to 5% enrichment. That goes into the core. And your moderator and your coolant is water, just regular water. And so that's most reactors on the grid. You end up with a pressurized steam line, large dome covering the reactor. That's part of the large construction project that that leads to the billions in cost per reactor.

**[0:07:55] John Collison:** Is the large dome covering the... That's a containment dome. I see, okay.

**[0:07:59] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, so in the case of an accident, in the case of loss of cooling, that's meant to do containment of any radiological material. I see. Yeah, so the reactor is not actually that large, it's a much larger dome covering the reactor.

**[0:08:12] John Collison:** Why does the containment dome need to be so big?

**[0:08:15] Scott Nolan:** Mostly for the most extreme accident scenarios. Just making sure the thickness is there, the internal volumes are there. I see.

**[0:08:24] John Collison:** It's small on the inside, it's very thick. Smaller. Yeah, smaller. Okay, so that's the traditional light water reactor design.

**[0:08:31] Scott Nolan:** How about the startups? Nearly all of them are focused on going modular, bringing the size down, bringing your core size down. So let's go to stranded demand centers and let's serve those demand centers and let's go containerized or even smaller than that. You're going to be using HALEU in that very small format. Again, that's the 19 .75 % enriched, smaller core, smaller format. So now we're talking about fuel formats, but they often go hand in hand with the reactor design.

**[0:08:57] John Collison:** But why do those two things go together? Which pieces? The smaller core and highly enriched uranium.

**[0:09:04] Scott Nolan:** To unlock a smaller core design that can be built in a factory, you want your fuel to be higher octane, so to speak, higher enrichment level. The reason you care about your fuel being at a higher enrichment level is because at some point as it is burnt, as it's consumed, as it reacts, that enrichment level will drop. And at some point, you can think of it as the power going out, the reactor fizzling out. If you have a stationary one gigawatt reactor, you're running three to 5 % enriched uranium.

**[0:09:36] Scott Nolan:** You're probably doing refueling every 18 months, 24 months. And so that's an acceptable thing. You have a very big reactor. Your core will stay critical for quite a while. and the refueling every 18, 24 months is not such a big deal. If you have a very small core, think of it as you need more higher octane fuel. As it burns up, it's less likely to, it will pass through, you know, acceptable power production down to not even being critical more quickly.

**[0:10:05] Scott Nolan:** And some of these reactors also want to have like five-year, 10-year refueling cycles because they're out somewhere remote, not somewhere central. And so it's a combination of you want to unlock a smaller core that will remain critical for a longer period.

**[0:10:19] John Collison:** Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Can you talk about the passive safety advantages of highly enriched uranium that you mentioned?

**[0:10:28] Scott Nolan:** Not highly, but HALEU.

**[0:10:30] John Collison:** Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**[0:10:31] Scott Nolan:** So the enrichment level itself does not lead to safety advantages, but people's reactor formats do. And so some of these reactors are passively safe. So a classically well-known version of this was like molten salt reactors. You know, the molten salt has thermal properties that cause it to self-regulate. And then if somehow it were overheated, you could put a plug in the bottom of the reservoir and then the plug would melt and then everything drains out and criticality stops.

**[0:11:00] Scott Nolan:** That's kind of the idea of a molten salt reactor. You have other ones like helium cooled where the helium can't be activated. The helium cannot become radioactive. So even if you had a cooling release, you're not releasing any radioactive material. And in general, these newer designs just have either passive safety features or modern architectures around active safety.

**[0:11:24] John Collison:** Got it. So it's a, you can design into the reactor some kind of self-correcting mechanism, like a fuse plug type thing where the act of starting to run away from you causes the safety mechanisms kick in. Right. Yeah. Well stated. The AI scale-up and power-up has been powered significantly by turbines and other forms of electricity that you can bring online very quickly, generators in some cases. Has it affected your market at all, or really the market for your customers, or are the timelines for nuclear power too long?

**[0:12:11] Scott Nolan:** I think no and no. So it has not impacted us specifically. So a lot of the topics in nuclear today are all about SMRs and advanced nuclear. That's an important segment. I think it's going to grow tremendously over the next decade. But it's still a small market today. And as an enricher, most of the contracting volume that we do is with the existing fleet. It's for low-enrich uranium, it's with the utilities. So as people think about how are they powering data centers in the next couple of years, you know, we think that some of that will be SMRs as they contract that, but even if it's all natural gas, that's fine because in the next few years most of

**[0:12:58] Scott Nolan:** our demand is from existing fleet utility customers. Now where does it go in five years? I think there will be more and more push to move off of natural gas, move to true baseload. And I think that'll be nuclear. And then the question, the really big question, I think, is does that happen through more of the gigawatt scale reactors or does it happen through more SMRs and what's that balance? And I think if you look at, if you just take a big step back and say, okay, what type of baseload energy, what type of energy do we want to power these data centers?

**[0:13:33] Scott Nolan:** I think there's going to be a lot of pressure for it to be safe and for it to be clean and for it to be baseload. And so the biggest, you know, the thing that people forget is that nuclear is by far the cleanest and safest baseload. It's actually safer than wind power per terawatt hour.

**[0:13:49] John Collison:** Sorry, how do people get harsh with wind power? Just the maintenance of the turbines?

**[0:13:53] Scott Nolan:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you look at all downstream mortality, it's more dangerous than nuclear. And then if you look at all downstream CO2 emissions, nuclear is actually the lowest, lower than wind or solar. So if you think that those things matter and that baseload matters, then it will have to be nuclear. The one thing nuclear has not done a good job of in beating everything else is on cost. And so I think that's actually what it all comes down to.

