This conversation examines Apollo Atomics' approach to scaling factory-assembled light-water reactors to meet rising electricity demand. Drew Walker of Apollo Atomics and Assil Halimi of Apollo Atomics join theCUBE and NYSE Wired at the New York Stock Exchange to discuss factory assembly, commercialization milestones and market strategy to address demand from data centers and artificial intelligence, AI.
Hosts Gemma Allen, John Furrier and Dave Vellante engage Halimi and Walker. theCUBE Research framing complements discussion of a compact steam generator developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, the factory-built light-water reactor approach, demonstration milestones at MIT and market strategy for behind-the-meter and grid-scale deployments. The modular architecture aligns with the small modular reactor, SMR, market and manufacturing-focused delivery models.
Halimi asserts that the compact steam generator reduces the nuclear island footprint by an order of magnitude, enabling factory assembly and fixed-price delivery to shorten construction timelines from about ten years to under two; they frame this reduction as essential for rapid, repeatable deployment.
Walker describes a product roadmap targeting 10 megawatt, 50 megawatt and 300 megawatt offerings and reports that Apollo Atomics holds over 20 gigawatts of letters of intent, LOIs. They note a commercial-condition demonstration at MIT and an objective for first commercial deployment in 2028, along with ongoing engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC, and industry partners on licensing and manufacturing readiness.
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Drew Walker & Assil Halimi, Apollo Atomics
This conversation examines Apollo Atomics' approach to scaling factory-assembled light-water reactors to meet rising electricity demand. Drew Walker of Apollo Atomics and Assil Halimi of Apollo Atomics join theCUBE and NYSE Wired at the New York Stock Exchange to discuss factory assembly, commercialization milestones and market strategy to address demand from data centers and artificial intelligence, AI.
Hosts Gemma Allen, John Furrier and Dave Vellante engage Halimi and Walker. theCUBE Research framing complements discussion of a compact steam generator developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, the factory-built light-water reactor approach, demonstration milestones at MIT and market strategy for behind-the-meter and grid-scale deployments. The modular architecture aligns with the small modular reactor, SMR, market and manufacturing-focused delivery models.
Halimi asserts that the compact steam generator reduces the nuclear island footprint by an order of magnitude, enabling factory assembly and fixed-price delivery to shorten construction timelines from about ten years to under two; they frame this reduction as essential for rapid, repeatable deployment.
Walker describes a product roadmap targeting 10 megawatt, 50 megawatt and 300 megawatt offerings and reports that Apollo Atomics holds over 20 gigawatts of letters of intent, LOIs. They note a commercial-condition demonstration at MIT and an objective for first commercial deployment in 2028, along with ongoing engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC, and industry partners on licensing and manufacturing readiness.
>> Palo Alto Studio connecting, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm John Furrier, co-host here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, co-host of NYSE Wired: Powering Tomorrow. And we have a huge power problem coming at us. AI and data centers are driving electricity demand higher than ever before. But building traditional nuclear power has meant enormous projects, enormous capital, and very long timelines. Apollo Atomics is saying that nuclear doesn't have to be built that way anymore. You're taking proven nuclear technology, dramatically shrinking the system, and trying to turn the reactor from a giant construction project into something that can actually be manufactured and deployed at scale. Joining me now to explain exactly how they're going to make that happen are Apollo Atomics co-founders Drew Walker, COO, and Assil Halimi CEO. Welcome, folks.
Drew Walker
>> Thank you for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm fascinated by folks like you that, as young men were like, I want to be a nuclear physicist, right? And I'm going to change the world and I'm going to monetize this and commercialize it because it seems like it's one of the world's largest and most challenging problems to solve and reimagine. So maybe I'll start with you, Assil. You began this journey at MIT, if I'm correct. Have proven a technical thesis that you feel has commercial scalability. Help me unpack that a little bit more.
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, first, the interest in nuclear. Why nuclear? As a first question, one, nuclear is the cleanest, one of the cleanest sources of making electricity that's actually firm and reliable that we have already in the grid. The question is, how can we scale it faster? And then we have many, many concepts within the academic world, within what we have tried in history. In terms of building new reactors. And so my whole PhD thesis was about how can we deploy much faster using what we have right now? And really the speed is the name of the game here. So what we've done and what I specifically studied is essentially all the existing concepts and can we use what we have right now, what we call the water-cooled reactors that operate in 70 to 80% of all the world's nuclear power plants. and actually many of them are in construction right now, mainly outside of the United States— and solve the construction problem, which is can we reduce the construction time for building these reactors from 10 years to less than 2? We do that with natural gas plants. We build them in about 2 years or even less than 2 years. So how can we learn from other industries and actually deploy that within nuclear? And the key to that is one single design change, not reinventing nuclear and not changing everything in the design, but really picking one design change that can actually enable that to happen. And so that was a conclusion and the component is a steam generator that we have developed at MIT for over 15 years that actually enables us to reduce the footprint of what we call the nuclear island or the nuclear reactor by an order of magnitude. Now what becomes possible is making the full reactor off the site, assembling it, testing it, and delivering it to the site for a fixed price. And that's really important because right now, if you want a nuclear reactor and ask for the cost, the answer is typically a question mark. So removing that risk from the construction project and saying, hey, we will deliver the reactor for a fixed price is really important to create confidence in any developer that would want actually to use nuclear for their energy generation. So that's the thesis, how we got into using MIT-developed technology into solving a very specific narrow problem while leveraging an existing infrastructure and existing supply chain that we have in what we call light water reactors.
