Quarter 1
Q1 2026 Earnings Call — May 12, 2026
Management: Thank you again for joining us. We will now open up the call for questions.
Analyst Ryan Fingst (B Reilly Securities): Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe I'll start with fuel. You secured supply needed for Aurora INL. And their cycling opportunity looks promising. But curious if you have an update on your fuel procurement strategy for midterm opportunities like the Ohio plants with Meta and what you're seeing from enrichment companies out there and your ability to source fuel from them.
Management: Thank you, Ryan. I'll start it and then Craig chime in. I think I appreciate that. Basically, you know, what we see happening in the space is a number of things evolving. We're actively working with enrichers. Obviously, we have a longtime partnership with Centris. We continue to dig in with the enrichment companies to shape the right format and try to figure out the best ways to accelerate their ability to meet supply needs, which we feel increasingly encouraged by. We're seeing timescales and delivery schedules shift to the left for the first time. That's pretty amazing. I think just given the activity in the space helps spur that. Similarly, we're seeing a significant uptick in different opportunities emerge on the government side for making extra excess materials available. And those are in the form of either basically high-interest uranium that can be recovered and downblended to make high-assay low-interest uranium, or plutonium inventories or stockpiles, surplus plutonium that can be used, blended with uranium and made as a fuel that's equivalent to HALU fuel.
The good news about those is those are all materials that can exist with very little spin-up time, or I should say, sort of production time compared to setting up enrichment capacity. And that's something we've long been pushing for and excited to sort of see and see happen because it enables a significant amount of what I think of as a bridge fuel to come to market sooner. So for the Ohio plants, it's an all sort of hands-on-deck approach working from the fresh fuel perspective as well as looking at other sources from the government to help get those plants started with the idea that they transition to refueling with sort of commercial HALU supplies until recycling comes online and makes sense to use in those areas as well. And that's a key differentiator for us, right? We have intentionally selected a reactor technology and an integrated sort of strategy approach that allows us to source fuel from fresh HALU sources, from government reserves that include uranium and plutonium that can be produced into fuel that can fuel our reactors, as well as recycling, which can produce fuel. You know, fuel form that can be used in all reactors and you can't do that across all reactor types.
It's really unique to fast reactors in many ways, and that's something that we've been building the infrastructure for really since the beginning.
Management Craig: I think the only thing I would add is in addition to things that are underway around the government helping on the supply side, it's early days, but it also feels like there's help being provided on the capital side as well. And just to emphasize Jake's point, you know, we think having more than one pathway in the near term, you know, as that bridge to recycling in the longer term is just it makes a lot of strategic sense, which is why we're progressing more than one avenue here.
Analyst Jed Dorsheimer (William Blair): Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Jake, can you just talk about some of the challenges and maybe the timing of going from uranium to plutonium in your Pluto reactor? And then also, the advantages that that may provide?
Management Jake: For sure. Thank you, Jed, and thanks for the question. I think that's one of the key things here. With a fast reactor system like ours, you can use plutonium as a fuel source. And the way that works is you take the plutonium as it exists, and this is all surplus plutonium that the government produced largely as part of the weapons program in the past. It's been deemed surplus by various activities, not really suitable for use in that program, and was slated for disposition. Well, the best way to dispose of it is to put it in reactors and split it, which is what we're intending to do. And plutonium is a really good surrogate as a fuel form compared to, for example, uranium-235, which is the main fissile isotope in uranium that you enrich to concentrate. So what that means is plutonium exists in a concentrated form today. It's being made available through a program that the government had a request for applications for recently, as moved forward by the executive order back in May. What that would do is pull that plutonium, enable it to basically be used as a fuel form for reactors like ours.
And how that works is you take it, you mix it with uranium and zirconium to cast the metallic fuel form. That fuel, in technical jargon, has been deemed or called or referred to as ternary alloy fuel. The long history of research and development in the fast reactor research and development programs in the United States and abroad, it has a deep history to its use and sort of a long supporting qualification base for that. So long story short, we can use that plutonium as a fuel source instead of helium, which is particularly useful because that material exists and is more readily fabricatable than standing up and spinning up the larger scale payload supply chains in the near term. Over time, obviously, that takes over. But that plutonium, it's a finite reserve, right? It's an unlimited amount of material that we'll use to get started. So we'll build reactors that will start on it and we'll gradually replace it and refuel it with either a high assay load of terranium, HALU that's produced, or the fuel produced from recycling, which is a different type.
It has all the transuranics mixed together with terranium and everything else. That 20 tons that the government's request for applications is making available in this first tranche of plutonium is equivalent to between 100 and 160 to 200 tons of HALU. That's a huge amount of fuel to get started, and help sort of create this bridge that can move a lot more reactors out the door more quickly. In terms of challenges, there are some challenges with it, but they're manageable from the sense that we've used this before in fast reactors. We know how to manage its usage, and it's a great fuel source. So it's one of those things that from a handling perspective and from other pieces, you manage to do that a little bit differently. But it's something, again, there's a long history base of in the United States, and we know how to deal with. It's just an incredibly powerful resource to kickstart building more reactors more quickly.
