theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Powering Tomorrow | Jordan Robison, Natura Resources

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Powering Tomorrow

John Furrier

Co-Founder & Co-CEO

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

Jordan Robison

Chief Executive Officer

Natura Resources

play_circle_outline Liquid-fueled molten salt reactor (MSR) technology modernization from 1960s Oak Ridge R&D.

play_circle_outline Modular Offsite-Built Low-Pressure High-Temperature Salt Storage for Hyperscale AI Power Using Oil-and-Gas Supply Chains — Commercial in 5–6 Years

play_circle_outline Natura Resources Abilene Demonstration Reactor: DOE Pilot Program Accelerates Deployment and DOE-to-NRC Transition

play_circle_outline Financing progress: $120M private capital and $120M Texas appropriation; ongoing raises.

play_circle_outline Main challenges: construction supply chain scale-up and real estate constraints for rapid deployment.

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Jordan Robison, Natura Resources

John Furrier

Co-Founder & Co-CEO SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

Jordan Robison

Chief Executive Officer Natura Resources

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(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, here at theCUBE's NYSE studio, of course. We have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Powering Tomorrow series. It's about energy. We know that the AI generation is bound by energy and money, but also energy has been one of the scarce resources in the supply chain, obviously the chips as well. Again, this is the future. Energy is a problem. Some people are looking at space. Some people are looking at nuclear. That's the topic of today. Jordan Robison is here, Chief Executive Officer of Natura Resources, who have a unique way to build out an advanced integrated nuclear facility to solve the energy problem. Jordan, thanks for coming in. Appreciate the time.

Jordan Robison

>> Oh, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

John Furrier

>> one of the things I mentioned in the intro is that energy is what all the top engineers and scientists right now are looking at, how do I solve the energy problem? Because even if you look at the forecast, the AI demand, just the orders, some are estimating that that's basically like the United States electrical grid. Yes. The total power capacity. But then you've got all this dormant power. there's a lot of aggregations. There's a lot going on there, the grids. Nuclear has been really floated in. We've seen all the big hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft. talk about nuclear as an option. And everyone's like, oh, that's fantasy land. That's way out there, kind of like quantum was five years ago. Quantum computing now arriving on the scene. So, these breakthroughs in science are happening faster than a lot of people are seeing with AI. Nuclear now is an option. I'm not a big scientist on the nuclear side, but I'm like, my first reaction is, okay, nuclear is good, but also could be bad. That kind of might be a reaction for most people. Demystify the current situation. Explain what you guys are working on, the science behind it, the approach you're taking. Let's get into that because I think there are paths that I'm learning. I think other people should too. Yeah.

Jordan Robison

>> No, the reality is a lot of these technologies were developed back in the late 50s and early 60s. And they just weren't needed at the time for power generation. And so what we're doing is grabbing a technology that was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a liquid -fueled molten salt reactor, and bringing that 60 years into the future. And doing that in a way that we can start small, demonstrate successful licensure with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose primary concern is safety. Show that we can license that technology with the NRC and moving to actually building a reactor. And so we're actively moving forward with a project in Abilene where our technology is one of three technologies. It's actually been approved for construction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And we're actively moving forward in building a reactor so that we can then scale into commercial systems that meet some of those big energy needs that we're seeing.

John Furrier

>> And you can hear the traders behind us all active here on the stock exchange floor. They love the energy. Yeah. And there's a lot of future talk about the economics because, all kidding aside about the trades, there's a lot of thirst here on Wall Street for nuclear energy because they see the future there. And also on the technology side, where, of course, the data centers are in massive demand. How is that playing into your plans? Is that part of it? Is that the big demand curve? Or is this at the stage of just heads down, get the science right? Sure. Are you guys still deep in the development? Or are you guys zooming out saying, hey, where's the market applications?