Gemma Allen
>> So your end product, it's not necessarily a massive construction investment in a nuclear power plant. What you're saying is that you can create a plug-and-play element of the nuclear supply chain and roll that out in so many use cases across the USA, correct?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, that's very correct.
Gemma Allen
>> So fast forward to 2025. It's the summer. You defend this thesis and you're thinking, okay, now I'm going to scale this and I'm going to try and understand how I can commercialize this. And then enter Drew, correct?
Assil Halimi
>> Yes, correct.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So Drew, let's talk about that, because when we think about nuclear, we know that there is a huge energy crisis. It's happening. It's not even on the horizon. It's here.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah, exactly.
Gemma Allen
>> But nuclear has always had, if we're being honest, very confusing and mixed resonance, right? There's a lot of bad aftertaste when you hear the word nuclear power plants. I'm not just talking about the world of Homer Simpson, right?
Drew Walker
>> Totally.
Gemma Allen
>> And even though he didn't help the marketing message for sure.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> So talk to me about the decision then to bring this to market, to say, okay, we want to commercialize this.
Drew Walker
>> So I think where we can maybe start is our— we decided to go down our product chain or our product roadmap of we have a 10-megawatt, a 50-megawatt, and a 300-megawatt. And so we're actually attacking a few different markets based on those sizes and those scales. So the 10 and 50 we're starting out with, which are more of those behind-the-meter type solutions for industrial power off-takers, smaller data centers that we can actually put next to each other and actually scale from there. So that's tackling a different problem because we can actually make that reactor in the same factory. Like Assil was saying, we make it in our factory, we put it on a truck and ship it to the site. So it's a much, much smaller project altogether. So as far as the messaging that we're doing as the whole nuclear industry. What we want to do is we want to make this approachable to the common person to understand what this new nuclear renaissance is bringing to us as a nation and how we can actually solve the power problem and beat China along the way.
Gemma Allen
>> So, when we hear nuclear, we think, great, no carbon, no CO2 emissions, fantastic, right? We also think, but hey, are we going to get a whole ton of other problems on the other end from the perspective of a chain reaction radiation, right? and I think that we've never, and I don't think any country really has done a very good job of really messaging that, of really helping us understand, well, what the future of this industry could look like. So I want to understand a couple of things from the perspective of the supply chain opportunity for you guys. Who are you predominantly targeting? who is the— if you had, if you could make this at scale tomorrow, who is the immediate use case? what sorts of conversations are you having right now? What commitments are you entering into with companies?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, at the moment we have over 20 gigawatts of LOIs from people ranging from the industry data centers that want to power AI models to university campuses to foreign countries that are looking for, clean, firm electricity for their grids. And within those, we have several of them who are at the contracting stage. We want to first start in the United States. Making sure that we can develop this and actually deploy the first model correctly on time and on budget, and then use that model as a template to deploy beyond the United States and also beyond that first project specifically.
Gemma Allen
>> So where are you at with the POC for this? Have you guys actually developed this? you've obviously created the technology within your PhD, but have you actually created a tangible product? Yes. And have you worked with anyone like on any particular manufacturing sites across the US that have basically taken this POC and said, yeah, this really works and it's the backbone of, a particular element of a supply chain, right? It might not, again, like I said, be the depiction we have of a nuclear power plant. Instead, it's part of an entire holistic supply chain that's more efficient.
Drew Walker
>> Definitely. I think just quickly, I would just say that we have built a 40-kilowatt demonstrator with MIT showcasing our technology and showcasing the compact steam generator that is our key innovation to our reactor. And I would say from there we've been able to showcase and bring some really great partners along the way with us and really securing that supply chain. So we have, I would say, one of the largest fuel manufacturers in the world that we have a commercial agreement with already. Pumps, everything else that is a normal pressurized water reactor supply chain that's already there, we're lining them up and getting them to hold to our timelines, which are very aggressive. I don't think we've talked about that yet, but we want to deploy our first plant, commercial plant, in 2028. So really bringing— so what keeps us up at night is going to be aligning that supply chain to hit those quick deadlines.