Analyst Brian Lee (Goldman Sachs): Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. I just wanted to go back to one of the slides. You know, this part 57 overview was helpful. Jay, can you maybe frame for us kind of, you know, expectations around timing for that and then it does sound like maybe as part of that the DOE to NRC licensing conversion could be facilitated. Is that the right read or then how should we think about this in the context of transitioning to NRC licenses from the DOE authorization?
Management: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. I think the general view, just to clarify, make very clear, from how the framework for converting from DOE to NRC authorization has been mapped out and planned is accommodating to a number of licensing pathways in the NRC, if that makes sense. Like at the end of the day, the focus is going to be on how do you best transition an operating asset to an operating reactor. And that process will be developed, but it can fit into a number of different frameworks, 57 being one of them. The way we see Part 57 is a culmination of a lot of work of regulatory engagement to drive the NRC to a more, I would say, performance-based regulatory platform and foundation. It's something that is kind of the fruits of labor spanning back over a decade, which is great to see. What I mean by that is not just the fruits of local labor.
I mean the fruits of the labor of the whole industry and the NRC and the government to come up with a better framework that is focused on recognizing the actual sort of hazard and consequence profile of reactors and not laying over massive prescriptive overlays, which is pretty significant and sort of, I would say, streamlining and focusing the regulations on what matter. 57's timeline for implementation is something that I know is going through a period of a public comment period. I don't know the exact details on when that's going to expect it to be rolled out. But based on the timelines that the NRC has put all of that forward, I think they're expecting that to be ready to be usable here as soon as later this year. It's possible that there may be some reasons that that moves a little, but I think that's the intent. And I think that's the general timeline target. And so I think that's pretty powerfully important. So it's a great platform that our reactors can be slotted into. We're generally quite excited about it. There's obviously an iterative dynamic that needs to be accommodated. It's going to be great, but I'm sure there will be ways to make it even better.
And that's something that we're going to be eagerly engaged on. But again, I think what's really important is this is a massive step forward based on what had been looked at in the past and discussed for a long time. And to see it more or less codified like this is incredibly encouraging for us at Oklo in particular. Given the amount of time we've sort of taken, the amount of work we've put in to really try to modernize regulations going back since our founding and seeing some of those concepts and ideas sort of change come to light like this is pretty dang exciting. So I think it's a great platform that we'll tend to use most likely for most of our plants going forward and most likely to convert through our INL. Of course, it depends on a number of the final details that come to bear, but we're pretty excited about it.
Management Craig: And Jake, I'm not the engineer in the firm, but what really excites me about it is, you know, it almost feels like it really aligns with the strategy we've always had. You know, Jake talked about in his speaking points about fleet-based licensing, we've always had the plan to deploy a fleet of assets. We've always talked about our safety profile and our passive safety characteristics with low consequences. And Part 57 is really an enabler for that sort of design. And I think the other thing that maybe excites me from an efficiency standpoint is it is trying to take unnecessary steps that have already been done in one process and leverage that. So I think there's just a lot of really positive things to take away for our powerhouse business as it relates to part 57.
Analyst Sharif El Maghrabi (BTIG): Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Analyst: Noon for the PJM interconnection request do you have a sense for the turnaround time on that and does approval come irrespective of where you are in the NRC regulatory process?
Management: You know, I don't have the best answer for the timeline on the interconnection request timescales. I don't know, Craig, if you do. I think the way I would say it is it's measured in, you know, months, if not more than a year. And my understanding is that it's somewhat disconnected from our regulatory process.
Management Craig: Yeah, and on that part, definitely disconnected from the nuclear regulatory part. So we think what we've done around PJM, it's really an important action just to make sure that we're thinking about the interconnection relative to all of our other critical path items as it relates to Aurora.
Analyst Jeffrey Campbell (Seaport Research Partners): Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my call. Jake, I just wanted to understand what's the, regarding the strategic partnership project with Battelle to integrate the AI, and you also have one with NVIDIA at LANL. Could you sort of synopsize what the goals of each program are, how they differ, if there's any synergies?
Management Jake: Yeah, they're complementary, a bit different, but they focus on bringing forward some of the state-of-the-art modeling and computational capabilities, frankly, from an AI-driven perspective. Kind of workflow, an agentic workflow perspective to support our reactor design and development works. And we're putting it to work on our Pluto reactor, which is a plutonium fuel variant and is quite accelerative. So the NVIDIA LANL1, it's a great setup. Los Alamos is kind of the premier plutonium laboratory. NVIDIA is working with us and them to help bring forward some state-of-the-art capabilities on various aspects around plutonium chemistry and material handling and management. That's going to be very, I think, constructive and moving certain processes and technology considerations forward. So I'm pretty excited about that. It's going to also help us streamline and accelerate how we can manage some of the plutonium, I would say, material costs. I guess, frankly, it's really the processing out from some of the stuff that might be coming in in an oxide form or different forms that need some purification around it.
