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Oklo CFO: Revolutionizing Nuclear Energy

• Haydn Brain & Ed Gotham

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In this week’s OPTO Sessions, Craig Bealmear, CFO of Oklo, shares how the company is transforming nuclear energy with small modular reactors. He discusses Oklo’s unique business model model, rising demand from data centers, and the future of reliable, clean energy.

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Welcome everyone to another episode of Opto Sessions. In this episode, we welcome Craig Bealmear, Chief Financial Officer at Oklo. With over 30 years of leadership experience in publicly traded energy companies, Craig is set to play a pivotal role in driving Oklo's growth and financial strategy. How are doing today, Craig? Fine and yourself? Yeah, really good, really good. Where are you calling from today? Today I'm in St. Augustine, Florida. Oklo is actually headquartered in Santa Clara, California, but we do have staff scattered across the United States. Okay, do you travel to the head office often or? I travel to the head office often and we have been, we did a lot of work when we went public. So I spent a lot of time in New York city and we've got customers in multiple States across the United States. So there's, there's travel for that as well. Okay, and when did you go public? We went public through a dSPAC, which was a business combination with a SPAC called Alt C. And we went public in May of 2024. So we've been public for almost a year. The company was founded by Jake Dewitte and Carolyn Cochran in 2016. And they are still not only our co-founders, but our chief executive officer and our chief operating officer. Okay, yes, it's quite, it's been around a while, the company. Yeah. And for a lot of people, they probably have no idea who Oklo is. So obviously a good place to start. If you can just give us an introduction of the company, where it is today and maybe a little bit of the history of where it's come from, as it's been, you know, coming on nine years. When I got the first call about would you like to be CFO of Oklo, I didn't know what the company was either. Oklo is a small modular nuclear company. So we are looking to build nuclear powered powerhouses. The company got its start though by kind of looking at the world and the fact that there are numerous customers out there that need the clean, affordable, reliable energy that nuclear power can provide. But the industry itself had had a lot of complexity. And so what we've done is a business model is really tried to step back and give those customers what they want, which is clean, affordable, reliable power. And we do that through three things. One is our business model. So traditional nuclear companies will design a powerhouse, sell that design to somebody else who will build it and then sell it to somebody else who will operate. And we stood back and figured out that our customers, what they really want is just the power. So our business model is one where we will build, own and operate the powerhouse and then sell that power directly to the customer through something called a power purchase agreement or PPA that can be 20 to 30 years in duration. So first is the business model. Second is size. I think when people think nuclear, they think very large assets. But we essentially have three size offerings of 15 megawatt, 50 megawatt. And we had our company update on Monday of this week. and announced that we can now scale up to a 75 megawatt power offering. And that really meets the needs of our customers, which I can go into a second. But what that size means is we can actually put one of our powerhouses on premise behind the meter. So it really becomes a direct source of clean, affordable, reliable power to our customers. And the third thing that makes us unique and really enables all this is our technology. We base our technology off of a powerhouse that was called the Experimental Breeder. reactor two or EBR two. It operated for 30 years in Idaho, producing a little over 20 megawatts per hour of electricity. And I think when most people hear nuclear, they think water as the coolant or the heat transfer agent. We use something called liquid metal sodium, which is what EBR two used, which allows us to operate at very high temperatures, creating a high quality steam, but we can operate at atmospheric pressure. So we don't need a lot of specialized pressure vessels, which lowers complexity, which lowers cost. And we have a lot of passive safety features incorporated into our design. And all of that was really based off of the 30 year track record of EBR2. Wow. So not only is the technology superior to nuclear power plants that exist today, it's closer to the people or businesses, et cetera, that need the power, which is beneficial because there's less power lost in transit and things like this. that a... I think it's just more the fact that, you know, with, you know, what we're seeing in the United States is that suddenly there's a huge uptake in demand for power. think the United States benefited for many years with there being more capacity that could go on the grid than what there was demand for, but we've kind of shifted. And with the huge demand growth coming from AI and data centers and other uses, you know, what our customers like is they can have a dedicated power source. The other thing that makes that size point of 50 to 75 megawatts unique is if a customer, say, needs 150 or 300 megawatts of power, we can provide that through four 75 megawatt powerhouses that we can put on premise. And when we are down for our planned maintenance, we'll only bring one unit down at a time so we can provide enhanced reliability for that. And what our customers are really liking is the fact