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah. And maybe one important addition is that the reactor demo that we're running out of MIT is at commercial conditions. This is not a simple R&D test here and there. It's running at high reliability factors and at the same temperature chemistry and pressure that you find in a commercial plant. That's really important because the data are important in terms of getting the right financing for the first projects that we have. So the data related to this new component, all the rest of the components are, traditional. So we have already a know-how. So that's really important to get to a point where you can actually contract. And this is what we're discussing at the moment, make sure that we have enough data to contract for 10 years, 15 years. what we call power purchase agreements. And so that's what we're producing. That's for 2026, our reactor demo that we're running at MIT. And we're building another demo that is 50 times more powerful by mid-2027.
Drew Walker
>> Wow.
Assil Halimi
>> And then in 2028, we'll have our first commercial reactor scaled up from the 1-megawatt test that we have in 2027.
Gemma Allen
>> So this has very much left the lab and it's about to enter the factory floor.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> In terms of your own supply chain for building these reactors. Where is that activity, that footprint happening? If you were to create, again, something that's highly repeatable and you can build these at scale, where will that happen? Where is this currently happening? And what is the kind of, design to implementation timeframe for something like this? How quickly can a hyperscaler, for example— I don't know if you guys are peddling in the tech space just yet, but I have no doubt that you will.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> And how quickly can they deploy this?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah. So the first we call the beachhead market. This— these applications are what we call behind the meter. People who cannot wait to get connected to the grid, they're actually looking for more redundancy, less of a scale. So looking for smaller reactors that they can have multiple of them in one installation. If they lose one asset, they still have others. So this is kind of our beachhead market where we have these small reactors, our first 10-megawatt reactor, which, by the way, we assemble it in the Bay Area.
Gemma Allen
>> An expensive choice.
Assil Halimi
>> Yes. Yes, this is so our installation in the Bay Area is mainly for engineering, licensing, and manufacturing of our key components and the first assembly. And then when we want to scale up the manufacturing, we're looking at two states, mainly Louisiana and Texas.
Drew Walker
>> Okay.
Assil Halimi
>> And in the US.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So I was going to go to cost, but first, I'm going to go to regulation. So I want to talk about Louisiana and Texas. We had an interesting conversation yesterday with a fellow MIT graduate and brains of tomorrow, Bob Mumgaard, who is building— he's not talking about fission, he's talking about fusion. You guys are probably familiar. He talked about the regulation space in nuclear and this idea of Agreement States where states essentially regulate themselves. Right. And I think part of the challenge that we have with the resonance and the image of nuclear is that we haven't really solved for that, right? I think if you were to ask the average person on the street, how is nuclear energy regulated today? Most folks would struggle to tell you. So when you guys are thinking about this and thinking about, deploying this and building these manufacturing footprints in different states, talk about the policy and regulatory element to that. It must be a huge part of it. And how willing are these states to say, you know what, we need this. This is a clean energy solution.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah. Maybe I can touch on it real quick, I think from a regulatory perspective, we're trying to build a coalition both at the state and federal level from the governor's office on down. So the local and state buy-in, we have to have it. And same thing with the federal government. We're going through the NRC with our Part 50 pathway for commercialization of this reactor. But to site these reactors locally, we have to have that buy-in from the beginning. And we're having those conversations even before we have a specific site that we're siting these at their location because we have to get the community buy-in, we have to get the state and make sure the incentives behind it do align with the project. So it takes a lot of coordination and effort to make sure those—
Assil Halimi
>> and from the regulatory point of view, I think that the current administration has been doing great work in terms of bringing more predictability. So we have a reactor that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had approved dozens of times in the past. This is not an exotic technology that they don't know. They already know about it a lot. And we're de-risking specifically this new component that makes us different. For the rest of it, they are very familiar. And actually, two executive orders from last year reduced the cost but also reduced the uncertainty on the timelines. It used to be you submit an application and then hope for the best. Now you submit an application and there is a clear timeline of that you are getting a response for a construction permit. And this is why we can assert that for our first commercial plant, It's going to happen. This commercial, this construction permit is going to happen in 2028.
Gemma Allen
>> Let's talk about costs for a second, because what I found interesting from the interview you had yesterday and other interviews you've had on this show is folks are willing to front a lot of money on these commitments, these 10, 15-year, 20-year commitments in the nuclear space on plants that haven't even broken ground yet. Right. Like Google, Talen, Microsoft, Three Mile Island with their Constellation partnership. Again, a lot of money is being spent on a promise, right?