Just given us almost an experience there and NVIDIA's capabilities and our capabilities, it's just a great way to work together to actually apply some of these, frankly, phenomenal compute capabilities to get insights and accelerate the technology development process and accelerate the trial and error considerations there, which is huge. In terms of time savings and increasing throughput and forming sort of design of material handling that allows us to get deeper into the inventory of some of that surplus plutonium and be able to turn it into fuel more quickly. There's a lot more to unpack there for time's sake. I'll kind of leave it at that and then move over to the INL one, which is a focus on us partnering with them to use some incredible capabilities they built around agentic AI workflows for reactor design and analysis all the way out through aspects of licensing and manufacturing and construction.
What that is, is effectively it's like using their tools to create effectively reactor design teams that are AI reactor design teams to help us do more with less because all of the exciting things we have going on, finding ways that are significant levers for our engineering team to do more with less is going to help us take advantage of all of these opportunities that are in front of us. And partnering with INL has been kind of the home of this suite of reactor design and modeling tools and being able to tie that into some of the really cool stuff they've been working on for a bit on driving AI development frankly, Gen Tech designers, is hugely enabling. Because when you think about reactor design, a lot of work turns into doing kind of multi-physics optimization. And now you can put all that in a single place and get a ton of information out really quickly by just firing it off and letting it run for a long time. Which helps us define, explore, and then iterate down on and optimize towards the design spaces much more quickly. And also gain a lot of insights in the process accordingly to reduce then the design space accordingly and make it even basically faster the next time.
So we're kind of the, I guess we're the vanguard of doing this with INL. We've been working with them for a few months on setting this up to see what we could do and what could be possible and very excited about that. So basically it's going to be applying their reactor design and analysis tools and things we've built together and then tying that in from an agentic AI reactor design workflow or team, if you will, that now allows us to apply that into the Pluto program to accelerate the design work there for what we can do on the reactor front there. We also expect that to span out to other design efforts, but that's the one where it's kind of the easiest natural tie-in to start. But I think it's going to be really helpful in us doing more, more quickly, frankly, with less, because that's really important.
Management Craig: Yeah. And Jake, you know, what excites me is, you know, further down the road when we have a fleet of assets running on more than one fuel, I can see a world where we're trying to optimize, you know, minimum amount of fuel in for maximum amount of power for longest duration between refuelings. So building out this sort of capability now, I think, is just going to have further applications on down the road.
Analyst Sameer Joshi (HC Wainwright): Hey, Jake. Hey, Craig. Thanks for taking my question. The Aysen Air Force Base CoGen facility is 15 megawatts. That's a different model than your 75 megawatt standard. How does that development differ or is similar to what you're doing with the 75 megawatt? And is there a Department of War or Department of Defense pathway as well to work for this?
Management Jake: Yeah, it's a great question. It builds off the experience from the basically what we've done from the past. If you go back to our earlier design iterations of the Aurora when we were smaller, it basically picks up on those and it's a carryover into the Pluto project, which was carried into the Pluto project, which then carries over into the Aurora side. Given the size of that, it's more about the thermal power output, especially given the steam needs rather than the electric side. This is less of a comparison on electric power, more on thermal power. So it's a 60 megawatt thermal power plant that will be designed to go up there. And we see that being a pretty important piece that naturally fits off of our kind of product roadmap and evolution because it has a lot of common carryover. There's some differences, of course, between the Aurora plant product line that's focused on the sort of 75 megawatt plus data center side and then this, but this has been core to some opportunities we've seen defense and then other industrial applications. It ties over pretty constructively there.
It uses the same fuel form and size and dimensions actually just a bit less and then a bit of a smaller vessel with smaller sort of plant footprint because it's smaller. You need smaller piping and small heat exchangers, but all the same technology pieces and in many cases we expect the same vendors, which, generally speaking, I think is helpful. And again, the strategic aspects of the Department of War's needs are pretty important to be able to match into, and this gives us that flexibility. The other piece that I think is important from that is, again, it shows the opportunity around the cogeneration side. You know, going back, I remember in my academic days and Caroline's academic days, there's a lot of excitement around high temperature reactors to produce process heat. But when you really dig into the market, the vast, vast, vast majority of the market is going to be served by steam temperatures under 450 degrees centigrade. And then the other big like sort of the other big there's then there's kind of a moat of application of temperatures above that until you get to very very very very high temperatures that make no sense to heat like to transport.
So you're going to use other things either combustion or hydrogen or electrified transport because moving, you know, a couple about like 1500 plus degrees centigrade heat is just really hard and really expensive. And designing reactor to do so is a So it's kind of cool because it allows us to tie in with a more moderate temperature reactor system and the benefits that that affords us with then being able to serve these kind of process heat applications, which are a massive opportunity, especially since, again, such a huge percentage of processed seed energy usage is met by sub 450 degree steam and this is a great example of what that looks like now for a lot of those like facilities and plants though this size range plan is very is ideal. So it's why we've designed it like that and built it from that. It also has benefits from different authorization and regulatory pathways potentially. However, given the part 57 dynamic that's come out, it's most likely very likely that we'll go that path with this there given that it has significant benefits and that's been the Air Force's inclinations.