that they can have a dedicated behind the meter source of power so they're not really counting on the utility to bring on new capacity in a sense they can bring their capacity with them. Okay. And the first point you mentioned was related to costs, was it? Is that right? of it's just business model and then I can go into what the cost if you like. So the business model is different. And so, you know, what are we targeting? So when I started with Oklo in August of 2023, so a little more than a year and a half ago, we had an order book that was sitting about 700 megawatts of demand. And at that point in time, our our primary offer was a 15 megawatt powerhouse. And it was mostly customers wanting one 15 megawatt powerhouse on premise. And when I say customers, we've got customers in the industrial sector, in oil and gas, the US military, and last but certainly not least, data centers. In the last 18, 20 months, that order book has grown from 700 megawatts to 14 gigawatts. So we've grown from 0.7 gigawatts to 14 gigawatts. Most of that growth is in the data center space. We've announced deals with Equinix, a company called Prometheus Hyperscale. They used to go by Wyoming Hyperscale. And most recently, we signed a 12 gigawatt master partnership agreement with a very large data center provider called Switch, which is really the lion's share of our order book. But again, we've announced projects with the United States Air Force at an Air Force base in Alaska called the Ellison Air Force base. Diamondback Energy, which is an oil and gas company here in the U.S. is another customer that we've announced projects with. And then there's a large industrial site or industrial park being built in Ohio called SODI. And we have orders in place to put powerhouses inside the fence line of that industrial park. Wow, okay. And this power is offered at a cheaper rate than they would be able to get elsewhere. Well, I think it's more the fact that how quickly we can bring to them because we'd say our pricing is competitive. know, that we're currently seeing pricing in the range of 100 to $130 per megawatt hour. Now, if we had done this interview a year and a half ago, I probably would have quoted figures more in the 70 to $90 range. So as demand has gone up, the pricing has gone up really to compensate. And just so people can imagine a bit clearer what it means when you say that the values of the power, how much, I don't know, like a small city or a town, how much power would they need? Can you compare? would probably need, you know, 10 plus depending on the size of the town of our powerhouses. What our data center customers though like especially is a data center campus is not built overnight, it's built in stages. And so what we're working with our data center customers on as well as companies like Diamondback is we will put in powerhouses in lockstep with as they're growing the data center campus. So in a sense, we can grow their power as their demand for the power grows. And what they like about that is if we were only building 500 megawatt units, one, those would take in the many years to deploy. think that initially our powerhouse would probably take 18 to 24 months per powerhouse to deploy, but we think we can bring that down over time, which is much different than if you're building a larger scale asset. And we can do that in lockstep, which if you're trying to build one, 500 megawatt unit, you you'd run the risk at the data center campus of for a long period of time, you'd have more power than you need and what would you do with that power? So really we can match supply of power with demand of power. And do you have sites live today, or is it just in an order book? pre-revenue and everything has been announced. Our first powerhouse will be in Idaho at the Idaho National Labs where the lab will be the customer. Part of the reason that our first powerhouse will be there is several years ago, the Department of Energy gave us land for that first powerhouse and they gave us fuel for that first powerhouse. And maybe the fuel is another unique point for Oklo. Because of using liquid metal sodium as our coolant, we use as our nuclear fuel source something called HALU, which stands for High Assay Low Enriched Uranium. Our design allows us to run on fresh HALU or recycled fuel. And in fact, the fuel that we've been given or granted by the Department of Energy for that first powerhouse in Idaho is recycled fuel coming out of the experimental breeder reactor two powerhouse that I talked about. maybe just a little bit more on recycling. Every nuclear power plant has to replace their fuel rods with some degree of frequency, and that frequency is driven by the design and the power use. Typically, especially for a light water reactor, when the fuel rod is taken out of the assembly, it still has 90 % of the energy capacity in the fuel rod. And there's, so that's a lot, right? But it's just, it's just the, Why do they take it out at that point in time? Because the light water design actually needs an even higher concentration of power capability above 90%. But there is a process called electro refining. It's in existence today. If you can imagine that my pen is a spent nuclear fuel rod, you can take that fuel rod, you can chop it up, you can put it into an electro salt bath with different polarities. and you can separate the fissionable from the non-fissionable material and then turn that new fissionable material, you can turn that fissionable material into a new fuel rod. And so we're working also with the Department of Energy on that fuel recycling capability, because there is enough nuclear fuel in storage to power the United States for a hundred years. And every year the country generates another four years of the stuff. So, it's just a lot of work. that we really