**[0:14:19] Scott Nolan:** So the question of do we deploy lots of gigawatt scale reactors or is the scaling handled by SMRs? It comes down to who is actually deploying more quickly and cheaply on a per megawatt scale basis.

**[0:14:31] John Collison:** Yeah, isn't the true competitor for nuclear solar plus batteries? Because those are coming down this, both are coming down a very aggressive cost curve. And so you could just be cost competed by solar and batteries in a lot of use cases.

**[0:14:47] Scott Nolan:** I believe the solar cost curve. I am not I haven't seen data that says compelling on the battery cost curve that could be coming But if you want a data center, that's five nines. You need a lot of storage Yeah, so I'd actually delete one thing the battery piece and I would say the competitor for nuclear is actually pure solar Solar and sun sync orbit for data centers if we're talking data centers I do think that that's the one other angle.

**[0:15:14] Scott Nolan:** That's pretty smart and could possibly win if we're talking about power on the ground, I think nuclear still wins, whether that's data center, industrial, whatever it is. How will cost get solved or will it get solved? It will get solved. And then the way it gets solved depends on what you think the cause of the cost issues in nuclear being. So this is one of those overdetermined problems of like, why haven't we scaled nuclear? I think most people just say safety.

**[0:15:43] Scott Nolan:** You know, they look back to the 70s and they say there was a movie The China Syndrome, you had Three Mile Island, you had Chernobyl, and so clearly nuclear was going to stop and we wouldn't scale it. And I do think the scaling piece is actually one of the proximate causes. Like we never hit economies of scale, we weren't doing it quickly enough, we never built out the supply chains, the workforces would shift around from project to project.

**[0:16:06] Scott Nolan:** Vogel was, you know, way over budget, way over schedule. but at a time of historically low interest rates, 20 % of Vogel's cost overruns were interest rate overruns, interest payment overruns. And so you realize that the overnight cost of a plant, when they take 10 years to build, actually doesn't matter as much as interest rates and how long you're actually taking to build these things. And so if you think about the big reactors, I think the way that we bring the cost down dramatically is just build them quicker and build more of them.

**[0:16:41] Scott Nolan:** I think that goes a very long way. If you look at the period when things really slowed down and that downward spiral began for nuclear, it was the 70s. So you had oil price shocks, you had oil prices going very low, you had interest rates that peaked, I think, in 1981 on mortgages, like 18 % mortgages at that point. And so how do you finance a huge infrastructure project when your cost of capital is well north of 10%, way north of that.

**[0:17:10] John Collison:** Because, yeah, the classical story of what happened is this very accident-based mood of things like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And you basically reject that as an explanation where you don't think it was that we saw these near misses and accidents and things and said, screw that, we're going to get much, we're going to strangulate nuclear and overregulate and everything like that. You think it was much more of a WTF happened in 1971 type story where we lost the ability to build large infrastructure projects generally.

**[0:17:46] John Collison:** And nuclear plants are an example of a large infrastructure project.

**[0:17:50] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, and maybe the safety concerns put a slight pause on it. But I think that that is often blamed as the only thing. and maybe that was, you know, kicked off this cycle to some extent, but I think it was probably inevitable anyway when your product is not cost competitive. So I think fundamentally that's the thing in nuclear. It's the cleanest baseload, the safest baseload, not the cheapest baseload. So you have to be the cheapest. I also think people in general, if presented with, you know, here's a new technology, would you like this to power your grid?

**[0:18:23] Scott Nolan:** You've maybe heard some safety issues with it that are probably confusing of which side to believe. And then also your energy won't be cheaper. And so if we're talking about being in 1970s, 1980s, when global warming was not really a topic and emissions wasn't as front and center, why would you say yes to I want a more expensive electricity bill? So I think that put us here. I think the way it gets solved is building more.

**[0:18:51] Scott Nolan:** I think the other side of it, if we want to talk about the cost structure thing in terms of being overdetermined, And you have to ask yourself, well, why did the cost get high? Why wasn't there more downward pressure on them? And I think there just wasn't a strong enough incentive in the ecosystem to push prices down. You had utilities that are more like cost plus organizations, and they're generally going to outsource the construction of the facility.

**[0:19:17] Scott Nolan:** And so you end up with this dynamic that was in some ways similar to the launch industry of no very strong economic pressure to reduce price.

**[0:19:25] John Collison:** It just stopped being a market and started to become a place where people rent extract in all their local corners.

**[0:19:31] Scott Nolan:** Maybe not intentionally, but I think absent a strong pressure to keep prices low and push them down and compete them down, I think in a lot of industries that happens. And it happened in space launch as well.

**[0:19:42] John Collison:** I mean, it feels like in general, the nuclear mood is this very interesting story of extremes where there was crazy unbridled optimism early on. Like, remember the radium watches where, you know, people are making watches with radium 226 for the light glow in the dark dials and this, you know, energy too cheap to meter and the jets in this future. Like, it was really ebullient in its optimism. and then there was this crazy pessimism where nuclear became the kind of public enemy number one and the enemy of environmentalists, which is kind of ironic given you're saying it is kind of probably the safest and lowest carbon format.

**[0:20:27] Scott Nolan:** And it was actually a big debate with the Sierra Club, actually, internally. There was about half of the Sierra Club. There was a pro-nuclear side of the Sierra Club. Pro-nuclear. Yeah, very pro-nuclear. And it was divided on this. around the time of Ansel Adams taking photos for the Sierra Club. I remember this as actually being something that let him create some huge rift. And the argument was basically, you know, we can try and have less energy consumption as a society, and that might be the best thing for the environment, but it seems unlikely.