But it's important to also note that we're also part of the defense innovation units advancing clear power program, the AMPI program, and that has some cool upside capabilities and benefits for us as well that may tie over to some of these DOE DOD regulatory pathways. But at this point, the intent and plan for Alston would stick with Part 57, but future defense or Department of War applications might go different regulatory pathway depending on the structure there. This is very much a Pathfinder. It's been clearly communicated that way by the Air Force, by a lot of the stakeholders. It's our view, too. And it's a great place to figure it out.
Analyst Derek Soderbergh (Cantor Fitzgerald): Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. I'm hopping around calls tonight, so apologies if the question's been asked. I want to start with some commentary from the Nuclear Energy Institute. Sounds like they're considering a plan to potentially finance billions of dollars of long lead time items for nuclear reactors. I was wondering if you can comment on that and what might be the implications on your CapEx assumptions, deployment timelines, if that indeed happens.
Management: I mean, I can take this one. So, Derek, you know, it's early days for those sorts of conversations, but we've talked about, we've been very active clearly in the capital markets to make sure that capital is not a constraint for our asset deployment timeline. And we are looking now to explore our government financing options and asset level financing options if the terms and other things make sense. And that could even include supplier financing. But it's good that we're looking at those sorts of things. Just as you said, can that help lower our cost of capital? Can that help accelerate deployment as opposed to something that we absolutely don't need to have to progress our strategic agenda.
Management: There are no further questions
at this time.
I will now turn the call back to Jake DeWitt, CEO of Oklo, for closing remarks.
Management Jake: Great. Thank you. And thank you all for coming in. We're excited to share these updates. I know it's only been about eight weeks since our last one, but it has been a pretty dynamic period, including just in the last few weeks, the release of Part 57. Couple that with the strategic advancements we've been focused on working with our partners in the National Lab ecosystem, as well as across sort of the, I would call it, you know, the AI space. And on top of that, we continue to see this broad mix of significant opportunities and tailwinds come together to be quite supportive for solving through some of the biggest bottlenecks, right? Regulatory is one of the biggest ones that obviously has been focused on, and there's a ton of tremendous work there. Again, the opportunity space around how we can convert the authorization to an NRC license is a clear benefit and advantage because you can take the first build iteration cycles faster on the DOE authorization side and then have a path to bring it over in the right way to the NRC license side while also informing NRC licensing for future work.
Again, we continue to ensure both of those and we're taking both approaches. And then on top of that, we're making steady progress on solving for fuel, which at this point has a multitude of potential pathways that get over and around the challenge of initial fuel loads. And we are uniquely positioned on purpose from a strategic perspective to be able to capitalize on that by using bridge fuel sources that come from different excess materials and inventories, while also working proactively and quickly with suppliers with our long-term enrichment partners. We're pretty excited about how that space is shaping up and how we're leaning into it and how we're positioned to take make the most out of diversity of fuel sources becoming available. And finally, I think it's really important to highlight that it's an exciting place in time for us to be moving fully into build and execution and iteration mode. With the Groves reactor in Texas, we're differentiated in the sense that we've been able to build a reactor from the ground up on a piece of land that had nothing on it.
And everything we put into it wasn't prefabricated or just seeing already fabricated fuel the government had or components or building that already existed or a minimum kind of slab and tilt up. It was a full-on civil construction build for a nuclear reactor with the vessel sourced and fuel sourced and all the components sourced in the supply chain that we needed or made. And we were able to do that and reach substantial completion in 229 days. Something that, frankly, has been a bit impressive if it was just a normal building, much less a nuclear reactor. We're really proud of the theme for how we've done that. We're proving out that some of the key theses we've had, that nuclear doesn't have to be incredibly big or incredibly slow and incredibly expensive. And it can be done in radically different ways by taking the right business model approach, team and structure and solving to do that. And we've got some great experience points already. So it's been very exciting for us to see that progress. We're very excited to then come back soon with even more exciting updates when we see you guys next in a few months. So thank you all for joining us and appreciate the time.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
Quarter 2
Q4 2025 Earnings Call — March 17, 2026
Brian Lee (Goldman Sachs): Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. I appreciate all the updates here. Lots going on. Excuse me. Maybe just first one. You mentioned a lot of progress toward commercialization. I know there's a lot of focus around kind of the pipeline and customer status. Jake, can you maybe speak to where that sits today? Any new additions or conversion into binding agreements and any incremental visibility into more of that happening in 2026?
Craig (Management): I would say that, you know, clearly META was an important anchor point towards that commercialization progress, as you mentioned. And kind of based on that, you know, we continue to have conversations not only with Meta but with other potential customers, both those we've announced and other ones that we're continuing to progress. But really, it is important that we think that, you know, Meta being an important anchor customer for us and the fact that we can do more not only in the Ohio location, but also with some of our kind of behind the meter on campus customers. And not only in the data center space, but there's a lot of work going on with US military, predominantly in Alaska, but not limited to there, as well as other industrial customers.
It does look like Jake's jumped back on. Jake, I went ahead and answered the question since I think you got disconnected.