have recycling up and running, but that's another great opportunity for our company in terms of improving our fuel supply chain reliability. Mm hmm. And that's sorry that those rods at the moment are just there's anything. many times on premise at a power plant or they are stored centrally. And so what we will be doing when we have a scale, and I think it's an important thing, the technology exists today. What we're working with the Department of Energy on is the best approach to building a larger scale facility or facilities. But once that's up and running, we will bring the material to our recycling site. We will recycle it. and then we will move it out to one of our powerhouses. And it can be used in an Oklo powerhouse, or if there's another powerhouse that uses HALU, they would be another customer. One company that is talked about a lot is TerraPower. They are the Bill Gates founded nuclear power company in Wyoming. They're building one powerhouse in Wyoming at the site of a former coal-fired power plant. So they're building about a 345 megawatt facility. But that facility when it's up and running would be another potential customer for our recycled fuel. Do you have to pay to get that fuel or people happy to give it to you? the other way around. Right now, there's a storage fee paid for putting that fuel in storage. there's actually three potential sources of value from the fuel recycling. One is the storage fee. Second is the cost of recycled fuel in a powerhouse is about 80 % cheaper than fresh fuel. So there's a huge value for Oklo there. And then last but not least, as a co-product of the recycling process, radioisotopes are generated. Now, I went to finance school, not engineering or physics school, but if you think about all those things on the bottom right-hand corner of the periodic table, our recycling process will produce a lot of radioisotopes. There's a lot of emerging uses for them in pharmaceutical and in aerospace that we think we can sell those isotopes to. And there's probably about a $50 billion market emerging for those isotopes. It's because of that that Oklo also just recently in the first quarter of this year completed an acquisition of a company called Atomic Alchemy. Atomic Alchemy is working on a pilot size facility at the moment, actually down the road from where our Idaho powerhouse will be to produce radio isotopes on a standalone basis. Part of the reason we bought that company is we were really intrigued with their standalone isotope production capability. We also believe that Atomic Alchemy might be in a situation where they could be producing and selling isotopes as early as this time next year. And so part of why we wanted to buy Atomic Alchemy is so we could be kind of at the forefront of these markets and these customer contracts as they develop. And you said 10 years, is that right until you think the recycling part gets up and running? Is there a reason why? sorry, it'll be more start of the next decade. So it's probably five to six years away. And if we can find ways to bring that forward, we will. originally started the recycling work as the idea that it would be a fast follower to the powerhouses. So like when our powerhouses start to need their fuel replacements, the recycled fuel would be available. But just given where the demand for nuclear power is going and the demand for the fuel is going, we're doing anything we can to bring forward our recycling activities. And one question I think a lot of people have tended to be the norm that a lot of people think that nuclear power equals unsafe, but a lot of things have changed, I believe over the last decade or more, suppose. And it's actually a lot, it's one of the safest forms, as far as I'm aware, is one of the safest forms of any energy of the safest forms of energy. Another slide that we like to point to, which was in our February 2024 investor deck is nuclear uses less inputs, steel, cement, land, you know, than any other power source. And if you think about, you know, what happens in terms of emissions from a coal-fired power plant or what happens around the carbon footprint of producing steel or producing cement, not only is nuclear extremely safe, but it's very environmentally and carbon friendly. And I think the other thing that we think makes nuclear unique relative to some other alternatives is our powerhouses will run 24 seven. So you've got a reliability factor that's better than maybe some of the other. low carbon alternatives, which is also what has people, think, especially our customers, so excited about Oklo. But even there's a gentleman by the name of Chris Wright, who used to run a company called Liberty Energy. Liberty was an initial investor in Oklo. Chris was on our board until earlier this year. Chris is now the new Secretary of Energy. And so we do feel like, you know, we've Chris knows what our business and what our business model is about, and that's quite exciting as well. Okay, yeah, regulation is getting easier now. Is that a trend that's sort of happening, especially when you have administration, more pro-nuclear than the previous? I would say that we've seen just improvement in both the Democratic and the Republican Party to try to accelerate the delivery of nuclear. The fuel and land that we were awarded was awarded under the first Trump administration. Last year in the United States, something called the Advanced Act was passed and signed into law by the Biden administration. The Advanced Act puts accelerators around the approval process, which is run by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States. And what the Advance Act did is for, especially for SMRs, so for small modular reactors, so nuclear powerhouses like Oklo, it is looking to reduce the permit approval time under the Advance