**[0:20:56] Scott Nolan:** And therefore the alternative is more coal, you know, other things we're doing. Maybe solar can work, maybe wind can work. But those are actually visually and in terms of like acreage more impactful to the environment. And so nuclear may be actually the most environmental source of energy if you think we're going to consume it. And so that was a big internal argument, even amongst the environmental movement around that time.

**[0:21:19] John Collison:** I hadn't realized that there was a rift there, but ultimately one side, one out. Yeah. That's the two side. But where I was going was it feels like we are now getting to a better spot where, at least amongst the youth, I mean, opinions are very striated by age, but younger people are much more likely to be pro-nuclear. So do you think we're getting to a better spot generally in terms of public perception?

**[0:21:44] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, I think we are. I think we are. And you look at, you know, not just age demographics, but also just politically. 10 years ago, nuclear was much less popular in general, and also it was a political issue. Now it's got bipartisan support. You look at, you know, the Biden administration went into triple nuclear production in the U .S. by 2050. The Trump administration wants to quadruple it. So there's good alignment politically around nuclear now. And I think it's because people who historically would have been very concerned more with environmental are realizing it's the cleanest, lowest CO2 emission source.

**[0:22:20] Scott Nolan:** And it's actually extremely safe.

**[0:22:23] John Collison:** Yes. So who do you sell to? Like who are your customers or prospective customers? I know you probably can't pick favorites, but what are a few of the most exciting approaches that you see amongst the startups?

**[0:22:37] Scott Nolan:** So if we're talking about specifics, let's just go smallest to biggest. in no particular order.

**[0:22:42] John Collison:** You're so diplomatic.

**[0:22:44] Scott Nolan:** Finish your goodness. The smallest would be like Antares. That's going to be more for forward deployed, military space, things like that. They have an incredible business in that market. Next size up would be Radiant, one megawatt. Very good reactor design, containerized for remote applications primarily and base resilience. Great business there. then you start getting up into the SMR size and so you have people like Allo or Valor or even Oklo then you go bigger so that would be serving the data center market primarily that's probably probably the first applications there and the ones that are most urgent and then you go larger than that and you're looking at you know Oklo X energy TerraPower larger format that can really compete

**[0:23:34] Scott Nolan:** on the grid in the near term. And so not all of these are using HALEU today. Some might use Lower Enrich or LEU Plus, 6 % to 10 % because it's available.

**[0:23:45] John Collison:** But all of them could. It's like putting a 100-octane in your car. I mean, the price can take it.

**[0:23:49] Scott Nolan:** I don't think all of them can. So if you go big enough, those are all the advanced ones. I think none that I named, I'm not aware of any limitations of any that I named. I think all of those can run HALEU at some point. some are choosing to run leu or leu plus today because that's what's available yep if you go bigger on the grid today those large reactors those gigawatt scale ap1000s the westinghouse design that cannot run HALEU but they are looking at operating and running like leu plus got it and again going back to what we were talking about before you increase the enrichment level and you don't have to refuel as often or you can get

**[0:24:27] Scott Nolan:** a little bit more power out of it yep so that's That's kind of landscape. Think large format light water reactors, really the ones people associate with Homer Simpson. That's low enriched uranium and then everything else that's happening generally trends towards a higher enrichment level, just under 20%.

**[0:24:47] John Collison:** Is it relevant to submarines and all the non-power plant?

**[0:24:52] Scott Nolan:** No, submarines care even more about refueling cycles. So when you refill a submarine, you have to cut it open and remove the reactor. So as infrequent as possible is ideal there. Got it. And they'll run north of 90 % enrichment. Okay.

**[0:25:06] John Collison:** Which is, again, getting into a different regulatory regime. Like you cannot, as a civilian company, produce that.

**[0:25:11] Scott Nolan:** Completely different. And that's why all of the new SMRs, all the advanced reactor designs, specifically choose HALEU. 19 .75%, just under 20%, which is the cutoff for different regulation internationally and domestically.

**[0:25:24] John Collison:** I see. 20 % is the cutoff because beyond that you're getting... You're getting close. Too close. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Where are you guys in the development of the company? Like, we're talking a lot about the market, but how many people? Where, like, do you have a bunch of, you know, uranium sitting in a warehouse somewhere? When do you enrich us? Just describe to me where you are on the journey.

**[0:25:44] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, so big picture, we started end of 2023. Today, here we are almost three years later. The team is just over 200 people, scaling pretty quickly. We have facilities in LA as headquarters, engineering. The facility that we're building is in Paducah, Kentucky, so Western Kentucky. And everything we're doing at the company is aimed towards bringing that online by the end of the decade. So that means licensing. We just submitted our NRC license last week. It means all engineering efforts.

**[0:26:24] Scott Nolan:** It means manufacturing, construction. Pretty much every piece of this is targeting that end of decade timeline.

**[0:26:32] John Collison:** So you're delivering enriched uranium by the end of the decade?

**[0:26:37] Scott Nolan:** And on the commercial side, all of our contracts are lined up against that date because we know that's when both the ban on Russian uranium import starts January 1st, 2028. Utilities do have some inventory. They do have some other contracts that can see them through for a little bit. But we want to be online as soon as we can after that to help plug that gap, which is about a quarter of US demand. And then all of the advanced reactors are more or less targeting first deployments in 28, 29 commercially and then scaling up from there.

**[0:27:08] Scott Nolan:** So that's about the right time to be online for the market and it's about as fast as we can go.

**[0:27:13] John Collison:** You worked at SpaceX. Elon's companies have this green lights to Malibu concept with planning. The idea is, as I understand it, that it costs you time to plan kind of conservatively a timeline that you can hit because you're building in buffers into the schedule. And instead, you should plan based on a green lights to Malibu. You know, what if all the traffic lights were green basis? Curious what you think of this phenomenon, this, you know, idea generally.