Jordan Robison

>> Right, right. So we are right in the middle of actually building our reactor system while at the same time developing our commercial system to go out and meet those needs. And so what we saw from day one, before really we saw the AI and data center boom coming, there was a huge power need that was already really kind of lurking below the surface. I feel like what AI and data centers have done is they've shown kind of the tip of the iceberg of what's really sitting there waiting for us. And so when we started, we wanted to develop a technology that made sense in the marketplace without subsidy or mandate. And so in that, it's really unique in what we're doing with a liquid-fueled molten salt reactor. With salts, you can do some really unique things where you put together different mixtures of salts and you can actually control the melting point of that salt. So what we end up having is a system that operates at very high temperature but at atmospheric pressure. And so what that means is we don't need huge concrete and steel containment structures. We don't need exotic forgings on our reactor systems. So we can reutilize existing oil and gas supply chains. We can leverage small modular reactor fabrication where we're pulling that manufacturing off-site, doing it in a controlled facility, and then deploying on-site for rapid assembly. And ultimately, what we end up with is a system that's going to be competitive with natural gas and other clean, firm sources of energy so that it can go out and meet those needs.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the clean piece because 20 years ago, the clean-tech or clean energy wave was starting. Not a lot happened. Now we have more advanced science and capability. What's the biggest change around the clean-tech side of this? Because that's really kind of where this works. If you get it working, which sounds like it's going great, then the next question is, how clean is it? Talk about the change. What's changed, and why is it working?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so with nuclear technology in general, it's a carbon -free source of energy. And the big thing, it's incredibly energy dense, right? Right. So we can create massive quantities of energy with very small amounts of fuel on a very small footprint and do that in such a way that we're not having the CO2 and the greenhouse gas emissions. And so what you end up with is just this system that's very, very efficient, very small, but produces massive quantities of electricity without harmful effects.

John Furrier

>> So you guys are on a path to clean energy with this.

Jordan Robison

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Explain that, because I think this is a notable thing. This is significant. Right.

Jordan Robison

>> So when you think about coal -powered systems, natural gas -powered systems, and the burning of those fuels, you're going to have emissions coming off of those. In some systems, you can capture those and try to control that. But with the nuclear fission process, we're taking the uranium atom and we're splitting it in order to create energy. And ultimately, we're generating lots of heat is what we're doing in our system. And then we're passing that heat down through a balance of plant, generating steam, turning a turbine and producing electricity without actually burning those fossil fuels. And so you ultimately end up with an incredibly clean source of energy.

John Furrier

>> Explain the order of magnitude, just scope, but just so people can visualize it. We see nuclear reactors, big concrete towers, cooling towers. What is it? What's the footprint like? Just explain, paint the picture. Sure. Is it like a monster facility? Abilene, Texas, that's where the data centers are being built. That's where you're at. So you're in a good spot. Congratulations. Love Texas for the energy angle there. But what does it look like? How big is it? What's it take?

Jordan Robison

>> So first of all, our demonstration reactor is being built in a small facility sitting on a university campus in Abilene. As we go forward into our first commercial reactor system, a single 100 -megawatt electric module can be deployed on less than five acres. We could then take 12 of those for a total of 1 .2 gigawatts and put it on less than 50 acres. So as we're talking with groups about building out these 1 ,000 -acre energy campuses that are incorporating natural gas and solar and all these different pieces, saying, hey, we need just a small corner of that, just 50 acres, and we can deploy over a gigawatt of power.

John Furrier

>> Wow, that's huge. And I was watching some of the hyperscalers and the new AI cloud scalers. They're in Sweden. They're getting all this land. You're talking about 1 ,000 acres to 50? 50. 50 for 1 .2 gigawatts. Damn. Yeah. And we saw Jensen's numbers from, he's the CEO of NVIDIA, their earnings call. And just recently he gave a talk, I think last night, that they're actually quantifying the economics per gigawatt. And it's so significantly improved. If you look at their last earnings, which they blew away, there's money there. Yeah. So you're walking into a market that's hungry and instrumented for this.

Jordan Robison

>> Yes, very much so.

John Furrier

>> What's the vision there? What's your vision as you look at that market?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so we've got an opportunity to rapidly deploy power systems to meet that market. And so our challenge at this point is finding those customers that are saying, hey, we need this massive quantity of power and we need it as quickly as possible. And the challenge there is you've got to get those customers bought in early, right? Because these are long development projects. It's going to take five, six years to get that technology deployed. And it's going to take some pretty creative financing structures to step into those first-of-a-kind projects.