Act. And there are fees that have to be paid to the NRC for a permit, and every powerhouse needs a permit. And those fees are coming down as a result of the Advance Act. The Advance Act passed the United States Senate by a vote of 88 to two. It passed the Congress by a vote of 393 to 13. And I just throw out those numbers because I think it demonstrates the bipartisan support that is underway for nuclear. That's great. I hadn't realized it. So it's a long time to making it essentially. do you so the growth in your order book recently, do you is that more around more positive trend in regulation and easier to get these things through? is it is it due to new products you've got out and things like this? What's what's behind the late? and yes. I think it's yes and yes. think from a customer point of view, when a data center customer is looking at, want a clean, affordable power source, especially with that 24 seven that we can offer. Nuclear is looking to be the best alternative and they do like kind of our size and our technology footprint. One thing that... You know, the fact that I even talk about the fact that we have a 15, 50 and 75 megawatt offer, I think also demonstrates that Oklo as a company has really tried to be customer oriented and customer responsive. One of our taglines is build powerhouses customers want, you know, and so we're, so I think that's driven our demand. And I think, you know, the, the, the need for more power in the United States and the recognition that what nuclear can do to provide that power, I think has caused a lot of the regulatory push and the regulatory improvements as well. And I think we also are really proud of the working relationship that we have with the NRC. We have former NRC staff now working for Oklo. We announced earlier this week that we have started the pre-application review of our permit. So essentially we are working with the NRC so they can assess our permit before we formally submit it to make sure that it's ready for review. And all that work that we have been doing around getting ready for that first permit in Idaho has really been in close collaboration and close cooperation with the NRC. And you've mentioned you secured agreements with Diamondback Energy and Prometheus for long term power supply. Which industries do you think are going to be the ones that are going to benefit the most of this? You're going to get the most demand from? Well, definitely right now, if you looked at that order book and it's sitting at 14 gigawatts, the lion's share of that order book is made up of data center customers. Another really important customer for us is a firm called Equinix. We signed an agreement for 500 megawatts of power right a little over a year ago. And as part of that agreement, Equinix also made a $25 million investment that they converted into a prepayment for power. Also having discussions with our customers around, now where do you want to locate your powerhouse or powerhouses? Cause that's really an important step to setting the overall power purchase agreement pricing structure. But we're also having discussions with customers around what we can do together, which could include joint lobbying efforts, or it could include utilizing some of their supply chains that they use for buying things like steel and cement that we can use for our supply chain. And last but not least, we're also talking to some of our customers around their interest in investing in Oklo, which could be another prepayment like what Equinix did. It could be an asset level investment or it could even be an equity level investment in Oklo. So the trend of AI is probably behind this sort of like increasing growth in sales as well, which is, so you're in a very good position at point in time, because they're just going to more more power. are you familiar with CERA Week? So CIRA Week happens every year in the United States in February in Houston. And it is probably the largest energy oriented conference in the United States, if not globally. Dan Jurgen, who was the author of the prize founded CIRA. So it's kind of his program. And you will have CEOs and other C-suite leaders from a multitude of energy companies there every year. A year ago, so February of 2024, I think was really when the word nuclear really started to be talked a lot about at things like CERA week. And one of the taglines I'll use from time to time is I've only been at Oklo a year and a half, but it does feel like in that year and a half, the world's gone from why nuclear to why not nuclear to nuclear now. And I think CERA week felt like to me was like one of those tipping points around the demand for nuclear. And I think it was fortunate that it was just a few months after that that we successfully closed our business combination or DSPAC with Alt-C. And we were really pleased with the outcome of that business combination because we generated on a gross basis before fees a little over $300 million. It was $276 million in cash coming to us and there were record low redemptions. coming out of that base pack, I think just demonstrates or demonstrated a lot of investor interest in nuclear overall in an Oakland. Yeah, that's amazing. And Sam Altman Yeah, so Sam was one of the initial investors in Oklo at the early stage when Jake and Carolyn were starting the company. And Sam was our chairman when Oklo was a private company and Sam remains our chairman now that we're a public company. And I was just going to say before, I forgot to say, so it's almost like you had overnight success, but it took 10 years to get there. Yeah, yeah And the. I'm not sure Jake and Carolyn would say overnight, but the excitement and momentum is infectious. I spent 30 years in BP or 28 years in BP. It's much different being in a high tech startup company, which is kind of