**[0:27:39] John Collison:** But then, too, is this end of the decade a Elon-style green lights to Malibu will have FSD next year type timeline? Or is it a timeline you guys are actually going to hit?

**[0:27:49] Scott Nolan:** This is when we'll actually hit. So that's our external timeline.

**[0:27:53] John Collison:** I see. So you have a secret internal timeline as well.

**[0:27:56] Scott Nolan:** Secret internal timeline is go as fast as we can. Yeah. And we do. Yeah, we do have an internal timeline. Yeah. Yeah, that schedule philosophy of Greenlights in Malibu, it comes out of this idea that if you give people more time, they will simply take more time. Now, there is a minimum. And there is, you can maybe go too quick and squeeze all time out of the schedule to the point where now you're doing things that are not in support of the correct architecture or a very long-term cost structure.

**[0:28:26] Scott Nolan:** That's always the critique.

**[0:28:28] John Collison:** That is the tension.

**[0:28:29] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, that's the tension. That's even the internal tension at any company trying to run a Greenlights and Malibu schedule is, number one, do you have waste? Number two, do you make the wrong architectural decisions? Yeah. And then number three, how do you manage people against this plan? So if you're doing performance-based management and you give someone a very difficult plan that maybe is perfection, it's more difficult to judge the performance against that. And so you have to have in your own mind, like, okay, what's a little bit of buffer?

**[0:28:58] Scott Nolan:** What's a reasonable thing? But, yeah, it's often very useful. The Greenlights of Malibu is not only like a scheduling tool. It's also a constraints tool of if we really try and dial this in and remove all buffer, what breaks? And so what's the thing that's actually the critical path that's preventing us? Also, it's a bottleneck discovery tool. I think it can be when done properly. And then the critiques I raised, they can be dealt with in other ways.

**[0:29:23] Scott Nolan:** If you're just like extremely exacting about, no, this is the architecture we're going to do. And if leadership is very deep in the weeds on every engineering decision and can say, okay, we have this schedule, but no one in the room thinks we should do this thing just to shave one day. Don't do that thing. Let's do it right. Let's take three days back. it's okay, we can make it up elsewhere.

**[0:29:46] John Collison:** From building great companies to investing in them, Scott Nolan knows both sides. And Stripe Press has two new books tackling each. First up, Built to Grow by Stephanie Friedman, the tactical playbook for building a sales engine from hire number one to 100. And it's out right now, you can buy it. And then coming soon is Nomad Letters, collecting the insights of Nick Sleep and Kais Zakaria, fund managers who generated a 900 % return in just 13 years, backing the relentless flywheels of companies like Amazon and Costco.

**[0:30:16] John Collison:** So grab both at press .stripe .com. What did you work on in SpaceX?

**[0:30:24] Scott Nolan:** SpaceX, when I started, I was just an intern in 2003. Oh, but you were there really early. Yeah, pretty early. Yeah, one of the first interns. SpaceX was founded in 2002? 2002. Yeah. So very, very lucky to graduate at the right time in aerospace, where prior to SpaceX, there wasn't too much interesting to do. I remember the first summer was working on test stands. We were getting ready for an engine to be able to be mounted vertically and put on a test stand.

**[0:30:50] Scott Nolan:** First winter break was working on a surrogate for the engine, and then after I graduated, I worked on the engine systems. So the Merlin engine, a bunch of components on there. Didn't design it myself. There were much more experienced people doing that, but I helped make sure that individual parts could withstand the thermal and structural loading. And then after that, did a series of engines across a few vehicles, including the Dragon capsule, which at the time was just cargo.

**[0:31:19] Scott Nolan:** And I was part of the early team and got to work on a few subsystems there. So I was there 2003 to 2007.

**[0:31:26] John Collison:** I'm always struck in U .S. manufacturing and Chinese manufacturing, for that matter, how influential Elon's management style and philosophy has been, where most of the companies founded later explicitly reference some tenets. Just what has been influential for you in terms of the design philosophies?

**[0:31:52] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, well, I think the thing that I actually draw more out of the SpaceX experience is working on something that not everyone agrees is the most important thing. It kind of overlaps with Peter's sort of philosophy.

**[0:32:07] John Collison:** Picking a flying car is not 140 characters type problem.

**[0:32:10] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, pick something that's almost like, in some ways, what industries have not lived up to their promise over the last 50 years? What are the actual bottlenecks to these things? What are the markets that we know need fixing, even if it's not a completely new greenfield sort of thing, but that is a big lever on a much bigger industry. And so at the time, early 2000s, everybody was talking about modern satellites. How do you do small sats?

**[0:32:41] Scott Nolan:** How do you do cube sats? And then it turned out there was no good way for them to get to launch. When your satellite costs $1 billion, 100 million for a launch isn't so bad. When it costs $1 million, now you really need to think about it. And so it's almost the same thing. It's, you know, you have a small reactor, SMR, small modular reactor, and now you're no longer doing a, you know, multi-billion dollar construction project.

**[0:33:06] Scott Nolan:** But now you need the fuel. And in fact, the fuel cost matters proportionately more to where some of these SMRs, their total LCOE could be 50 % fuel cost with enrichment.