John Furrier

>> Well, you guys got the molten salt reactor. They call it MSR. That's the base technology. Talk about the business, the journey you're on, where you're at, some of the momentum you have. Talk about the successes.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so Natura Resources was founded in 2020, really based upon the vision of our founder and executive chairman, Douglass Robison, who ultimately saw the technology and saw an opportunity for that technology after he had spent 40 years in the oil and gas business. He said, hey, I think this could be the future of energy. and so this is worth spending some time and money on. And so quickly jumped into that because we saw molten salt reactors as this technology that can bless the world with abundant energy, clean water, and medical isotopes. And so we started small and said the first thing we want to do is show that this technology can be licensed with the NRC, show that it's safe. When the NRC said you can build this reactor on a university campus, what they were signing off on was not that the reactor was going to function exactly how we wanted it to. They're signing off on safety. They're saying it is safe to put right here across the street from a brand new girls and boys dormitory and operate here on this university campus. And so show that it can be licensed with the NRC and take those incremental steps and start building things. Start building vessels. Start building pumps. Start running molten salt systems so we can gain those learnings and de-risk the technology as we move into the commercial realm and make it such that it's licensable for the NRC for the full commercial systems. We tell people all the time. The NRC doesn't license based upon assumptions. They license based upon data.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, and they have a high bar. Exactly. Just people don't know the bar is super high. Talk about the Department of Energy because one of the things I love about this regime we're in now and the political environment is they're doing a lot of good work. They are. They are interested. Are they involved? What's their role? Because now this looks like a template for a path to clean energy.

Jordan Robison

>> That's why I tell people that what this administration has done has really provided some unique pathways to accelerate deployment. And so with the Department of Energy and specifically the Reactor Pilot Program, which Natura Resources is a part of, they've provided the opportunity to utilize a DOE authorization process to rapidly deploy technologies. And so we were accepted to that program in August of last year. And our reactor at Abilene will actually start under that DOE authorization process. And then in the long term transition back over to an NRC license, but they've just provided some really good mechanisms such that companies can move forward quickly in deploying and demonstrating their technology, which is going to do nothing but accelerate on the commercial side.

John Furrier

>> Talk about your focus right now. Obviously, it's the picks and shovels stage. You got to get the mechanisms out there, pumps, the workflows. You got the core technology and license that. That's a business model. But once you get the playbook down, this is a construction play there. Absolutely. It's an energy play, obviously, funded by the cash flows. Right. Talk about the financing. How are you looking at taking this to market as you guys hit your milestones? How do you think about that? We saw some unique financing around the neoclouds, which are now called AI clouds, because the GPUs and the demand didn't have the same operating cycle as some of the facilities. I got a 10 -year lease. I only got three -year contract. So that's getting resolved now. NVIDIA's involved and the big banks are involved here. That's on the AI infrastructure side. You're a critical link to that AI. Have there been funding mechanisms emerging new ways to finance? Yeah.

Jordan Robison

>> There were some funding mechanisms. That came back or came out in about 2020 time period as a part of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. And that was the DOE putting a large influx of capital into these projects with some matching funds. We were a baby company barely even in existence at that point. And so what we've done today, we've raised $120 million in private capital. Received $120 million appropriation from the state of Texas last legislative cycle to go towards building that reactor. that's huge support from the state. And so we see it as our burden to raise financing in order to really develop the product so that we're ready to go out and be shovel -ready and deploy. So it's process workflows.

John Furrier

>> You've got to commercialize process. That's right. Commercialize construction, build out, standing these up. What are your blockers? What is holding you back? Just the time to get the science right? What are the key things that you're optimizing for?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so if you had asked me five years ago, I'd say it's licensing. We've solved that puzzle, right? Regulatory licensing with the NRC is no longer the critical path for us, which is great. That's a huge milestone. Yeah, it is. It's huge. At this point, it's actually building, right? There's limited supply chain for the advanced reactor industry. because we often struggle to even call it an industry at this point because nobody's actually gone out and built a fully advanced reactor system. And so what I tell people is I am not concerned with our ability to build one, two, three reactors. What happens, though, is once we build those first reactors and Google or Amazon or whoever says, okay, now I need dozens, how is the supply chain going to respond to build those dozens of reactors?

John Furrier

>> And real estate, too. Acres are still 50 acres. Exactly. Not 1,000. Obviously, the 1,000 is not optimized. All right, so I have to ask you because this is one of the most exciting areas in tech and science. There's a lot of cool. It's a great time to be an engineer right now. If you're an engineer out there, you love physics. You love anything. This is one of the best times. What are you guys looking for? Obviously, there's a huge opportunity. What are some of the hard problems you're trying to solve? Folks watching, people love to solve hard problems. Intractable problems, that's a different story. You go crazy. But there are hard problems. What's the kind of makeup of someone who might be interested to jump into the fray? I'll say engineering talent. What's the problems you're trying to tackle? Share the puzzle, the bigger picture.