what I think of Oklo as. And I do sometimes joke that, My kids are in their 20s and they definitely think it's pretty cool that I'm working for a company like Oak Club. Yeah, mean, the designs look amazing as well. very cool. And that's intentional because maybe one thing around, I talked about the size of our powerhouse. The 15 megawatt unit needs a little under two acres for the powerhouse. And that's including the safety perimeter. So that is about the size of a European football pitch. The 50 and 75 megawatts will need, you know, three to five acres, but there's not a lot of land usage. and that, and again, that's including parking lots and everything else. So that's, another thing, that get, and the other thing that that liquid metal sodium allows for is we can pretty much cite a powerhouse anywhere. So we've announced projects in Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Texas, Ohio. And I think, you know, and there's many more States, I think that will, will come to fruition as we turn the orders in that order book into, into power purchase agreements. Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, yeah, they definitely look a lot safer as well, which is like when you compare them to the traditional nuclear power plants, it's just it's just night and day. It's completely different. Yeah, normally if this was on Doom, I would have a picture of one of our powerhouses behind me as opposed to my artwork in my office at home. one thing I was doing when I would start with the company is I would bring up a picture of the Oklo powerhouse on my phone and ask family and friends, what do you think this is? And you would get, know, ski chalet or church, you know, but you don't get powerhouse. that having an appealing design is intentional. And it definitely works as well. The operation of the power plants, have you minimized the amount of people that are in them? Is there a lot of automation? Do you use AI to help managing systems, et cetera? intend to use AI around, you know, automating as much as we can. And also the design itself is inherently safe. And I can go into what I mean by that, which also will impact the staff. The other thing that should impact our staffing is that liquid metal sodium in the design means powerhouse two will look like powerhouse one and powerhouse 50 will look like powerhouse two. And that means that, you know, they will operate the same. And we even think that there's things that we can do around having staff that can support more than one powerhouse. And that's going to be great that when we're, you know, with a company like, with one of our customers, like Switch or Equinix or Prometheus or Diamondback, you know, when we're putting multiple powerhouses on their campus, you know, we do think that there will be some operating synergies. And in terms of that passive safety characteristic, If we ever were to be in an over-energized situation, the core is actually exposed to air, it's exposed to atmosphere. And if the neutron started to over-energize or speed up, what would actually happen is natural law of thermodynamics, air would come into the reactor chamber and slow and shut the reaction down. So it would shut itself down naturally as opposed to needing where a light water reactor needs to have more water come in to cool the reaction. And I'm not just saying that when EBR2 was in operation, and it's not been in operation for number of years, but when it was operating for 30 years, because it was an experimental reactor, one of the experiments they did is they intentionally over-energized the reactor, took their hands off the control panel, and it shut itself down. The operating crew went to lunch. They came back, they turned the powerhouse on again. This time they pulled the safety rods out, over-energized the reactor, turned their hands off the control panel, and it shut itself down. So we've incorporated all those passive safety features into our design as well. Wow, that's cool. And you mentioned that you sell power direct to customers. I had a question. Does that mean you have more reliable business? the customers essentially buy all the power rather than a traditional plant that it may fluctuate based on demand? We want to operate 24 seven and most of our customers are saying, we'll buy all the power you need. We'll buy all the power you can produce. But there are probably situations where we will also have connectivity to the grid so that if the customer suddenly can't use the power because they've got a planned maintenance event, then we will have the optionality to put that excess power on the grid. We've even had conversations with some customers that maybe they only want four powerhouses, but they'd like us to build a fifth one for additional reliability and additional redundancy. And so what we would do with that fifth powerhouse is that one, there would probably be a right of first off take where the customer could take power coming from that fifth powerhouse. But if they don't want it, then we would have the option to put that power on the grid and sell directly. most of our order book is made up of customers wanting kind all the power we can produce from the powerhouses that we will deploy on their printers. which is great, isn't it? Yeah. So you get more reliable income streams with that. And in terms of looking forward over the next five, 10 years, what sort of key milestones has the company got to hit? And on top of that, I had a question just like, big is this market? how many, it's interesting to know like how many businesses, how much of the government, know, how big do you think this can be? So a 14 gigawatt order book translates into 1 % of US power usage today. So that kind of demonstrates the size of our demand opportunity. In terms of go-forward milestones, I think