Gemma Allen
>> Yes.it's a promise that I think people now realize probably has to come true because of the demand in the energy space. But the CapEx upfront is huge. And from what I understand, and correct me on this, if you actually price out nuclear versus the less clean tech energy sources we have today, it's actually right now more expensive., correct? Yeah. So it's not necessarily cheaper, but it has huge opportunity, long-term or midterm opportunity. Talk about the conversations with investors in this space. They obviously have to be super familiar, super comfortable already. I'm interested to understand when you're in those rooms how those economics are playing
Assil Halimi
>> out.Yeah. And we want to be clear, we're not developing nuclear just because it's clean. We're actually developing nuclear that is going to compete with natural gas. That's our clear goal. Unlike some of the other players, when we look at comparing the costs and specifically the CapEx between nuclear and let's say natural gas, because that's the best thing outside of nuclear category, natural gas is typically about 70 to 80% cost of the fuel. And then the CapEx is a smaller portion and the operating the plant and maintaining the plant. So 70 to 80% cost of the fuel means that you're highly exposed to the volatility of natural gas. So we're seeing it every day.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Assil Halimi
>> The good thing with nuclear is that the CapEx is the largest portion. The fuel is a smaller portion. We're talking about 10%, mostly depending on the size of the reactor, but roughly about 10%, which means that even if, although the uranium is well spread across the planet, there is an issue on the fuel supply. If you do 2x on the cost of the fuel, you're still not affecting the price of electricity down the road. So that's one good thing about nuclear that we have in terms of resiliency to supply chains. And then as a company, we see ourselves not only as a hardware company, we're also a software company. We have detailed cost models, call them bottom-up cost models, where we look at every component and every system that goes into the power plant and actually bring that as a proof based on feedback that we get from the suppliers. Remember, we're starting from a technology that we already know how to build and how to operate. And so we have the cost figures and so we aggregate all that and then build it in a model where we have our new steam generator that enables us to have much higher compactness. And that's how we build our proof. And I think that's important. the techno economics beyond the promises is really important because when you get to the stage where you're actually contracting, we get to the stage where you're actually asking for financing the project. That's what people will ask for. They will ask for reliability. They don't want a reactor that breaks after 2 weeks. It needs to be reliable at least for 10, 15 years so they can sign a contract for 10, 15 years. And they look at the costs and where are the sources of your costs. And so having that ability to develop a very detailed model to actually aggregate all the costs from the suppliers is very, very important. And then there is a third layer, which is the financing layer. This is why we're focusing on having shorter construction timelines. When you look at the total cost of nuclear, we talk about CapEx. Most of that CapEx is actually cost of debt and equity that you have to pay during the construction period because it's massive upfront costs. And then you have to wait for the construction time. Now that we have decoupled the reactor from the construction on the site, we can do that in parallel and shorten the construction period. That will enable us actually to reduce the capital costs, reduce the cost of debt, reduce the cost of equity. And that's the other layer that we have in terms of how can we reduce the cost of nuclear in the next 5 to 10 years.
Drew Walker
>> Although you didn't say the magic word AI. So we also— I think there's a lot of, one of the biggest costs of nuclear is the soft costs, like the regulatory side and bringing some of these things like AI and these systems that we're actually developing, as I said, we're a software company on top of a hardware company, and building some of these systems internally so that we can take on and utilize the agentic workflows of today to help us bring some of these costs down that will help us deliver on these projects that we're agreeing to.
Gemma Allen
>> And it's an interesting conundrum in the techno-economics of AI and nuclear because in the minds of tech investors and the tech community, sure, right? It's chicken and egg. One will solve for the other. In the public mind, though, and the public opinion and the hearts and minds of Americans, it's confusing because there's two things at once, where you have challenges right now out there in public perception. Right. So like it is kind of an interesting dance.
Drew Walker
>> It is.
Gemma Allen
>> But okay. So last question to you guys. when I think about a company like this, a product like this, and the chops that you guys have in terms of what you've already proven at MIT. people are like, these guys are smart. They know exactly what they're talking about, right? Does the go-to-market kind of happen by itself? Like, what is the go-to-market like for you? And how much priority is spent right now on winning these commitments from whoever it might be, a hyperscaler or, some large manufacturing, global Fortune 50 company? Like, Talk about how naturally that happens.
Drew Walker
>> I would say it happens fairly naturally and it has evolved over the course of that as we've worked together because, we were very fortunate to get into Y Combinator and after that we started Y Combinator, I think with 1 gigawatt of LOIs and then we ended up, with 20 gigawatts. And now we're doing this transition of a go-to-market from okay, it's great to give us a non-binding LOI, but we're now looking at slotting actual projects whether they be PPAs or selling our reactors as we scale up and actually slotting them into our manufacturing plan because we're now at a point where we're no longer having to show these great LOIs. But we're at the point where we want to do some real projects and actually build and bring power to the grid.