**[0:33:17] John Collison:** It's that high.

**[0:33:17] Scott Nolan:** In some cases, yeah. It depends on the exact design. But at today's market prices, it can be.

**[0:33:23] John Collison:** And so. LCOE is levelized cost of energy. but basically the energy cost, right?

**[0:33:26] Scott Nolan:** Basically the cost of producing energy if you factor in both the upfront capital into the reactor and then the operating cost. And so, yeah, the fuel cost starts mattering a lot, which is the second part of what I appreciated in 2023. Not only did we need to remove this bottleneck, but for advanced nuclear to really scale on HALEU, you would want to bring down the cost. And so the biggest piece that felt like we could influence actually turned out to be enrichment as well.

**[0:33:53] John Collison:** So it feels to me one of the big challenges for you guys is the same challenge that many hardware companies face, which is dollars required and time required until you're profitable or even you kind of have meaningful revenue to fundraise against because so many hardware companies have had good ideas and have gone out of business because they couldn't prove that the idea was good to investors before they run out of money. And so ultimately, there's kind of fundraising risk.

**[0:34:27] John Collison:** How do you burn down that fundraising risk that's inherent in the company?

**[0:34:32] Scott Nolan:** If you really look at the big picture, you've got equity funding, you've got debt funding, and then you've got non-dilutive funding. And in our case, when we began, we competed for a program that Congress authorized to help address this ban on uranium. That's part of the ban. Yeah. Exactly. And on the lack of availability for fuel for advanced reactors. And so we competed for that. We were down selected under the Biden administration, awarded under the Trump administration earlier this year for a $900 million award for capacity building, which helps us stand up that first facility and takes a lot of that cost off the table.

**[0:35:09] Scott Nolan:** And so it's a big lever for getting past some of these challenges that companies often have in getting their first project online.

**[0:35:16] John Collison:** Oh, that's great. Okay. How do you spin up on all this material? Like you're not a nuclear physicist by background.

**[0:35:26] Scott Nolan:** Luckily. You are? No, I'm definitely not. And luckily don't need to be. So everyone thinks of enrichment. They hear nuclear. They think, is your team half nuclear scientists? And the answer is it's actually relatively few. It's very few. Just chemistry? Not even chemistry. So in our facility, there's no nuclear reactions. there's not even any chemical reactions. What you have is a separation of a gas. And so you actually still need chemists, you still need nuclear scientists, but mostly for safety analysis, mostly for making sure you don't have those things happen.

**[0:36:03] Scott Nolan:** No chemical reactions, no nuclear reactions.

**[0:36:06] John Collison:** I have a question, because actually I don't know much about enriching uranium, so this is good, it's filling in some gaps for me. You mine uranium out of the ground. It's a solid. Exactly, it's a solid. It's like a rock looking thing. It should look like a rock to you. And then you boil it to pressure and temperature.

**[0:36:25] Scott Nolan:** Then someone else has step two after it's out of the ground. And that's called yellow cake out of the ground, U308. Classically, it would be open pit mining. And then you have a milling process to turn into U308 from the ore. Today, that's done with in-situ recovery, like enhanced techniques that involves pumping a fluid underground and collecting the uranium out of rocks that will come out as U308. So step one, get the U308. That's mining and milling.

**[0:36:56] Scott Nolan:** Step two, take the U308 and chemically convert it into a gas. So that's a separate chemical facility that does that work. I see. So that's a chemical process that converts it into a gas. And then it would arrive at our facility

**[0:37:07] John Collison:** as a gas that we can separate. And you just spin it in a centrifuge and what else is in there? Like, what are you separating it from?

**[0:37:14] Scott Nolan:** So there's a few techniques that one might use to go do this. Where we're doing it in Kentucky, we are at the site of the last place that the U .S. did enrichment, which is in western Kentucky, Paducah. There was a facility that was shut down in 2013 on a DOE site that was a gaseous diffusion process. And that's the first thing that was pioneered. The Europeans used gas centrifuge. Other countries have done aerodynamic processes, and there's even aqueous processes, as well as laser enrichment.

**[0:37:49] Scott Nolan:** So at least five techniques that are classically used, and our technique is one that we'll unveil first half of next year when we'll talk about it. But it's gaseous diffusion, and so you... That's what was done in Paducah. I see. That's not necessarily what we're doing. We're building a fresh facility in Paducah on the same site in the last community that did enrichment in the US.

**[0:38:11] John Collison:** Got it. If it's kind of simple, why do you need to be in Paducah where the last version was? Do they leave a bunch of machines behind and you get to say, wow, there's all this free stuff here? Or is there expertise amongst local employees? Yep.

**[0:38:29] Scott Nolan:** So our search for Paducah lasted over a year. We went to over 10 states, looked at over 1 ,000 plots of land. And the answer in the end was kind of the obvious one. go to where the community most recently did this. So you have a combination of two things. We always felt like the community was the most important part. We're building a facility that's going to last decades, and so we want to make sure that the community that we're building in actually welcomes us there.

**[0:38:55] Scott Nolan:** Yes. And Paducah was extremely familiar with enrichment, comfortable with it, understood it to be a positive thing for the community and has the talent. So it was this combination of community support for what we're building and the talent base there above anything else. Now, the DOE site had other benefits. By building on a DOE site, we were able to have some shared services. So out of the gates, a little bit less to stand up. Already a piece of land there that's 100 acres, just big enough for us to build a first facility.

**[0:39:28] Scott Nolan:** DOE security around it. So lots of different benefits.

**[0:39:31] John Collison:** Presumably it's actually simpler from a permitting point of view because you're working with the DOE rules and not county and municipality rules?

**[0:39:38] Scott Nolan:** Could be. We are primarily doing commercial sales out of this facility, so we will be NRC regulated.