on the customer side, we are still in active conversations with other customers. But I think you will also start to see us turning these master power or master partnership agreements and letters of intent into actual power purchase agreements. Now we're trying not to rush that because we want to make sure that we get the right price for our customer. We will be submitting our permit to the NRC for our first powerhouse in Idaho this year. Maybe an aside on our permitting process. So our permitting process is taking an approach called Part 52 or COLA, which stands for combined licensing arrangement. So when we file our permit, it's a design, build, and operate permit. So when we have an approved permit, it's not just you can build it, we can actually operate on that permit. And that first COLA for our first powerhouse is a reference COLA. And every other powerhouse will need a permit, but we will reference off of that first permit, and we only have to note what's changed. And because we're trying to keep our design tight, the primary things that will change will be more site-specific factors than design-specific factors. And we also don't have to wait for that first permit to be approved to file subsequent permits for the NRC. So one is turning customer letters of intent into PPAs and continuing to grow that order book, filing our first permit, and maybe even filing some subsequent permits at the end of... this year or into early next year after we filed the permit for Idaho. We are starting to do site characterization work and getting ready to start construction for that first site in Idaho. And we don't have to wait for the permit to be approved to start our construction activities. And we're aiming to have that powerhouse online into 27, early 28. It is an aggressive timeline, but we're pushing ourselves to operate under aggressive timeline. So we'll be making more announcements around site progress there. And the other thing we're building out is our overall fuel and non-fuel supply chain. So we have a partnership with Centris, which is a fuel supplier, but we're doing other things to build out fuel supply for our business until recycling comes online. I think we'll have some recycling milestones to announce around how we look to start that operation up. Then on the One of the things that we've done intentionally is 30 % of our overall design needs nuclear specific componentry. And that's really around the fuel core. The other 70%, we can use existing supply chains. So we announced last year that we signed a preferred supplier arrangement or PSA with Siemens Energy. And they are going to provide all of our steam turbine generators for all of our powerhouses. And we've got other commercial negotiations underway with other contractors to provide steel, cement, exchanger bundles, boilers, and we'll probably use an EPC, which stands for engineering, procurement, and construction firm to do a lot of the construction for our powerhouses. So we'll probably have things to announce there. And I guess last but not least, we didn't complete the acquisition of Atomic Alchemy until about four weeks ago. we don't have, we're not sharing milestones around that business yet, but we will be sharing milestones around atomic alchemies path to first revenue in the coming weeks and months. And so in terms of revenue streams, so you've got the powerhouses, you've got the recycling, nuclear fuel. Do you foresee other sort of revenue channels in the future? So one question we get asked that we're not focused on yet is like, hey, would you ever license out your technology? You right now we are very much focused on the build on and operate model and selling power directly to our customers. So it's really going to be revenue coming from power. And then when recycling is up and running, revenue coming from potentially the selling of recycling fuel, potentially revenue coming from storing of spent nuclear fuel. And then last but certainly not least is the sale of isotopes coming both from atomic alchemy and when our recycling business is up and Brilliant. And do you see any risks going forward that you've got to be aware of and prepared for outside? is that regulation or do you see that as something that's largely positive and going away at the moment? Anything else? Like how will tradition? work with the NRC, we feel good about the direction of travel, but I'm always clear to point out that a regulatory process is something you influence, not something you manage. But I think we're really happy with how we're working with the NRC. If you said what keeps us up at night, it's delivering that first powerhouse. I'm sure we'll learn some things along the way, but we've got a great experienced staff and are bringing in more experienced staff every day around that. Probably the rate limiting step to scalable growth for us, because we ultimately want to get into a world where it's deploy one powerhouse a year to two a year to five a year, and growing that deployment capability. And right now we think probably the biggest risk to being on that growth trajectory is fuel availability, which is why we're you know, working with Centris, you know, talking with other potential fuel suppliers. You know, we announced a partnership with a company called LightSource, which is working on new generation fuel that we don't need for our powerhouse, but we're talking about what we might do collaboratively in terms of co-locating Oklo Fuel Fabrication Facility with a light bridge facility. And then, you know, and then things we can do further down the line. I did forget to mention one other that we announced earlier this year, there's a firm called R-Power that has a natural gas-fired power solution. And what we're looking to explore with R-Power is, could there be a world where