Gemma Allen
>> So is that the priority for you guys for the next 6 to 12 months? Where is the majority of your time going to be spent?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, so we're doing technical work obviously as founders and also working with the government, making sure that we're getting the right financing for these first-of-a-kind nuclear projects. Because speaking of go-to-market, no one wants to be the first. So you need to create a structure and a contract where actually the risk is shared. Actually, most of the risk is on our side to deploy that first reactor. And then we have an order book of many people actually willing to sign contracts after the first-of-a-kind is being deployed. And we're talking about contracts before 2030. And the only way, and I think the way to actually get these off-takers to sign and get investors to put money in these projects is to be credible. And we spent a lot of time, you know, with utilities. We have a utility advisory board that know how to operate pressurized water reactors that actually help us both on the design aspect but also in operating these plants. They know how to operate them at over 95% capacity factor. That's, by the way, higher than natural gas. So it's a very reliable asset. We want to keep that as we're deploying nuclear. And then on top of that, we're partnering with construction companies. We're not a construction company. We make their lives easier. We make the construction period much shorter, but we're not a construction company. There are people who do it very well. And so we focus really on our product and we build this thesis and go and tell it to people and say, hey, this is what we think is the future of the nuclear industry in this country. Because in the past 6 months, China connected 6 gigawatts of electric power into their grid. That number is zero in the United States. So that needs to change. We need a roadmap. We need a credible product. And that's, you know, we're happy to sit and talk to people and tell them we have the right thesis.
Gemma Allen
>> And a Frenchman might be here to fix it. Exactly. Well, Assil, Drew, thank you so much for joining us at NYSE Wired. I think my key takeaway is that even nuclear needs a village.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah, exactly
Gemma Allen
>> right.Thanks for joining
Drew Walker
>> us.Thank you very much for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is NYSE Wired. It's powering tomorrow. Thanks for watching.
>> Palo Alto Studio connecting, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm John Furrier, co-host here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, co-host of NYSE Wired: Powering Tomorrow. And we have a huge power problem coming at us. AI and data centers are driving electricity demand higher than ever before. But building traditional nuclear power has meant enormous projects, enormous capital, and very long timelines. Apollo Atomics is saying that nuclear doesn't have to be built that way anymore. You're taking proven nuclear technology, dramatically shrinking the system, and trying to turn the reactor from a giant construction project into something that can actually be manufactured and deployed at scale. Joining me now to explain exactly how they're going to make that happen are Apollo Atomics co-founders Drew Walker, COO, and Assil Halimi CEO. Welcome, folks.
Drew Walker
>> Thank you for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm fascinated by folks like you that, as young men were like, I want to be a nuclear physicist, right? And I'm going to change the world and I'm going to monetize this and commercialize it because it seems like it's one of the world's largest and most challenging problems to solve and reimagine. So maybe I'll start with you, Assil. You began this journey at MIT, if I'm correct. Have proven a technical thesis that you feel has commercial scalability. Help me unpack that a little bit more.
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, first, the interest in nuclear. Why nuclear? As a first question, one, nuclear is the cleanest, one of the cleanest sources of making electricity that's actually firm and reliable that we have already in the grid. The question is, how can we scale it faster? And then we have many, many concepts within the academic world, within what we have tried in history. In terms of building new reactors. And so my whole PhD thesis was about how can we deploy much faster using what we have right now? And really the speed is the name of the game here. So what we've done and what I specifically studied is essentially all the existing concepts and can we use what we have right now, what we call the water-cooled reactors that operate in 70 to 80% of all the world's nuclear power plants. and actually many of them are in construction right now, mainly outside of the United States— and solve the construction problem, which is can we reduce the construction time for building these reactors from 10 years to less than 2? We do that with natural gas plants. We build them in about 2 years or even less than 2 years. So how can we learn from other industries and actually deploy that within nuclear? And the key to that is one single design change, not reinventing nuclear and not changing everything in the design, but really picking one design change that can actually enable that to happen. And so that was a conclusion and the component is a steam generator that we have developed at MIT for over 15 years that actually enables us to reduce the footprint of what we call the nuclear island or the nuclear reactor by an order of magnitude. Now what becomes possible is making the full reactor off the site, assembling it, testing it, and delivering it to the site for a fixed price. And that's really important because right now, if you want a nuclear reactor and ask for the cost, the answer is typically a question mark. So removing that risk from the construction project and saying, hey, we will deliver the reactor for a fixed price is really important to create confidence in any developer that would want actually to use nuclear for their energy generation. So that's the thesis, how we got into using MIT-developed technology into solving a very specific narrow problem while leveraging an existing infrastructure and existing supply chain that we have in what we call light water reactors.
Gemma Allen
>> So your end product, it's not necessarily a massive construction investment in a nuclear power plant. What you're saying is that you can create a plug-and-play element of the nuclear supply chain and roll that out in so many use cases across the USA, correct?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, that's very correct.
Gemma Allen
>> So fast forward to 2025. It's the summer. You defend this thesis and you're thinking, okay, now I'm going to scale this and I'm going to try and understand how I can commercialize this. And then enter Drew, correct?
Assil Halimi
>> Yes, correct.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So Drew, let's talk about that, because when we think about nuclear, we know that there is a huge energy crisis. It's happening. It's not even on the horizon. It's here.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah, exactly.