**[0:39:44] John Collison:** But I mean federal and not kind of state and local.

**[0:39:47] Scott Nolan:** The biggest benefit was that the site had been heavily characterized environmentally. And so the environmental work that was required to get to a point where we knew what the environmental impacts would be was quicker than it would have been on a completely uncharacterized separate piece of land. Yeah, that makes sense.

**[0:40:01] John Collison:** And so, okay, going back to the enrichment, what are you separating the uranium from when you're enriching uranium? From itself.

**[0:40:10] Scott Nolan:** Ah, okay, it's the different isotopes. I see. So uranium out of the ground is 0 .7%, 0 .711 % U235. That's what you want. That's the number when we talk about 3 to 5 or 19 .75.

**[0:40:25] John Collison:** So it exists in the world as 0 .7 % and then you're enriching it to some number beyond that. Exactly.

**[0:40:30] Scott Nolan:** The rest is primarily U238, which is not the fissile material you want.

**[0:40:36] John Collison:** And if the isotopes have different masses, why can't you just spin it around in a centrifuge and have a...

**[0:40:41] Scott Nolan:** Many people do. I see. Yeah, many people do. Or you can do a sort of osmosis-type process, which is gas-to-siffusion. Or you would do it, you know, you might split the gas using an aerodynamic process. And so there's a lot of options.

**[0:40:55] John Collison:** It does sound quite simple when you put it that way. When you put it that way. So why is it hard?

**[0:41:00] Scott Nolan:** You know, the hard part about most of nuclear, I think, like nuclear is perceived as this incredibly complicated thing. I think fusion is pretty difficult. That is really new physics. That's new science. But fission's been around for a long time. And if we just talk about reactors, it goes back to economics, I think, more than anything. And so to me, for all the advanced reactors versus the gigawatt scale, the most interesting thing is not just the technology.

**[0:41:25] Scott Nolan:** It's really what is the cost implication going to be? For us, enrichment's been done before. A number of countries do it. But the real challenge is we don't only want to bring it back in the U .S. We want to make it globally competitive. We want the U .S. capability to be truly commercial, be able to compete with Europe, Russia, China over time. And so it's all about cost. And so I think the hard thing is not simply doing enrichment.

**[0:41:53] Scott Nolan:** It's doing it in a way that can be scalable and highly cost competitive. And so that's the North Star.

**[0:41:59] John Collison:** You don't worry that this is a bad market somehow? Like the fact that there isn't a U .S. producer suggests there's something a bit broken about the market and the buyers?

**[0:42:07] Scott Nolan:** No, I don't think so. I think there's a path dependency of how we got here. And we can talk through that, but it's, you know.

**[0:42:14] John Collison:** No, no, no, please tell me the path dependency.

**[0:42:15] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, I think the history of it was really, you know, the U .S. did a first generation technology to win World War II to stay dominant in the Cold War. We were over 90 % of supply globally. And ultimately that approach, that specific design and technology, was not cost competitive with the European and Russian approaches. And so we shut those down. We shut them down following the Cold War. So the Berlin Wall fell. The US entered a trade agreement with Russia.

**[0:42:44] Scott Nolan:** It was nicknamed megatons to megawatts. So we imported Russian warheads, blended them down, ran our reactors on it, and started trade with Russia that way. We, since the 70s, had been trading with Europe. And once we felt like Cold War is over, there was less reason to keep these plants running in the U .S.

**[0:43:05] John Collison:** So it was a gloss moment in the U .S. basically?

**[0:43:08] Scott Nolan:** It was, yeah, why are we running these more expensive plants when we're now in a world of free trade and we can trade for this? At the same time, there were efforts inside the U .S. to develop new technologies. but they didn't really hit the cost structure required to compete internationally and they're still in development to some extent to try and get on that curve and so I think it's it's simply a you know we used to do it we then relied on free trade and then only more recently does this seem like an issue and the issue is really around HALEU availability for advanced reactors and low enriched uranium availability for the larger reactors given the ban on Russian

**[0:43:50] Scott Nolan:** imports. So if you tried to start a company like this 10 years ago, you know, you might say, what's the market? The utilities are fully contracted. There's no gaps. Why would they leave gaps? They're going to make sure that they have reliable source. And then there is not a really big advanced reactor market that you could sell into. And so both on the LEU side and the it would have been much more challenging to get to some critical mass that could support a new entrant.

**[0:44:15] Scott Nolan:** Today, that window is open.

**[0:44:19] John Collison:** Classically, cost advantages in manufacturing come from scale. That's one common one. Or simplicity in design. It feels like, I mean, the market is what the market is. I mean, it will grow hopefully, but it's not like you guys are going to come out of the gates, targeting 10x or 100x larger scale than the incumbents. And then also when you say simplicity, like as you described, there's a few approaches that everyone knows here and so you don't get to have like a radically simpler process.

**[0:44:50] John Collison:** And so how do you plan to have a cost advantage versus all the incumbents?

**[0:44:55] Scott Nolan:** I'd say you missed one more. So there's economies of scale, there's simplicity. And then the third, honestly, is decades of technology improvement that no one's captured. So the last time anyone to our knowledge reinvented enrichment, at least if you look at the incumbents, the incumbents being Russia, China, and two European firms that use the same underlying technology, the last time anyone's done a clean sheet redesign was decades ago. And so if you think of all the progress in technology over the last few decades, there's a lot you can do in addition to economies of scale and simplification.

**[0:45:33] Scott Nolan:** Meanwhile, there's no public domain technology in this space since the 50s or 60s. And so, you know, you look at those few decades of technology that you could leverage, then you do a clean sheet redesign, doing something very novel, and you can end up somewhere pretty different.