Jordan Robison

>> As an engineer, my background is in physics and mechanical engineering. The opportunity to jump on a project like this was what I saw as a once -in -a -lifetime opportunity. We picked our family up, moved them to Abilene and said, hey, this is an opportunity to work on a technology that could literally change the world. Right. And so we're bringing in talented mechanical engineers, nuclear engineers. There's a lot of chemists. For us being a liquid fueled molten salt reactor, as much as I hate to admit it as a mechanical engineer, there's a lot of chemistry involved, and a lot depends on what our chemists do. And so bringing in a lot of that experience. But then we're reaching out to the existing nuclear fleet and the existing kind of experience on large capital power projects and building a new workforce. Right. Because nobody's gone out and built a molten salt reactor before. And so we're grabbing guys that have built coal plants, that have built natural gas plants, guys that have operated large light water reactors, and a lot of real expertise and knowledge coming out of the universities and national labs and bringing that together to form a team that's ready to go out.

John Furrier

>> So this is a generational shift. This is actually an energy, a generational energy shift. So it's a whole new ballgame.

Jordan Robison

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> So you're borrowing best practices from other industries, but it's not a rip and replace. Right. It's not a rinse and repeat.

Jordan Robison

>> Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's very new with what we're doing. Although it was done at Oak Ridge back 60 years ago, we're really taking the legacy of what those scientists did at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and bringing it 60 years into the future.

John Furrier

>> All right, so I have to ask because I'm curious. Was it just sitting around on a shelf somewhere? How did this – what happened? How did this get exposed? Did someone just say, hey, we worked on this project? Or was it timing of other factors that were intersecting? What was the big driver here?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, when the technology was being developed back in the 60s, it was really for military applications. We wanted to build nuclear submarines, and the decision there was solid-fueled systems that were cooled with water. It made a lot of sense. These other reactor systems, we weren't looking at nuclear technology back then as a source for commercial power generation. So it got shelved.

John Furrier

>> It got shelved. It was R&D.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, it was R&D. It operated successfully. And it got shelved because they didn't need it because they were going to burn coal. We solved the problem already. Exactly, exactly. So now, as we're moving into this new age where we need massive quantities of power and we want to do massive quantities of clean power, you start looking back and saying, okay, these technologies were demonstrated. We just need to bring them 60 years into the future and start building them.

John Furrier

>> You know, what's interesting, Jordan, is that it's almost the same song, it's the same music. We're seeing old school 60s, 70s, 80s tech in all fields come to the forefront. We're seeing even on the AI side, a lot of this stuff on the data ontologies and all this stuff that's been around all this AI science, the theory, right? We didn't have the horsepower. So the ingenuity and the timing, are there other technological factors that make it more viable now? Are there other forces besides just dusting off the old R and D and applying it to commercial? Was there any advances that match some of the trends we're seeing in the AI era?

Jordan Robison

>> There's some opportunities to do that with advanced manufacturing, advanced materials, things of that nature. Those are in the future for us. Right now, we're trying to move forward with the simplest, kind of most baseload system. We don't want to go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with a material they haven't seen.

John Furrier

>> You've got to get a reactor up and running. Exactly. That's your job now. Exactly. All right, so what's been the investor interest? Because this is a long game you're playing. Yep. What's the sentiment there? Here's the cash, matching funds. There's some sort of things going on. What's the sentiment from the investors? Obviously, they know the demand, so they're interested in that. Right.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah. So we've been raising since 2020. We're actually in a current raise right now. So we raised $120 million in private capital, raising in small tranches, raise capital, achieve milestones, raise your value. And so we're seeing a lot of investor interest because they're seeing the huge need that's out there. Like I said, it's on us to raise that capital, develop the product, and then go out and find some unique financing structures in order to do that. There's many of our peers have moved into the public marketplace and there are some significant opportunities there. And those are things that we're going to have to weigh as an organization moving forward.

John Furrier

>> All right, final question for you. Smash the narrative out there that people might have fear. Kind of the fear I had coming in, which is, whoa, nuclear, we should really go slower. That's one fear. The other fear is this is going to take a long time. Right. What would you say to those people that are listening and watching around the fear, those two fears?

Jordan Robison

>> I would say one of the big things on the fear side is a lot of times it's radiation. You can't see it, and if not handled properly, it can be dangerous. But nuclear in its history really has a strong track record of safety, and so we're taking a technology that has a strong track record of safety, and we're just making it more efficient and even safer. Those are some of the unique aspects of our technology, being this liquid -fueled, low -pressure, walk -away safe system. I tell people all the time, that reactor is trying to shut itself down at all times. We're working against it in order to keep it running. So incredibly safe systems. And for us, not hiding from the fact that it's a nuclear reactor. We do a lot of community engagement. We bring people into the facility, teach them what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, in order to remove some of that fear. And we're seeing broad support across the industry. For that technology.