Gemma Allen
>> But nuclear has always had, if we're being honest, very confusing and mixed resonance, right? There's a lot of bad aftertaste when you hear the word nuclear power plants. I'm not just talking about the world of Homer Simpson, right?
Drew Walker
>> Totally.
Gemma Allen
>> And even though he didn't help the marketing message for sure.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> So talk to me about the decision then to bring this to market, to say, okay, we want to commercialize this.
Drew Walker
>> So I think where we can maybe start is our— we decided to go down our product chain or our product roadmap of we have a 10-megawatt, a 50-megawatt, and a 300-megawatt. And so we're actually attacking a few different markets based on those sizes and those scales. So the 10 and 50 we're starting out with, which are more of those behind-the-meter type solutions for industrial power off-takers, smaller data centers that we can actually put next to each other and actually scale from there. So that's tackling a different problem because we can actually make that reactor in the same factory. Like Assil was saying, we make it in our factory, we put it on a truck and ship it to the site. So it's a much, much smaller project altogether. So as far as the messaging that we're doing as the whole nuclear industry. What we want to do is we want to make this approachable to the common person to understand what this new nuclear renaissance is bringing to us as a nation and how we can actually solve the power problem and beat China along the way.
Gemma Allen
>> So, when we hear nuclear, we think, great, no carbon, no CO2 emissions, fantastic, right? We also think, but hey, are we going to get a whole ton of other problems on the other end from the perspective of a chain reaction radiation, right? and I think that we've never, and I don't think any country really has done a very good job of really messaging that, of really helping us understand, well, what the future of this industry could look like. So I want to understand a couple of things from the perspective of the supply chain opportunity for you guys. Who are you predominantly targeting? who is the— if you had, if you could make this at scale tomorrow, who is the immediate use case? what sorts of conversations are you having right now? What commitments are you entering into with companies?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, at the moment we have over 20 gigawatts of LOIs from people ranging from the industry data centers that want to power AI models to university campuses to foreign countries that are looking for, clean, firm electricity for their grids. And within those, we have several of them who are at the contracting stage. We want to first start in the United States. Making sure that we can develop this and actually deploy the first model correctly on time and on budget, and then use that model as a template to deploy beyond the United States and also beyond that first project specifically.
Gemma Allen
>> So where are you at with the POC for this? Have you guys actually developed this? you've obviously created the technology within your PhD, but have you actually created a tangible product? Yes. And have you worked with anyone like on any particular manufacturing sites across the US that have basically taken this POC and said, yeah, this really works and it's the backbone of, a particular element of a supply chain, right? It might not, again, like I said, be the depiction we have of a nuclear power plant. Instead, it's part of an entire holistic supply chain that's more efficient.
Drew Walker
>> Definitely. I think just quickly, I would just say that we have built a 40-kilowatt demonstrator with MIT showcasing our technology and showcasing the compact steam generator that is our key innovation to our reactor. And I would say from there we've been able to showcase and bring some really great partners along the way with us and really securing that supply chain. So we have, I would say, one of the largest fuel manufacturers in the world that we have a commercial agreement with already. Pumps, everything else that is a normal pressurized water reactor supply chain that's already there, we're lining them up and getting them to hold to our timelines, which are very aggressive. I don't think we've talked about that yet, but we want to deploy our first plant, commercial plant, in 2028. So really bringing— so what keeps us up at night is going to be aligning that supply chain to hit those quick deadlines.
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah. And maybe one important addition is that the reactor demo that we're running out of MIT is at commercial conditions. This is not a simple R&D test here and there. It's running at high reliability factors and at the same temperature chemistry and pressure that you find in a commercial plant. That's really important because the data are important in terms of getting the right financing for the first projects that we have. So the data related to this new component, all the rest of the components are, traditional. So we have already a know-how. So that's really important to get to a point where you can actually contract. And this is what we're discussing at the moment, make sure that we have enough data to contract for 10 years, 15 years. what we call power purchase agreements. And so that's what we're producing. That's for 2026, our reactor demo that we're running at MIT. And we're building another demo that is 50 times more powerful by mid-2027.
Drew Walker
>> Wow.
Assil Halimi
>> And then in 2028, we'll have our first commercial reactor scaled up from the 1-megawatt test that we have in 2027.
Gemma Allen
>> So this has very much left the lab and it's about to enter the factory floor.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> In terms of your own supply chain for building these reactors. Where is that activity, that footprint happening? If you were to create, again, something that's highly repeatable and you can build these at scale, where will that happen? Where is this currently happening? And what is the kind of, design to implementation timeframe for something like this? How quickly can a hyperscaler, for example— I don't know if you guys are peddling in the tech space just yet, but I have no doubt that you will.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> And how quickly can they deploy this?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah. So the first we call the beachhead market. This— these applications are what we call behind the meter. People who cannot wait to get connected to the grid, they're actually looking for more redundancy, less of a scale. So looking for smaller reactors that they can have multiple of them in one installation. If they lose one asset, they still have others. So this is kind of our beachhead market where we have these small reactors, our first 10-megawatt reactor, which, by the way, we assemble it in the Bay Area.