Jake (Management): Yeah, it's perfect. I would say, I think at the end of the day, you know, there's a pretty healthy pipeline that continues to kind of grow in different places. And I think one of the dynamics that's important is having, you know, Meta as one of the kind of basically lead customer helps others want to come follow and kind of repeat that because sometimes finding the first customer is the biggest hurdle to get into. It creates a pretty powerful dynamic. And I think on top of that, like the locationing and how we've built the strategy around, you know, where we see a lot of opportunity in Ohio is going to continue to kind of grow and scale with us.
Brian Lee (Goldman Sachs): And then just a second question on the CapEx guidance here. The $350 to $450 million in 2026, it's a pretty meaningful pickup. Again, lots going on, and it seems like some areas accelerating. Can you maybe just provide a breakdown of where that CapEx is being allocated? You mentioned a couple different locations. And then how should we think about the cadence into 2027 and future years off of this level? And then maybe just curious how much of the capex being allocated to the meta-Piketon site in Ohio. Thank you, guys.
Craig (Management): Yeah, so Brian, I'm not going to provide a kind of a business unit by business unit or project by project breakdown at this point. And part of that is, you know, we're still doing a lot of work kind of refining cost estimates for certain projects as well as kind of progressing procurement activities across those projects. And it kind of feels like with where we are commercially, it would be good to kind of let those progress before throwing project bogeys out there as we're progressing procurement strategies. But that being said, it's progressing things across all three business units. But clearly, the Idaho project is an important piece of that spend, just given the criticality of giving that first power project up and off the ground.
But we are also starting some preliminary work in places like Ohio for the metapowerhouses. And there's also quite a bit of work that's underway in recycling for the potential project in Tennessee, things we're doing to get isotope projects off the ground. And there's also some scoping capex available for some of those fuel projects that Jake mentioned across HALU, plutonium, and transuranic fuels. In terms of, you know, 26 to 27, you know, I think, you know, given the project pace of delivery, you know, I do think that we'll, you know, continue to see CapEx that, you know, will be, you know, at those levels. But it's really just a reflection of multiple projects going on in multiple dimensions across all three business units.
Jake (Management): Yeah, and I'll just echo. I think that's an important part about the positioning we have and also, like, the, you know, frankly, the ability to move more quickly and scale into the opportunity space as it is here and kind of set the direction and set ourselves up for a very long-term success by flexing into all of that is, I think, a very important thing to be doing, which is great that we're in the position to do it.
Dimple Gassai (Bank of America): Good evening. Appreciate you taking the question here, Tim. Just a question on the regulatory strategy here, right? You know, can you give us a status update on the COLA timing and the PDC topical report review? Like, how do you sequence the DOE authorization at INL with future NRC licensing for subsequent sites? And on the same topic, did, you know, the government shutdown at the end of last year, and some of the staffing constraints that we heard of at the DOE and NRC move any internal licensing, you know, timelines or anything, and does this change the schedule at all in terms of deployment or filings or anything? That's the first question. Thank you.
Jake (Management): Yeah, I think, I appreciate the question. There's a couple things in regulatory that are important. I think there's like, look, there's still, I think sometimes some confusion about DOE authorization, recency licensing, and how these things all fit together. The key thing is DOE authorization allows us to do the most important thing, which is build, which is learned by building now in a faster path, which is what we just talked about and shared a lot of information on. The progress we've been able to make on the ore plant wouldn't have happened without that pathway going forward.
And in many ways, arguably, this is the way the policies were set up a long time ago. And it dates back even, you know, even a little more recently, but still some time ago. Back in 2018, there was the bill time to pass into law and finance law called the nuclear energy innovation capability act and that's at the stage for using Department of Energy capabilities and resources, including the regulatory authorization side to support kind of the first of the kind of build because do we have just a wider range of regulatory experience and flexibility.
And now, you know with the executive orders they directed a pretty clear approach and prioritization of DOE to leverage that and build the capabilities to do that, which frankly, they largely already had. It just said, put them to use to support these things, which is amazing because it's completely shattered the paradigms of the past. It's really illuminated a lot of the significant regulatory inefficiencies that have existed. On top of that, it sets a good pathway for us to then build that first plan.
But then also, what we expect to see coming from the NRC as part of executive orders there that build on all the work from the advanced act before, are driving a lot of new regulatory pathways and development there that bridge from the DOE basically authorization itself. So we're expecting the NRC to fairly soon issue basically their approach, if you will, for converting a DOE authorized and built and operating facility to an NRC licensed facility. And we're in a great spot to be able to go through that and experience what that looks like.
That inherently is not like a COLA because you're not getting a license to build and operate the plant. The plant's already built. So it's really a conversion process, which is cool. But they have to do the safety review and they have to reference and leverage everything before. Not only that, but we've also been working to include and loop in the NRC into our basically regulatory review with DOE. So they're seeing how it's done and they're getting experience watching and shadowing those pieces.
Which is pretty powerful. And this is a key kind of opportunity to go, I think, faster. It's really, it's hard to overstate the value of focusing on actually moving out of the way of sort of if you think about what a nuclear company historically would have to do, what our product was, if you really looked at it objectively before these opportunities existed. Our first product was really more built towards shipping permitting applications, right, paperwork.