John Furrier

>> Clean, safe energy. That's the goal. Absolutely. Jordan, thanks for coming on Powering Tomorrow. This is our series around energy. Powering Tomorrow, this is not just an AI problem, this is a societal global problem, as energy is a scarce resource, and also the ways we can create energy, and there's a new science involved. So again, if you're an engineer, you'd like to solve problems, this is an area that if you solve it, it'll be great for the world and the world we live in. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is the NYSE Wired program, and theCUBE, thanks for watching. Thank you.

Jordan Robison, Natura Resources

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(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, here at theCUBE's NYSE studio, of course. We have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Powering Tomorrow series. It's about energy. We know that the AI generation is bound by energy and money, but also energy has been one of the scarce resources in the supply chain, obviously the chips as well. Again, this is the future. Energy is a problem. Some people are looking at space. Some people are looking at nuclear. That's the topic of today. Jordan Robison is here, Chief Executive Officer of Natura Resources, who have a unique way to build out an advanced integrated nuclear facility to solve the energy problem. Jordan, thanks for coming in. Appreciate the time.

Jordan Robison

>> Oh, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

John Furrier

>> one of the things I mentioned in the intro is that energy is what all the top engineers and scientists right now are looking at, how do I solve the energy problem? Because even if you look at the forecast, the AI demand, just the orders, some are estimating that that's basically like the United States electrical grid. Yes. The total power capacity. But then you've got all this dormant power. there's a lot of aggregations. There's a lot going on there, the grids. Nuclear has been really floated in. We've seen all the big hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft. talk about nuclear as an option. And everyone's like, oh, that's fantasy land. That's way out there, kind of like quantum was five years ago. Quantum computing now arriving on the scene. So, these breakthroughs in science are happening faster than a lot of people are seeing with AI. Nuclear now is an option. I'm not a big scientist on the nuclear side, but I'm like, my first reaction is, okay, nuclear is good, but also could be bad. That kind of might be a reaction for most people. Demystify the current situation. Explain what you guys are working on, the science behind it, the approach you're taking. Let's get into that because I think there are paths that I'm learning. I think other people should too. Yeah.

Jordan Robison

>> No, the reality is a lot of these technologies were developed back in the late 50s and early 60s. And they just weren't needed at the time for power generation. And so what we're doing is grabbing a technology that was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a liquid -fueled molten salt reactor, and bringing that 60 years into the future. And doing that in a way that we can start small, demonstrate successful licensure with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose primary concern is safety. Show that we can license that technology with the NRC and moving to actually building a reactor. And so we're actively moving forward with a project in Abilene where our technology is one of three technologies. It's actually been approved for construction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And we're actively moving forward in building a reactor so that we can then scale into commercial systems that meet some of those big energy needs that we're seeing.

John Furrier

>> And you can hear the traders behind us all active here on the stock exchange floor. They love the energy. Yeah. And there's a lot of future talk about the economics because, all kidding aside about the trades, there's a lot of thirst here on Wall Street for nuclear energy because they see the future there. And also on the technology side, where, of course, the data centers are in massive demand. How is that playing into your plans? Is that part of it? Is that the big demand curve? Or is this at the stage of just heads down, get the science right? Sure. Are you guys still deep in the development? Or are you guys zooming out saying, hey, where's the market applications?

Jordan Robison

>> Right, right. So we are right in the middle of actually building our reactor system while at the same time developing our commercial system to go out and meet those needs. And so what we saw from day one, before really we saw the AI and data center boom coming, there was a huge power need that was already really kind of lurking below the surface. I feel like what AI and data centers have done is they've shown kind of the tip of the iceberg of what's really sitting there waiting for us. And so when we started, we wanted to develop a technology that made sense in the marketplace without subsidy or mandate. And so in that, it's really unique in what we're doing with a liquid-fueled molten salt reactor. With salts, you can do some really unique things where you put together different mixtures of salts and you can actually control the melting point of that salt. So what we end up having is a system that operates at very high temperature but at atmospheric pressure. And so what that means is we don't need huge concrete and steel containment structures. We don't need exotic forgings on our reactor systems. So we can reutilize existing oil and gas supply chains. We can leverage small modular reactor fabrication where we're pulling that manufacturing off-site, doing it in a controlled facility, and then deploying on-site for rapid assembly. And ultimately, what we end up with is a system that's going to be competitive with natural gas and other clean, firm sources of energy so that it can go out and meet those needs.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the clean piece because 20 years ago, the clean-tech or clean energy wave was starting. Not a lot happened. Now we have more advanced science and capability. What's the biggest change around the clean-tech side of this? Because that's really kind of where this works. If you get it working, which sounds like it's going great, then the next question is, how clean is it? Talk about the change. What's changed, and why is it working?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so with nuclear technology in general, it's a carbon -free source of energy. And the big thing, it's incredibly energy dense, right? Right. So we can create massive quantities of energy with very small amounts of fuel on a very small footprint and do that in such a way that we're not having the CO2 and the greenhouse gas emissions. And so what you end up with is just this system that's very, very efficient, very small, but produces massive quantities of electricity without harmful effects.