**[0:45:51] John Collison:** Okay, I want to try something out. It feels like sometimes you have a trend that sweeps in industry that takes place at many companies at once. And so in the US in the 70s and 80s, this happened with lean manufacturing. A lot of the success of private equity firms at that time or early Danaher were, there were all these US firms that had not embraced lean manufacturing. And so you can buy a manufacturing firm, just adopt the lean stuff about better inventory management and everything like that.

**[0:46:22] John Collison:** And yeah, you can make the business much better because it turns out these are like, this is a technology that had not, a managerial technology that had not been adopted by a whole bunch of firms.

**[0:46:31] Scott Nolan:** Right, and maybe there's people doing this today with AI applying it to services industries.

**[0:46:35] John Collison:** Exactly, that would be another example. it feels like there's maybe another trend that you're a part of in hardware, which is there is this stasis in companies where there was stasis in launch until SpaceX came along and targeted much lower cost launch. There was stasis amongst the primes. And then Anduril and now kind of a whole bunch of other neoprimes are coming along. And similarly, you're identifying stasis in the existing companies that enrich uranium that you can very easily do.

**[0:47:06] John Collison:** Does that resonate with you as a trend where there's something that has not been adopted amongst a whole set of companies and entrepreneurs are coming along and finding those weak spots and building better competitors?

**[0:47:18] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, it seems like it. Although each of those three examples is at least a decade apart, I'd say, on average. So, yes, SpaceX and or all us would be on average a decade in between. And the only way that those opportunities were found were by people trying to actually go deep in the space. And so nobody really thought that space launch was a thing until Elon tried to launch something and realized it was the cost of the launch.

**[0:47:42] Scott Nolan:** And Trey at Founders Fund was looking for a defense company, couldn't find someone that was taking this holistic approach. And then we only discovered this because I knew many or virtually all of the advanced reactor producers, and they had the same issue.

**[0:47:58] John Collison:** What is the thing that all of the incumbents miss? Why do they become slow and stodgy? Presumably, like, it's not a problem for you yet, but it will be a problem when you're successful that you will also need to avoid becoming slow and stodgy. Yeah, yeah, you definitely want to avoid that. How do you avoid becoming ULA or Lockheed Martin or?

**[0:48:16] Scott Nolan:** You know, I think all those industries, not to, you know, not to single them out, but they were all cost plus industries. That was my experience. So, you know, before SpaceX, I did work at one of the aerospace incumbents as an intern. Which one? Boeing. Okay. And I worked on a military program. It was Cost Plus. You know, there was a big project. There was a goal of getting online. And so, you know, at some point while I was there, it felt like more and more people were working on the project, and it just didn't feel like we were going faster.

**[0:48:47] Scott Nolan:** And you realize, like, that is one tool. Put more people on the project. And if there's not strong downward pressure on cost, your incentives are just not aligned with, like, moving fast and doing it in a lean way. And so I think these industries that end up getting stagnant often have that same characteristic. Now, people assume once a company gets to a certain size that it becomes that way. I think it doesn't have to at all.

**[0:49:12] Scott Nolan:** I think the best companies that get large, even like tens of thousands of people, always have that new project, that new thing that's like borderline existential, where if they mess it up, they're going to be in a much worse place than if they never tried it. and it almost risks the business. And I think that's almost the thing to stay, to like stay young as a company. You just have to keep doing that next project and not just say, well, I have this nice business.

**[0:49:37] Scott Nolan:** I'm just going to earn my economic rents and do nothing else ever again. You have to actually have a vision for the future of what you want this industry to be.

**[0:49:45] John Collison:** What were your other takeaways from Boeing?

**[0:49:47] Scott Nolan:** Really the main takeaway I think that I walked away with was that the cost plus structure was not the right structure to motivate moving fast. That was just empirically evident by working at both.

**[0:49:58] John Collison:** It sounds like you more broadly think it's a completely broken incentive system.

**[0:50:01] Scott Nolan:** I think the whole point of Cost Plus is to make sure people can work on projects whose costs are very uncertain. And, okay, we have a very urgent project. The government needs you to do X, Y, Z. We need some of the suppliers to come forward and actually say that they'll try and do this. And it's for everyone's good. It's a wartime and not a peacetime incentive system. I think so, or it's something where it's very urgent, never been done before, and it's very uncertain what the cost will be.

**[0:50:29] Scott Nolan:** Once you get to equilibrium, I don't think that structure makes sense, at least not to motivate the right behaviors. But I think the bigger thing I walked away with after Boeing, even in just being an intern at SpaceX when it was sub-50 people, was at the end of the first week or month, I felt pretty high certainty that SpaceX would eventually win, even though it was at most 1 ,000th the size. And it was just because of the speed of execution.

**[0:50:58] Scott Nolan:** And so the thing I walked away with that I actually, especially in the early years, where that is a more recent memory while I was at Founders Fund, was these small teams, even though they seem completely outmatched, by moving quickly with a good group of people, you can still beat incumbents.

**[0:51:15] John Collison:** So it gave you that ability to be optimistic about the odds of a five-person startup.

**[0:51:22] Scott Nolan:** Bet on the small guy. Yeah. If they have a vision, if they have some insights about how they want to do it differently, especially if they're motivated by something more than just, let's stand up a small business here. Now let's actually change things long term.

**[0:51:37] John Collison:** The three examples I used were SpaceX, Anderil, and General Matter. I hadn't realized until you said it. in formulating those examples that all three are deeply tied to Founders Fund. Hwas, what is it about Founders Fund and the culture that makes it a good breeding ground for these sorts of companies?