Now, because of the DOE authorization approach, it's building while doing that, which allows us to learn and iterate way more quickly. Because naturally, things come up and evolve, and that helps you learn the really hard things that are actually really important to, like, deployment and scale. Now, all that also translates very effectively to what we're going to do with the NRC in Ohio.
And I think what's pretty clear is DOE and their approaches and the milestones we've hit with them show that they can do a safety review of surging fast reactors. And they've done a lot of those before because they oversaw the power plants that we build our legacy off of. On top of that, the energy is also shown by recent developments that they've had, including, for example, the construction permit work with TerraPower, that they can do that work as well.
And looping them into this and leveraging the experiences and expertise that DOE has, because DOE has done this stuff before, is quite constructive and quite efficient, frankly. So we're waiting to see the new framework from the NRC to start executing down the pathway of preparing to convert a license. But in parallel, we continue to work through effectively developing out the combined license to submit for Ohio.
That said, it's very important to also flag something else. Part of the executive order is there's significant regulatory work and rewriting going on that could significantly influence our approach in a constructive and productive way that we would expect to reduce costs and timelines, as well as add additional regulatory confidence and certainty. So that is all a very live situation as we speak, and we're watching eagerly as various things flow out from the NRC on that front.
But it's fair to say that that's probably going to be quite constructive, but also have some tweaks, if not more significant changes on our actual regulatory, I'll call it semantic strategy. In other words, we still get an NRC license, but the vehicles by which we might do that may be a bit different because of what's happening at the NRC.
That said you know we've been preparing and continuing to go through the pathway of pre-application that addresses general and somewhat generic or cross-cutting issues that are important for licensing for us. And those will set the stage for us to actually have, you know, reference those and whatever application structure takes place going forward from the NRC. Again at this point, you know we still expect a part 52 combined license. But that's just because we haven't seen what the new menu of options are going to look like as well, which we expect to happen over the course of the next few months, and then we'll adapt kind of a strategy from there.
But a couple of key things that we see are obviously just having the experience of going through the Aurora plant in Idaho under DOE authorization, going through the DOE regulatory process, having the NRC part of it, taking an iterative approach, learning by actually building and scaling that, and then applying that outward. On top of that, we're also getting experience from NRC licensing already on the isotope side, having obtained an NRC license now. It's a great win.
To your latter part of your question, Nipul, yeah, we did face some delays on that with that license application back in the fall during the shutdown. But now we have the license in hand, and off we go. I don't see any of the other effects that are, you know, frankly, at this point materially affecting our progress on the other activities that we have going on with the NRC and with DOE. But that was definitely something that was noted.
And then the last thing I'll just say is one important thing, too, that's very helpful is, you know, in the current frameworks, which may evolve and change a little bit, or frankly a lot, possibly, the approaches with what we're licensing and the work we've been doing on the isotope side, not just the material handling license, but the actual production reactor, like basically the full commercial version of Groves that we've spent some NRC pre-application time with, that has a different pathway than what the commercial Aurora power plant version has.
And having the experience that we gained across both of those and what we're gaining on the recycling side and what we've done on fuel fabrication, is very helpful because we see a whole spectrum of different parts of the NRC and can cross-connect best practices and help guide things from our development of an application as well as our engagement with them in the review process. And that helps in many, many ways in terms of some scaling efficiencies and bringing best practices from various business units across. And that's pretty unique for us because we're taking on that broad set of projects.
So, yeah, that's kind of the way I'm seeing that landscape evolve and how all this is moving forward.
George Gianakris (Canaccord Genuity): Hi, Oklahoma team. Thank you so much for taking our questions. You mentioned in the past that about 70% of the aurora powerhouse components are being sourced from non-nuclear supply chains, which is, I think you brought to it into the picture. Is there any update on what the 75 megawatt reactor capex should look like in the not a complete update, maybe any early indication on the dollars per kilowatt there. Thank you.
Jake (Management): Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the things that's actively evolving from, you know, where we're at in terms of the building cycle and what we're seeing is doable. And also what we're seeing, you know, can be done to either move some timelines to the left and build it faster and pay more to do that or not, right? But generally speaking, speed is a very important thing for us. So that's how we're trying to focus on this.
This also gives us a lot of insights into then what we're going to do from a more, I would say, optimized strategy with the Ohio plants that would allow us to scale those according to, you know, what makes the most sense from sort of like the experiences learned from the Idaho plant. So what that's all to say is, you know, we're going to have more information as we continue to get into the actual deeper works beyond some civil and prep works and have some relevant updates that come accordingly as I get deeper into it.
But, you know, what we've learned on the procurement side is we've been able to find ways to pull schedule to the left in different ways constructively. We've been able to find ways to look at how some things can be accelerated. But one aspect of that is sometimes it helps the fact that we have the Aurora planes in Ohio coming afterwards because it can maybe accelerate some things here in Idaho to help us with know other components and other parts and other sourcing for scanning those to the other Ohio plants and maybe having some benefits that happens that way.
So, the general view we have is it's evolving as we go through on this and as we develop and enhance the relationships we have and we look at different angles of attack on the different fronts of what drives costs and what doesn't and some things are, candidly, not worth necessarily driving the modernization for the first plant that we'd like to see in terms of the actual supply chain and the procurement of it.