John Furrier

>> So you guys are on a path to clean energy with this.

Jordan Robison

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Explain that, because I think this is a notable thing. This is significant. Right.

Jordan Robison

>> So when you think about coal -powered systems, natural gas -powered systems, and the burning of those fuels, you're going to have emissions coming off of those. In some systems, you can capture those and try to control that. But with the nuclear fission process, we're taking the uranium atom and we're splitting it in order to create energy. And ultimately, we're generating lots of heat is what we're doing in our system. And then we're passing that heat down through a balance of plant, generating steam, turning a turbine and producing electricity without actually burning those fossil fuels. And so you ultimately end up with an incredibly clean source of energy.

John Furrier

>> Explain the order of magnitude, just scope, but just so people can visualize it. We see nuclear reactors, big concrete towers, cooling towers. What is it? What's the footprint like? Just explain, paint the picture. Sure. Is it like a monster facility? Abilene, Texas, that's where the data centers are being built. That's where you're at. So you're in a good spot. Congratulations. Love Texas for the energy angle there. But what does it look like? How big is it? What's it take?

Jordan Robison

>> So first of all, our demonstration reactor is being built in a small facility sitting on a university campus in Abilene. As we go forward into our first commercial reactor system, a single 100 -megawatt electric module can be deployed on less than five acres. We could then take 12 of those for a total of 1 .2 gigawatts and put it on less than 50 acres. So as we're talking with groups about building out these 1 ,000 -acre energy campuses that are incorporating natural gas and solar and all these different pieces, saying, hey, we need just a small corner of that, just 50 acres, and we can deploy over a gigawatt of power.

John Furrier

>> Wow, that's huge. And I was watching some of the hyperscalers and the new AI cloud scalers. They're in Sweden. They're getting all this land. You're talking about 1 ,000 acres to 50? 50. 50 for 1 .2 gigawatts. Damn. Yeah. And we saw Jensen's numbers from, he's the CEO of NVIDIA, their earnings call. And just recently he gave a talk, I think last night, that they're actually quantifying the economics per gigawatt. And it's so significantly improved. If you look at their last earnings, which they blew away, there's money there. Yeah. So you're walking into a market that's hungry and instrumented for this.

Jordan Robison

>> Yes, very much so.

John Furrier

>> What's the vision there? What's your vision as you look at that market?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so we've got an opportunity to rapidly deploy power systems to meet that market. And so our challenge at this point is finding those customers that are saying, hey, we need this massive quantity of power and we need it as quickly as possible. And the challenge there is you've got to get those customers bought in early, right? Because these are long development projects. It's going to take five, six years to get that technology deployed. And it's going to take some pretty creative financing structures to step into those first-of-a-kind projects.

John Furrier

>> Well, you guys got the molten salt reactor. They call it MSR. That's the base technology. Talk about the business, the journey you're on, where you're at, some of the momentum you have. Talk about the successes.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so Natura Resources was founded in 2020, really based upon the vision of our founder and executive chairman, Douglass Robison, who ultimately saw the technology and saw an opportunity for that technology after he had spent 40 years in the oil and gas business. He said, hey, I think this could be the future of energy. and so this is worth spending some time and money on. And so quickly jumped into that because we saw molten salt reactors as this technology that can bless the world with abundant energy, clean water, and medical isotopes. And so we started small and said the first thing we want to do is show that this technology can be licensed with the NRC, show that it's safe. When the NRC said you can build this reactor on a university campus, what they were signing off on was not that the reactor was going to function exactly how we wanted it to. They're signing off on safety. They're saying it is safe to put right here across the street from a brand new girls and boys dormitory and operate here on this university campus. And so show that it can be licensed with the NRC and take those incremental steps and start building things. Start building vessels. Start building pumps. Start running molten salt systems so we can gain those learnings and de-risk the technology as we move into the commercial realm and make it such that it's licensable for the NRC for the full commercial systems. We tell people all the time. The NRC doesn't license based upon assumptions. They license based upon data.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, and they have a high bar. Exactly. Just people don't know the bar is super high. Talk about the Department of Energy because one of the things I love about this regime we're in now and the political environment is they're doing a lot of good work. They are. They are interested. Are they involved? What's their role? Because now this looks like a template for a path to clean energy.