R-Power could bring power to a customer today through their gas-fueled solution? And then when our nuclear powerhouse is up and running, we would step in and be the primary power supplier and then our power would be backup power or transition power. So that's just, I think again, us just recognizing, know, doing some things to meet not only the needs of our customer in the future with our powerhouses, but seeing what we can do with them and for them today. And looking into the future, 10 years down the line, how do you see the sector changing or do see the technology changing? Sometimes hard to think that far in the future, but yeah. Well, think it'll be a little bit of what you're focused on when you're trying to put your first asset on the ground will be a certain set of factors. And I kind of talked about those. When we get the company to the point of we're deploying five to 10 powerhouses a year, I think it'll be more about, well, how do we adequately allocate our people power to deploy five powerhouses a year? And what do we do to? deploy assets at that scale. That'll be a different set of factors. But that'll be a really exciting time to be the CFO of Oklo too. When the discussion is just how quickly can you fill your order book and how quickly can you grow that revenue stream. And I don't know if you've even thought about it yet, but your focus at the moment is the USA. Would you look into international markets as well? I think for right now we've got a lot to do with our US customer base, but definitely if there's opportunities in the future to go outside the US, we'd entertain those discussions. And we sometimes get asked, why not go outside the US first? But we believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US kind of sets the global standard. Jake Dewitte, our CEO, will talk about times he's visited the NRC and the Polish Nuclear Regulatory Commission is there talking with the US NRC. So we feel like the right approach is really to go down an NRC approach. And I was just going to ask if you had any one on the order book that's specifically sort of looking into it because it's hard to get power where they are because I assume that's one of other benefits is that you can place it. about they're wanting the reliable power. think that's the big, yeah. And I think they like the fact that it's kind of, know, it'll be our powerhouse, but it'll be dedicated for the duration of that PPA to their needs. And I think they like that as well. OK. But is it also a benefit that if they're in a really isolated area, which doesn't have access to easy power, this is a way to put something down and get reliable power? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason the US Air Force base has talked to us about putting a powerhouse at Ellison is Alaska is not an easy place to get to. Right. And right now they have a coal fired power plant on base and they've got to worry a lot about getting the coal to the facility. Right. Makes a lot of sense. So see potentially a lot of use cases in the defence sort of area. Yeah. the one thing that's probably, you the way it works though, is you generate energy from the nuclear reaction to boil water, to make steam, to turn a steam turbine generator, to make power. And with the Ellison project, they may want more of the heat, the steam, than the electricity, because they've got an air force base to keep warm. They've got runways to de-ice. And so there, you know, there could be use cases out there were more selling the heat than the electricity. But right now, most of those use cases are the customers wanting the electricity. Awesome. Well, Craig, it's been really interesting to chat about this. Just love the chance I get to speak to people like yourself and, know, at companies that are really at the forefront of technology. So I'm really excited to see how this develops over the years. We, Oklo appreciates the time and the interest. And to any of your listeners, know, if you do want to learn more, I think we're pretty proud of our website and there's lots of investor material. There's a pretty cool two and a half minute video on recycling. So, you know, and we sometimes even get requests for Oklo merchandise. So, maybe that's another revenue stream in the future. have just got to go to look at the design. mean, it doesn't do it justice talking about it. You've got to see it. is one those one pictures worth a thousand words, right? So I recommend everyone goes away and does that. And then obviously, how do they keep on top with the company developments and things like this? Is there a newsletter they can sign up to? It's through our website. So, you when we have press releases, they come out. Our website, we keep it up to date with material. And because we are a public company, we have to release quarterly earnings. You know, we just did that on Monday of this week, which included a shareholder letter. I don't think any only the finance people would want to look at the 10K, but you can look at that. And there was a slide deck and a presentation that we did. And we tend to do a company update at the end of every quarter, kind of in lockstep with when we file our 10K or our 10Q. You just remind me of another thing that I wanted to ask is how do you, how do people hear about you? Have you got a sales team that are going outbound sales or people coming to you? Brian Get runs our business development team and Brian is one of the more well-traveled people in Oklo. And also, we're trying to do industry events. I mentioned CERA Week. We had Oklo investor relations staff, engineering. staff and business development staff at CERA Week as well. So we try to be out there as much as we can. Well, thanks again, Craig. Have a great rest of the day. it is, yeah, really great to speak to you. See you. you.