**[0:52:01] Scott Nolan:** Maybe the one thing, you know, SpaceX was started before Founders Fund. I don't think Founders Fund can take too much credit. Founders Fund was an early high conviction backer. Yeah, first outside investor at a time when very few others wanted to do it. And I think the... Kind of go deeply tied. Yeah, yeah. But I think SpaceX gets the credit. Elon gets the credit. You could say that it's something coming out of the whole zero to one mindset and these frameworks of work on something that's important that other people don't realize.

**[0:52:32] Scott Nolan:** So what important truth do you believe that most of your peers would disagree with you on? Don't go after 1 trillion dollar market on day one. Focus on a small market that really needs a new solution and satisfy those customers. make them love your product, own that market and go from there. Those, I think, are common to those companies. But probably even more than that is Founders Fund does not programmatically start companies, and it doesn't want to either.

**[0:53:01] Scott Nolan:** Everyone there is selected for wanting to be an investor, not hoping that they can someday be an entrepreneur. And so I think this leads to a mindset of don't start companies, don't do it programmatically, it's almost like that airplane with all the war wounds on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, you know, you would think, okay, what about all the companies that didn't get started out of Founders Fund? And I think the bar for starting something, at least for me, was always, you know, being an investor is a great job.

**[0:53:35] Scott Nolan:** It's a great, you know, great career. It's awesome in so many ways. So to actually go start something, it had better be extremely important. You have to believe no one else is doing it, which is why, you know, in both Andrel and our case, there was a long search for someone doing it. Because if there was, it wouldn't be worth starting a new company. And then finally, the one that's seemingly the most difficult is, you know, in my case, it should be something where my skill set actually contributes to making it more likely.

**[0:54:08] Scott Nolan:** And so it's extremely important no one doing it and actually lines up with the skills is such a small Venn diagram that it's almost like that activation energy is so high to go do it that it has to be extremely compelling. And then most of the risk, I think, ends up being on execution. And so you end up with these sort of forgotten opportunities that were overlooked for a long time but that are actually really central to an industry taking off.

**[0:54:34] Scott Nolan:** and it just so happens like no one did them for a long time because there wasn't the convergence of market opportunity and often it was just extremely hard.

**[0:54:45] John Collison:** How much conviction did you get on the idea before you took the jump and went and started the company?

**[0:54:54] Scott Nolan:** I would say, yeah, extreme conviction.

**[0:54:57] John Collison:** What are the intermediate milestones for you guys as you approach production in Paducah by the end of the decade. Presumably that is not the target on the whiteboard in the office. You have short-term exactly target. Nothing in between.

**[0:55:11] Scott Nolan:** So if you think of the big work streams to do that, at the end of it you have a large facility and it's filled with equipment and equipment's operating. And if it's operating, that means it's licensed. So one work stream is licensing. Yep. As I mentioned, late last month we submitted our NRC license. And so that's one of the work streams. Another one is, okay, you have this big building that's operating, let's work backwards. You have your license, that's how it's able to operate.

**[0:55:42] Scott Nolan:** But also the building exists, that's important. And so you have a large construction effort. Typically in the nuclear space people outsource the construction of their facilities. In our case, we copied the Tesla playbook of build your own in-house construction EPC team. What's EPC? Engineer, procurement, construct. So design your buildings, order the steel, build it. And so we have our own GC on the construction side. We have our own procurement and engineering teams internally. And so that building is being designed and built.

**[0:56:19] Scott Nolan:** and that'll basically be online in time to, it'll exist in time to install hardware and commission it and operate it by the end of the decade. Then of course you need all of your equipment inside. So that's ordering out of your supply chain, it's manufacturing and manufacturing final designs that hit the economics that you want. And so I think a lot of people think of nuclear and they think it's all about core technology or it's all about licensing.

**[0:56:47] Scott Nolan:** And I think for the reactors, it's actually about, if you're a big reactor, it's probably about a construction project. If you're a small one, it may be mostly about building your factory. For us, it's more like that. It's more manufacturing. And manufacturing is a thing that relatively few companies in the U .S. have really proven that they can do at scale. And I think that'll be the really exciting part in a year or two.

**[0:57:12] John Collison:** Last question. We've talked about what you learned at SpaceX and Boeing and various places. What did you learn working at Founders Fund?

**[0:57:25] Scott Nolan:** Avoid competition. So, you know, which is, it happens automatically if you work on something that's really important that no one else is doing and that you can uniquely be good at. and so you know avoid competition is you know you kind of achieve it that way but it's also something that will inherently be true if you're solving a problem that's not solved so you know what important truth do you believe or like what important problem is no one working on and I think that was actually the thing that led us here was it wasn't a desire to start a company it wasn't anything specific like that it was what thing is actually holding back the nuclear industry, what is the

**[0:58:07] Scott Nolan:** bottleneck, what is the one thing that could prevent all the reactors from scaling all the SMRs or gigawatt scale light water reactors? And it's fuel. A lot of the other

**[0:58:19] John Collison:** pieces have been solved and so it's just fuel. For other future entrepreneurs, there's presumably

**[0:58:23] Scott Nolan:** equally big opportunities just staring them in the face. Yeah, there certainly are. I don't know what they are. I think it takes a lot of digging to see them. And then enriching. Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, then enriching and turning into a gas. But, no, I think you only find out about these things if you follow some passion that you might have that not everyone's thinking about. So it's usually not part of a trend, or at least it's ahead of the trend.

**[0:58:49] Scott Nolan:** If you're into something and you think it has value and you go deeper and you work in that space, you'll see what the problems are. And I think they become obvious to those who go deep enough.

**[0:58:59] John Collison:** Yeah. Scott, thank you.

**[0:59:01] Scott Nolan:** Yeah, thank you.

**[0:59:08] John Collison:** Thank you.