00:00Yeah, well, I think, I mean, so basically, we're working towards turning our first plant on come 2027 on the commercial power side. And thank you guys for having me. It's pretty exciting to talk about this. But I think what we see, though, is there's some acceleration that's really happened in the policy space in the last really, you know, seven or eight months.
00:16Because back, you know, on May 23, the president signed in the executive orders that introduced this thing called the Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program, which we became part of to basically bring forward building a first plant much more quickly. It's great because it also dovetails well with regulatory modernization going on there, as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing to then allow us to kind of scale those things forward.
00:36But what that looks like, then, is if you think about a first plant coming online, producing power, getting built, getting that experience between now and 27, because we broke ground in September, it's a pretty good trajectory to then to see follow on plants on, for example, you know, the 2028-29-2030 timelines, which ramp well into what Meta's timing and the needs that is for this Ohio site.
00:54JJ, just thinking about the politics at the moment, to your point, this is a White House that is very much so been concentrated on affordability. And of course, energy is a really big part of that, going as far as talking about Microsoft taking on a bigger share of some of their data center energy consumption. In your conversations with the White House, how much has that come up? Are they pushing you and helping you to move faster in order to get more things online to help with the issue of affordability?
01:20Yeah, they are. And I think what's great, though, is this really is the bipartisan thing, right? Like under President Biden, they signed in the Advance Act, which brought forward accelerated regulatory modernization. And when people talk about that, what does that mean? It really just means bringing more modern approaches, the state-of-the-art capabilities we have on design, modeling, simulation to understand what really matters for the permitting bases and reflect that in the processes. So they move faster. Technology has changed a lot from the 1970s. So letting those kind of things organically evolve accordingly. Let me rephrase that.
01:49Letting them pushing them to evolve accordingly is important. This administration and this president really accelerated that further. And we see that happening now. I mean, we have this wild thing happening where you have all this demand happening. And it's not just AI. We're bringing back industrial capacity in this country. We're bringing back manufacturing. It needs power. It needs energy. And we don't have nearly enough of it.
02:08So seeing the opportunity to then come forward and provide new generation is key. And this administration has worked really hard and continues to say, hey, we need to bring more power plants online sooner. What can we do to make that happen, including making federal resources able? And I'm not talking about just money. I'm saying sites, land, permitting acceleration, infrastructure they have that could be used. And this Ohio site is actually a perfect example.
02:29It's an old nuclear facility that produced enriched uranium for our industry and was a huge beating heart of that. Unfortunately, it went away. But that site still has great infrastructure that now we're able to come in and build on and expand on that.
02:42That's a great example of being able to work in a multi sort of faceted manner with the government to accelerate bringing more power online sooner.
02:49And this is key. These data center companies, the hyperscalers, they need new generation. They can't just be buying the electrons on the grid. That's key for affordability.
02:57I will say Ohio is pretty perfect. Danny, if you haven't been there, I recommend going to the great state of Ohio, regardless of the Buckeyes loss on New Year's Eve.
03:04It's a fantastic place to operate, to live, to grow up. Jake, I wonder about bottlenecks other than land and permitting and finance.
03:15And I'm thinking specifically about labor. Are you getting access to the amount of skilled labor that you need,
03:23considering that there must be so much competition for it right now in a in a labor pool that is not growing?
03:28Yeah, that's a really interesting place. And it really helps to be one of the first movers because it gives you first access,
03:35because we don't have enough labor pools in this country for everything that's coming.
03:40I was at a dinner last night and an individual said electricians are king right now.
03:45And there's a lot of truth to that, right? Like we have a huge shortage and there's a real need for this.
03:49We feel good about where we're at and what we need. But it's also affected our strategy.
03:53We're really focusing on a couple areas that make a ton of sense, including the great state of Ohio that has a huge amount of, frankly,
03:59labor infrastructure that works here. And there's a lot of competition for it.
04:03But in this site, for example, we're building. It was one of the largest uranium enrichment complexes in the world.
04:08They have been decommissioning that facility, but there's a ton of skilled labor there that honestly they've been looking at jobs going away
04:13because of the decommissioning going forward. Now we're bringing them back and they're there like the people, the talent is there.
04:19So it's a huge benefit. And that's why, for example, when we pick these sites that we're going to be going heavily into investing in
04:25and building a lot of power plants, it's because partly, you know, you have that workforce in hand and in place to build off of it.
04:33I mean, it's very exciting to see what that entails for the local community and the economy, but also how that spurs more.
04:38I mean, just to get back to that, I think the Midwest has incredible labor markets.
04:41So it's a pretty exciting place to be developing.
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