Jordan Robison

>> That's why I tell people that what this administration has done has really provided some unique pathways to accelerate deployment. And so with the Department of Energy and specifically the Reactor Pilot Program, which Natura Resources is a part of, they've provided the opportunity to utilize a DOE authorization process to rapidly deploy technologies. And so we were accepted to that program in August of last year. And our reactor at Abilene will actually start under that DOE authorization process. And then in the long term transition back over to an NRC license, but they've just provided some really good mechanisms such that companies can move forward quickly in deploying and demonstrating their technology, which is going to do nothing but accelerate on the commercial side.

John Furrier

>> Talk about your focus right now. Obviously, it's the picks and shovels stage. You got to get the mechanisms out there, pumps, the workflows. You got the core technology and license that. That's a business model. But once you get the playbook down, this is a construction play there. Absolutely. It's an energy play, obviously, funded by the cash flows. Right. Talk about the financing. How are you looking at taking this to market as you guys hit your milestones? How do you think about that? We saw some unique financing around the neoclouds, which are now called AI clouds, because the GPUs and the demand didn't have the same operating cycle as some of the facilities. I got a 10 -year lease. I only got three -year contract. So that's getting resolved now. NVIDIA's involved and the big banks are involved here. That's on the AI infrastructure side. You're a critical link to that AI. Have there been funding mechanisms emerging new ways to finance? Yeah.

Jordan Robison

>> There were some funding mechanisms. That came back or came out in about 2020 time period as a part of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. And that was the DOE putting a large influx of capital into these projects with some matching funds. We were a baby company barely even in existence at that point. And so what we've done today, we've raised $120 million in private capital. Received $120 million appropriation from the state of Texas last legislative cycle to go towards building that reactor. that's huge support from the state. And so we see it as our burden to raise financing in order to really develop the product so that we're ready to go out and be shovel -ready and deploy. So it's process workflows.

John Furrier

>> You've got to commercialize process. That's right. Commercialize construction, build out, standing these up. What are your blockers? What is holding you back? Just the time to get the science right? What are the key things that you're optimizing for?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, so if you had asked me five years ago, I'd say it's licensing. We've solved that puzzle, right? Regulatory licensing with the NRC is no longer the critical path for us, which is great. That's a huge milestone. Yeah, it is. It's huge. At this point, it's actually building, right? There's limited supply chain for the advanced reactor industry. because we often struggle to even call it an industry at this point because nobody's actually gone out and built a fully advanced reactor system. And so what I tell people is I am not concerned with our ability to build one, two, three reactors. What happens, though, is once we build those first reactors and Google or Amazon or whoever says, okay, now I need dozens, how is the supply chain going to respond to build those dozens of reactors?

John Furrier

>> And real estate, too. Acres are still 50 acres. Exactly. Not 1,000. Obviously, the 1,000 is not optimized. All right, so I have to ask you because this is one of the most exciting areas in tech and science. There's a lot of cool. It's a great time to be an engineer right now. If you're an engineer out there, you love physics. You love anything. This is one of the best times. What are you guys looking for? Obviously, there's a huge opportunity. What are some of the hard problems you're trying to solve? Folks watching, people love to solve hard problems. Intractable problems, that's a different story. You go crazy. But there are hard problems. What's the kind of makeup of someone who might be interested to jump into the fray? I'll say engineering talent. What's the problems you're trying to tackle? Share the puzzle, the bigger picture.

Jordan Robison

>> As an engineer, my background is in physics and mechanical engineering. The opportunity to jump on a project like this was what I saw as a once -in -a -lifetime opportunity. We picked our family up, moved them to Abilene and said, hey, this is an opportunity to work on a technology that could literally change the world. Right. And so we're bringing in talented mechanical engineers, nuclear engineers. There's a lot of chemists. For us being a liquid fueled molten salt reactor, as much as I hate to admit it as a mechanical engineer, there's a lot of chemistry involved, and a lot depends on what our chemists do. And so bringing in a lot of that experience. But then we're reaching out to the existing nuclear fleet and the existing kind of experience on large capital power projects and building a new workforce. Right. Because nobody's gone out and built a molten salt reactor before. And so we're grabbing guys that have built coal plants, that have built natural gas plants, guys that have operated large light water reactors, and a lot of real expertise and knowledge coming out of the universities and national labs and bringing that together to form a team that's ready to go out.