So we might pay a little bit more to move faster and other things that is worth doing that. It's a bit of a dynamic situation that we're continuing to evolve and look at. At the end of the day, though, like my, you know, my view is like, generally speaking, all of these things can live, like pretty much every part outside of the fuel can live outside of the nuclear conventional supply chain.
But I think what's really important is I think that paradigm has actually been sort of inverted as of late, because we're seeing growth in the industry for the first time in a while. So you're actually seeing folks bring forward more disruptive approaches in kind of taking away some of the legacy models and approaches that were driving significant costs and inefficiencies by sort of locking into the status quo across different suppliers in different parts of the entire sort of value chain, if you will.
And a pretty cool thing that we're seeing is that we can actually get to be a lot more thoughtful engagement from our partners about how to do that and more constructive engagement about knocking out some of the synthetic like nuclear cost multipliers that have existed before. I know I say this a lot but it's hard to overstate the value of modernizing, of basically taking out some of those nuclear cost multipliers right the quote unquote nuclear idiot index if you will is really really high and is right to be changed by changing how we design, how we try to minimize and reduce parts that come in with some of the typical nuclear classifications to them by taking advantage of passive and inherent safety features, but also by modernizing how our suppliers and ourselves actually deliver those plans.
But we're finding that there are some places where, you know what, just easier to deal with what's legacy for the Idaho plant to get it up and running because that's more important. But that sets the stage for them how we can actually solve that problem in Ohio because we learned the best practices to do that. So it's pretty interesting to see that combo sort of evolving and taking shape.
Generally speaking though we're seeing a very different way of engagement across most of the supply chain and not having some of the conventional legacy requirements and what I really mean by that is not being a light water reactor is actually really constructive counterintuitively a value of that is not having to play in the legacy supply chains with the historical cost structures in place there that's actually worth a ton because it gives us a lot more flexibility.
Because we're not buying light water reactor parts by and large. I mean, yes, there's some similarities, but we're not a light water reactor. So a lot of it's different. And that gives us a lot more flexibility. And it also helps us focus on where do we need to flex into building ourselves? What parts make the most sense to buy to go faster or build ourselves and maybe build ourselves to scale and build ourselves to deconstrain supply chains or build ourselves just to be cheaper?
So it's an active, you know, growth aspect of the business, and it's also how we're looking at, you know, not just sort of the capital cost, you know, modeling and data sets, but also the long-term, you know, cost structures of the business and also, like, opportunities in the business.
Ryan Fingst (B Reilly Securities): Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Somewhat of a follow up to some of the comments there, Jake. For the agreement with Meta, they ended up choosing two sodium cooled reactor developers following their nuclear RFP process. Can you rehash some of the benefits of your design and why Meta might have chosen it?
Jake (Management): Yeah, I think the answer right now is the fact that we've got, you know, I think they see the benefit of certain fast reactor technology between us and TerraPower, right? That's just repeating what you said, but basically, you know, I think that translates across a couple of vectors. One is the technical maturity, something that's vastly underappreciated, even by, you know, a lot of nuclear experts.
The fact is, you know, as a society, we've built a lot of these plans. We've learned a lot about what doesn't work and what does work. And in the U.S., notably the experiences we got through EBR2 and FFTF, the ability that those plants had to achieve pretty exciting operational characteristics, both in terms of operating capacity factor, in terms of occupational dose rates, in terms of how to service and run those plants, right? Their operating capacity factors were competitive and exceeded, in many cases, light water plants at the time, which shows a lot of the inherent benefits of the technology itself.
And it's the only technology that's really been able to do that. And on top of that, I think there's a clear trajectory on the cost benefits of sodium being a relatively, you know, materially benign fluid with commonly available seals. In other words, you can use it and it's quite, you know, compatible with stainless alloys. That's great in terms of opening up supply chains and reducing costs and avoiding major cost drivers of very exotic alloys you might need if you didn't have those benefits.
And then also not being pressurized and then having the benefits of being able to operate at relatively higher temperatures and then the features that come from that for passive heat rejection through the phenomenal heat transfer characteristics that sodium has, as well as operating at higher temperatures and what you can do to reject heat to air because you're at slightly higher temperatures.
So all in all, it translates to a lot of, generally speaking, cost benefits, as well as the strong operational history and high technology readiness. I think those are big features there.
Brian (Management): Maybe just a couple of ads there. I think, you know, as we continue to emphasize in calls like this, you know, the importance of having multiple field pathways, I think, was another important point of distinction and being able to have proof points against those pathways. And I think another important part on META was, you know, already having a ROFA in place and access to land in Ohio. I think was another important advantage and that we've leveraged that land access even more with, you know, what we could potentially do with Centris.
Vikram Begri (Citi): Hi. Good evening, everyone. I have two questions. I'll ask them together. First, maybe for you, Craig. Can you talk about the timing of Aurora ML? It appears timeline shifted slightly to the right with a change in language from late 27 to early 28. Now it says 2028. Am I reading that right? And what led to the shift in timing? Also, I see it's a 75 megawatt reactor. Can you talk about what the CAPEX requirements for this reactor will be or when you will have a greater clarity into CAPEX requirement?
