Oklo CEO Says Trump Nuclear EO Will Unleash Innovation

Bloomberg

23-05-2025

CC-Transcript
00:00How did your job just become easier as of an hour ago? A couple of ways. Thanks for having me. I think it's a pretty exciting moment, honestly, for American nuclear technology and American nuclear industry. It unlocks a couple of things, right? It moves forward, modernizing regulatory procedures and processes so that we can actually get them right in an efficient way. I think that's a big unlock because there's a lot of sclerosis and a lot of, frankly, inefficiencies baked in the process. We're really excited about what that does. It opens up more an alternative regulatory pathways for doing things. Department of Energy and Department of Defense sites. It moves forward some of the commercial opportunities and accelerates those in terms of being able to provide power for security. And it opens up supply chains for fuel. That's one of the biggest accelerants for us. Okay. Well, let's get to that, because part of the issue with nuclear, in part, is the cost. It's just so expensive to build a new plant. Expanding or keeping a plant running is one thing. Building a new one, something else. And small modular reactors are still it's still unproven in terms of its efficiencies to scale as well as cost. How does this help that? Yeah, I mean, the thing to me that sticks out is, is the actual cost drivers in a nuclear system really compared to all energy sources. And what I mean by that is to me the best fundamental metric is the actual energy efficiency or really the material efficiency to make energy from these systems. In other words, how many pounds or kilograms of steel, copper, concrete, fuel, etc. are needed per megawatt hour of energy produced? And nuclear requires the least by far. That means it should be the cheapest source of energy. It's some of these inefficiencies from a regulatory perspective, from kind of old, outdated requirements and processes that have slowed these things down from a commercial development and sort of iteration process to sort of unfold and actually tap into that economic potential. These things will help modernize and accelerate how we can do that and realize that because, look, if you used if you need the fewest materials to make what your product is, you inherently have a cost advantage. And so I think nuclear is well-positioned to frankly, be one of, if not the cheapest source and most scalable source of energy that we have. We've seen teasers of this. We've seen it work really well in other countries who've been able to continually build without this kind of regulatory decay. We're about to see that unlock in the U.S., I think in just just want to point out for our viewers, just in terms of the actual provisions, the contours of this executive order, we knew, of course, last year, I think, what Joe Biden had proposed, trying to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. Now, this new executive order by Trump would actually quadruple it by 2030. And that includes provisions to ensure ten large conventional reactors are under construction by that time. Where is the money going to come from? I think this is what's really exciting about now. We've seen this gradual build up of support from President Bush to Obama to President Trump to President Biden to President Trump again, of this continual escalation of support for nuclear because of it's important for energy, abundance and all of those pieces. And I think what we see happening here is the market wants power now in a way that's never been clear as we reshore jobs, as we drive electrification, as we think about how we want clean power to drive all the things we want to do here. And this massive piece that from power demand perspective, that air provides. So the money is going to come from the private markets, from the capital markets. We've already seen record capital inflows from investors, from strategic investors, from companies, from customers across the board into projects, things like what we're doing, things like some of our peers competitors are doing. They're going to drive these things forward. And I just have to say, this is like a real testament to a vision of, frankly, the president has Secretary Brigham has, Secretary Wright has on energy dominance. It's about unleashing the nuclear innovation ecosystem in the U.S. to actually start deploying. And it builds on great bipartisan wins in the past, including, for example, the advance act that last Congress and President Biden signed. So it's a pretty exciting time to see how these things are going to be moving forward. And the steps taken in a holistic approach today by the president really are going to supercharge this. One other provision in this that I think is interesting and of course, the first of these, or at least according to the executive order, will be on military installations. And I guess part of that is to get around some of the regulatory constraints that I think you were referring to a little bit earlier. Does that matter, the location of them, if they are on military, effectively on military bases, does that matter about its commercial application? I think it does, yes, in a couple of ways. For one, you know, that's going to be an important opportunity from a national security perspective as well as a market opportunity. Right. To provide clean, resilient, reliable, affordable power that offers significant sort of energy security benefits on bases both domestically and potentially even in some cases internationally. We need critical infrastructure to have the power that it relies on at our military bases around the country and abroad. And so opening up pathways to actually accelerate the deployment of nuclear technologies, to be able to provide that power is critically important. And one of the reasons that nuclear so resilient is you can put a lot of fuel in a single system that can run for a long time. In other words, when you load up a reactor with fuel, it might run for years, even a decade or more, without needing to refuel. So it's quite resilient against supply chain disruptions. You just can't do that with any other energy source. Renewables obviously aren't reliable enough and fossil fuels, you need to constantly bring in, you know, fuel replacements. And that's just a testament to the incredible energy density of nuclear. Jacob, Is the timeframe good enough, the tax credits, you can take effect with them as long as you begin construction by the end of 2028. That's not that far away for something like it's not that far. Can I know? I mean, I think I think it's a great question. I mean, I think we're hopeful, obviously, that those kind of the benefits and the importance of what the tax credits enable in terms of scaling initial technologies forward and drawing in capital to then become self-sustaining is important. Look, there's a natural expiration for those things that makes perfect sense. But we need to also recognize the window of time, which they can be most useful. We're positioned to benefit from that and be able to use those in a good way. And honestly, the actions done by these aeos actually help accelerate the timeframes to be able to actually take, you know, some of those credits into play. But, you know, honestly, I think there's a lot of opportunity to think about how you can move those. To be more honest, they are complementary to the EO signed today and even more accelerated. So, you know, we'll watch how things kind of continue to progress and in Congress, but there's still a lot of opportunity to sort of combine policy angles of permitting reform of kickstarting and supercharging supply chains and bringing to bear capital incentives to drive those private capital inflows and accelerate them to build more and more nuclear plants and all the benefits that that unleashes in the country.