John Furrier

>> So this is a generational shift. This is actually an energy, a generational energy shift. So it's a whole new ballgame.

Jordan Robison

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> So you're borrowing best practices from other industries, but it's not a rip and replace. Right. It's not a rinse and repeat.

Jordan Robison

>> Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's very new with what we're doing. Although it was done at Oak Ridge back 60 years ago, we're really taking the legacy of what those scientists did at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and bringing it 60 years into the future.

John Furrier

>> All right, so I have to ask because I'm curious. Was it just sitting around on a shelf somewhere? How did this – what happened? How did this get exposed? Did someone just say, hey, we worked on this project? Or was it timing of other factors that were intersecting? What was the big driver here?

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, when the technology was being developed back in the 60s, it was really for military applications. We wanted to build nuclear submarines, and the decision there was solid-fueled systems that were cooled with water. It made a lot of sense. These other reactor systems, we weren't looking at nuclear technology back then as a source for commercial power generation. So it got shelved.

John Furrier

>> It got shelved. It was R&D.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah, it was R&D. It operated successfully. And it got shelved because they didn't need it because they were going to burn coal. We solved the problem already. Exactly, exactly. So now, as we're moving into this new age where we need massive quantities of power and we want to do massive quantities of clean power, you start looking back and saying, okay, these technologies were demonstrated. We just need to bring them 60 years into the future and start building them.

John Furrier

>> You know, what's interesting, Jordan, is that it's almost the same song, it's the same music. We're seeing old school 60s, 70s, 80s tech in all fields come to the forefront. We're seeing even on the AI side, a lot of this stuff on the data ontologies and all this stuff that's been around all this AI science, the theory, right? We didn't have the horsepower. So the ingenuity and the timing, are there other technological factors that make it more viable now? Are there other forces besides just dusting off the old R and D and applying it to commercial? Was there any advances that match some of the trends we're seeing in the AI era?

Jordan Robison

>> There's some opportunities to do that with advanced manufacturing, advanced materials, things of that nature. Those are in the future for us. Right now, we're trying to move forward with the simplest, kind of most baseload system. We don't want to go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with a material they haven't seen.

John Furrier

>> You've got to get a reactor up and running. Exactly. That's your job now. Exactly. All right, so what's been the investor interest? Because this is a long game you're playing. Yep. What's the sentiment there? Here's the cash, matching funds. There's some sort of things going on. What's the sentiment from the investors? Obviously, they know the demand, so they're interested in that. Right.

Jordan Robison

>> Yeah. So we've been raising since 2020. We're actually in a current raise right now. So we raised $120 million in private capital, raising in small tranches, raise capital, achieve milestones, raise your value. And so we're seeing a lot of investor interest because they're seeing the huge need that's out there. Like I said, it's on us to raise that capital, develop the product, and then go out and find some unique financing structures in order to do that. There's many of our peers have moved into the public marketplace and there are some significant opportunities there. And those are things that we're going to have to weigh as an organization moving forward.

John Furrier

>> All right, final question for you. Smash the narrative out there that people might have fear. Kind of the fear I had coming in, which is, whoa, nuclear, we should really go slower. That's one fear. The other fear is this is going to take a long time. Right. What would you say to those people that are listening and watching around the fear, those two fears?

Jordan Robison

>> I would say one of the big things on the fear side is a lot of times it's radiation. You can't see it, and if not handled properly, it can be dangerous. But nuclear in its history really has a strong track record of safety, and so we're taking a technology that has a strong track record of safety, and we're just making it more efficient and even safer. Those are some of the unique aspects of our technology, being this liquid -fueled, low -pressure, walk -away safe system. I tell people all the time, that reactor is trying to shut itself down at all times. We're working against it in order to keep it running. So incredibly safe systems. And for us, not hiding from the fact that it's a nuclear reactor. We do a lot of community engagement. We bring people into the facility, teach them what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, in order to remove some of that fear. And we're seeing broad support across the industry. For that technology.

John Furrier

>> Clean, safe energy. That's the goal. Absolutely. Jordan, thanks for coming on Powering Tomorrow. This is our series around energy. Powering Tomorrow, this is not just an AI problem, this is a societal global problem, as energy is a scarce resource, and also the ways we can create energy, and there's a new science involved. So again, if you're an engineer, you'd like to solve problems, this is an area that if you solve it, it'll be great for the world and the world we live in. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is the NYSE Wired program, and theCUBE, thanks for watching. Thank you.