Gemma Allen
>> An expensive choice.
Assil Halimi
>> Yes. Yes, this is so our installation in the Bay Area is mainly for engineering, licensing, and manufacturing of our key components and the first assembly. And then when we want to scale up the manufacturing, we're looking at two states, mainly Louisiana and Texas.
Drew Walker
>> Okay.
Assil Halimi
>> And in the US.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So I was going to go to cost, but first, I'm going to go to regulation. So I want to talk about Louisiana and Texas. We had an interesting conversation yesterday with a fellow MIT graduate and brains of tomorrow, Bob Mumgaard, who is building— he's not talking about fission, he's talking about fusion. You guys are probably familiar. He talked about the regulation space in nuclear and this idea of Agreement States where states essentially regulate themselves. Right. And I think part of the challenge that we have with the resonance and the image of nuclear is that we haven't really solved for that, right? I think if you were to ask the average person on the street, how is nuclear energy regulated today? Most folks would struggle to tell you. So when you guys are thinking about this and thinking about, deploying this and building these manufacturing footprints in different states, talk about the policy and regulatory element to that. It must be a huge part of it. And how willing are these states to say, you know what, we need this. This is a clean energy solution.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah. Maybe I can touch on it real quick, I think from a regulatory perspective, we're trying to build a coalition both at the state and federal level from the governor's office on down. So the local and state buy-in, we have to have it. And same thing with the federal government. We're going through the NRC with our Part 50 pathway for commercialization of this reactor. But to site these reactors locally, we have to have that buy-in from the beginning. And we're having those conversations even before we have a specific site that we're siting these at their location because we have to get the community buy-in, we have to get the state and make sure the incentives behind it do align with the project. So it takes a lot of coordination and effort to make sure those—
Assil Halimi
>> and from the regulatory point of view, I think that the current administration has been doing great work in terms of bringing more predictability. So we have a reactor that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had approved dozens of times in the past. This is not an exotic technology that they don't know. They already know about it a lot. And we're de-risking specifically this new component that makes us different. For the rest of it, they are very familiar. And actually, two executive orders from last year reduced the cost but also reduced the uncertainty on the timelines. It used to be you submit an application and then hope for the best. Now you submit an application and there is a clear timeline of that you are getting a response for a construction permit. And this is why we can assert that for our first commercial plant, It's going to happen. This commercial, this construction permit is going to happen in 2028.
Gemma Allen
>> Let's talk about costs for a second, because what I found interesting from the interview you had yesterday and other interviews you've had on this show is folks are willing to front a lot of money on these commitments, these 10, 15-year, 20-year commitments in the nuclear space on plants that haven't even broken ground yet. Right. Like Google, Talen, Microsoft, Three Mile Island with their Constellation partnership. Again, a lot of money is being spent on a promise, right?
Gemma Allen
>> Yes.it's a promise that I think people now realize probably has to come true because of the demand in the energy space. But the CapEx upfront is huge. And from what I understand, and correct me on this, if you actually price out nuclear versus the less clean tech energy sources we have today, it's actually right now more expensive., correct? Yeah. So it's not necessarily cheaper, but it has huge opportunity, long-term or midterm opportunity. Talk about the conversations with investors in this space. They obviously have to be super familiar, super comfortable already. I'm interested to understand when you're in those rooms how those economics are playing
Assil Halimi
>> out.Yeah. And we want to be clear, we're not developing nuclear just because it's clean. We're actually developing nuclear that is going to compete with natural gas. That's our clear goal. Unlike some of the other players, when we look at comparing the costs and specifically the CapEx between nuclear and let's say natural gas, because that's the best thing outside of nuclear category, natural gas is typically about 70 to 80% cost of the fuel. And then the CapEx is a smaller portion and the operating the plant and maintaining the plant. So 70 to 80% cost of the fuel means that you're highly exposed to the volatility of natural gas. So we're seeing it every day.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Assil Halimi
>> The good thing with nuclear is that the CapEx is the largest portion. The fuel is a smaller portion. We're talking about 10%, mostly depending on the size of the reactor, but roughly about 10%, which means that even if, although the uranium is well spread across the planet, there is an issue on the fuel supply. If you do 2x on the cost of the fuel, you're still not affecting the price of electricity down the road. So that's one good thing about nuclear that we have in terms of resiliency to supply chains. And then as a company, we see ourselves not only as a hardware company, we're also a software company. We have detailed cost models, call them bottom-up cost models, where we look at every component and every system that goes into the power plant and actually bring that as a proof based on feedback that we get from the suppliers. Remember, we're starting from a technology that we already know how to build and how to operate. And so we have the cost figures and so we aggregate all that and then build it in a model where we have our new steam generator that enables us to have much higher compactness. And that's how we build our proof. And I think that's important. the techno economics beyond the promises is really important because when you get to the stage where you're actually contracting, we get to the stage where you're actually asking for financing the project. That's what people will ask for. They will ask for reliability. They don't want a reactor that breaks after 2 weeks. It needs to be reliable at least for 10, 15 years so they can sign a contract for 10, 15 years. And they look at the costs and where are the sources of your costs. And so having that ability to develop a very detailed model to actually aggregate all the costs from the suppliers is very, very important. And then there is a third layer, which is the financing layer. This is why we're focusing on having shorter construction timelines. When you look at the total cost of nuclear, we talk about CapEx. Most of that CapEx is actually cost of debt and equity that you have to pay during the construction period because it's massive upfront costs. And then you have to wait for the construction time. Now that we have decoupled the reactor from the construction on the site, we can do that in parallel and shorten the construction period. That will enable us actually to reduce the capital costs, reduce the cost of debt, reduce the cost of equity. And that's the other layer that we have in terms of how can we reduce the cost of nuclear in the next 5 to 10 years.