And then secondly for you, Jake, I see you conducted a fast spectrum plutonium criticality experiment. Can you share what that entails and your expectation of timing of plutonium allocations that we've been looking forward to? Thank you.
Craig (Management): Yeah, Vic, you know, in terms of the last bit of your question, you know, I'll take that first, you know, that we're still doing a lot of work, and Jake kind of mentioned this dynamic of challenging, you know, the cost versus the timeline because, you know, trying to bring timelines forward could have a cost element to it and we're really trying to balance both of those pieces, and I think we'll have more information to share around what the cost of that first asset looks like later this year, as well as you know how we look to bring costs down on future deployments.
And in terms of the timeline, I think I've been pretty consistent in the various investor meetings that I've been in that we're targeting a 2028 timeline. We know it's an aggressive target, but we feel like the industry and our customers are pushing us towards being able to hit those timelines. And it's also, I think, important why we're doing things on projects like growth where we can learn how to bring down capital costs and learn how to bring down project timelines as well.
I think one thing we saw with the, like what we're having happen with, you know, I think that basically the timeline elements are, as we're putting all these things together, right, like we're, we have a path of being able to start hitting important construction milestones this year, doing some plant commissioning work.
But getting the full plan in the nuclear heat production just is going to really happen in 2028, right? And it's just where it's going to be. So I think at this point, we're seeing that lineup to make that kind of the case. We're always looking at different ways that might pull parts of the schedule to the left, and there might be some things that kind of help with that, but a lot of this gets to how we can execute on, you know, building this thing and doing it quickly and moving through learning iterative processes relatively quickly.
And I think it's important because we're trying to also make sure we capture lessons learned and not design the fly to implement all those things, but that help us with Ohio. And that's important because it means that the palm plants are going to, you know, obviously show this improvement significantly. And that's a key thing about small reactors, right? The cost and timelines iterations are just way lower. And that's how you really drive learning and scale as we see everywhere.
Jake (Management): Onto the plutonium front. Yeah, it was pretty cool. We got to partner with Los Alamos National Laboratory and throw out to the Nevada National Security Site. Basically what we got to work with was a small plutonium, like basically metal assembly that we used uranium as a reflector and plutonium was the primary fuel and gore and got to run it through some criticality, basically benchmarks and tests as well as some reactivity measurements, which means you're actually taking the system, putting some power into it, heating it up a little bit and looking at the thermal expansion and the other effects that cause it to shut itself down naturally.
It was important because while a lot of that data has been out there, doing it in this kind of way helped us get more fidelity in certain ranges of particular interests for us relevant to our use, as well as just to enhance our overall models for validation purposes. It was pretty cool because it was really doing that, right? I think we were putting in a couple of kilowatts at most in terms of thermal power, but in a very small system that's literally very small, it matters.
And it was able to heat the system up and we got to see all those insanely fast dynamics and responses. I've gotten to spend a little time around like a high and restraining fast reactor system in my past. But this thing was even faster and how it behaved is very, very tightly responsive, which was awesome. And the way they ran it was just a pure Testament to like how, you know, robust a small type of coupled fast reactor is in terms of like inherent feedbacks and all those benefits.
So that was helpful. We anticipate there's gonna be more work there that just adds more fidelity to basically improve reactive performance and reduce some certainties throughout the system that ultimately translate to, you know, dollars saved or more dollars earned right or both, and then the other part of it is.
With the plutonium awards, you know, we're expecting those things to kind of progress that other Department of Energy is going through the active kind of reviews of the request for applications they put out and we're pretty excited about, you know, our positioning for that, but. Timelines, I think, you know, I think we'll watch it eagerly this quarter coming up, but I think it depends on a couple of factors that are still evolving.
Jeffrey Campbell (Seaport Research Partners): Hi, Jake. Hi, Craig. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one is will the deconversion discussions you've noted result in Centris increasing its enrichment capabilities from its current small volumes, or do you envision the deconversion capability as independent of any particular uranium enrichment supplier?
Jake (Management): I mean, from the deconversion technology side that we've worked through and, you know, we've been developing out, it's pretty flexible. I mean, it's based on a, you know, a UF6 input. And, you know, try to supply some things we think can help scale and drive costs more effectively at a facility level. So it's pretty flexible.
Part of why we explored it with Centris to start is just given the positioning we have in Ohio, the fact we're going to be building a lot of plants right there by where they have it. There's some significant economies of scale of putting deconversion there, as well as potentially fuel fabrication there and the reactors there. You have a pretty cool campus that goes from enrichment to deconversion to fabrication to actual reactors, all in that general area.
And in a very attractive market to be in overall. So that's how we see kind of the opportunity on that. I think the space we see is, I think we've got some cool technology pieces. We're eager to explore what that looks like to integrate with theirs, like their facility and their approach. The idea would be, of course, to support their significant growth and expansion. But yeah, we see this as being, you know, broadly suited for any kind of uranium hexafluoride.