Drew Walker
>> Although you didn't say the magic word AI. So we also— I think there's a lot of, one of the biggest costs of nuclear is the soft costs, like the regulatory side and bringing some of these things like AI and these systems that we're actually developing, as I said, we're a software company on top of a hardware company, and building some of these systems internally so that we can take on and utilize the agentic workflows of today to help us bring some of these costs down that will help us deliver on these projects that we're agreeing to.
Gemma Allen
>> And it's an interesting conundrum in the techno-economics of AI and nuclear because in the minds of tech investors and the tech community, sure, right? It's chicken and egg. One will solve for the other. In the public mind, though, and the public opinion and the hearts and minds of Americans, it's confusing because there's two things at once, where you have challenges right now out there in public perception. Right. So like it is kind of an interesting dance.
Drew Walker
>> It is.
Gemma Allen
>> But okay. So last question to you guys. when I think about a company like this, a product like this, and the chops that you guys have in terms of what you've already proven at MIT. people are like, these guys are smart. They know exactly what they're talking about, right? Does the go-to-market kind of happen by itself? Like, what is the go-to-market like for you? And how much priority is spent right now on winning these commitments from whoever it might be, a hyperscaler or, some large manufacturing, global Fortune 50 company? Like, Talk about how naturally that happens.
Drew Walker
>> I would say it happens fairly naturally and it has evolved over the course of that as we've worked together because, we were very fortunate to get into Y Combinator and after that we started Y Combinator, I think with 1 gigawatt of LOIs and then we ended up, with 20 gigawatts. And now we're doing this transition of a go-to-market from okay, it's great to give us a non-binding LOI, but we're now looking at slotting actual projects whether they be PPAs or selling our reactors as we scale up and actually slotting them into our manufacturing plan because we're now at a point where we're no longer having to show these great LOIs. But we're at the point where we want to do some real projects and actually build and bring power to the grid.
Gemma Allen
>> So is that the priority for you guys for the next 6 to 12 months? Where is the majority of your time going to be spent?
Assil Halimi
>> Yeah, so we're doing technical work obviously as founders and also working with the government, making sure that we're getting the right financing for these first-of-a-kind nuclear projects. Because speaking of go-to-market, no one wants to be the first. So you need to create a structure and a contract where actually the risk is shared. Actually, most of the risk is on our side to deploy that first reactor. And then we have an order book of many people actually willing to sign contracts after the first-of-a-kind is being deployed. And we're talking about contracts before 2030. And the only way, and I think the way to actually get these off-takers to sign and get investors to put money in these projects is to be credible. And we spent a lot of time, you know, with utilities. We have a utility advisory board that know how to operate pressurized water reactors that actually help us both on the design aspect but also in operating these plants. They know how to operate them at over 95% capacity factor. That's, by the way, higher than natural gas. So it's a very reliable asset. We want to keep that as we're deploying nuclear. And then on top of that, we're partnering with construction companies. We're not a construction company. We make their lives easier. We make the construction period much shorter, but we're not a construction company. There are people who do it very well. And so we focus really on our product and we build this thesis and go and tell it to people and say, hey, this is what we think is the future of the nuclear industry in this country. Because in the past 6 months, China connected 6 gigawatts of electric power into their grid. That number is zero in the United States. So that needs to change. We need a roadmap. We need a credible product. And that's, you know, we're happy to sit and talk to people and tell them we have the right thesis.
Gemma Allen
>> And a Frenchman might be here to fix it. Exactly. Well, Assil, Drew, thank you so much for joining us at NYSE Wired. I think my key takeaway is that even nuclear needs a village.
Drew Walker
>> Yeah, exactly
Gemma Allen
>> right.Thanks for joining
Drew Walker
>> us.Thank you very much for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is NYSE Wired. It's powering tomorrow. Thanks for watching.
Gemma Allen
