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Robinson Meyer:
Hello, it’s Wednesday, September 23, and it’s New York Climate Week. Thousands of people are piling into the city today to discuss climate and energy issues. One topic that’s very likely to be on the agenda is nuclear energy. I think over the past few years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in nuclear, and it’s one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans in Congress can seemingly still agree on.
Robinson Meyer:
The Energy Department has this new multi-billion dollar program to subsidize 10 new nuclear reactors across the country. And in an age of rising electricity demand and overall load growth, nuclear has become more alluring because it’s one of the few sources of energy where you can bring on a whole gigawatt of power online just at one go.
Robinson Meyer:
One other thing that’s changed recently in nuclear is the rise of what I would call nuclear developers. These are standalone companies who want to develop and then sell off new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants. The most prominent of these companies is a startup called, as it happens, The Nuclear Company.
Robinson Meyer:
They arose a few years ago, and they’re involved in taking over the VC Sumner nuclear project in South Carolina. VC Sumner, as you’ll hear, they were gonna build two new AP1000 nuclear reactors in South Carolina on one site, and the company trying to build the project actually went bankrupt before it could finish the power plant.
Robinson Meyer:
That project has now been taken over by Brookfield, the asset investor, and, by The Nuclear Company. Today, we are joined by the CEO of The Nuclear Company, Jonathan Webb. Jonathan previously worked for the Department of Defense and then started and ran a startup called AppHarvest, which built large greenhouses in Kentucky before going bankrupt.
Robinson Meyer:
Jonathan started The Nuclear Company in late 2023. He and I had an interesting conversation. I tried to understand what exactly The Nuclear Company does, what they believe their advantage to be, and what could come next for them. I’m Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and it’s all coming up on Shift Key.
Robinson Meyer:
Jonathan Webb, welcome to Shift Key.
Jonathan Webb:
Thank you for having me.
Robinson Meyer:
So can you just start by giving us the rundown on what the nuclear company is? Certainly your name suggests that you make nuclear reactors, but you operate in this very distinct kind of segment of the industry. I’m not even sure if at the time you were founded there were other companies like you. So give us the rundown on what your company does and how it’s different from other firms in the industry.
Jonathan Webb:
So we’re about 200 people, built to deploy, operate, and service nuclear at scale in the Western world, obviously a focus in the U.S. And right now we have about 40 to 50 people on site daily at VC Summer, which was the abandoned site back in 2018 where $9 billion was spent, but unfortunately had to pause that effort. And so, you know, when starting this about three years ago, had a little bit of a counter thesis viewpoint that, while we remain technology agnostic and very optimistic about some of the great technologies that are gonna come to market with these reactors, our viewpoint was we wanted to be an enabler to support the community, and starting with the AP1000 because it’s the only technology that we can go deploy today. So building a team to support that program while being ready to help support others in the market, as they reach a point to commercialize their technologies.
Robinson Meyer:
So just give us a sense of where the nuclear company sits kind of with other segments of the industry, because you know, there’s utilities that tend to operate or off take power from big nuclear reactors. There’s a handful of companies that make reactors, including Westinghouse, with the AP1000. The nuclear company seems to sit somewhere in between, almost in a project management role. Can you just describe what you handle in the ecosystem of scaling up nuclear?
Jonathan Webb:
Nuclear is uniquely different and challenging than almost any other sector or industry in a lot of different ways, in which building a static building, building a manufacturing facility. You know, the Western world, we talk about nuclear as if it’s not working today. And what we forget to remember is it took decades to get to a point where we had fleets of nuclear operating at 93% capacity factor, meaning when the plant is up and running, it’s operating at 93% of the time. You know, the viewpoint to build this team, I hired much of the people I could off of the Vogtle 3 and 4 site, so I didn’t want to theorize about what the problem was.
Jonathan Webb:
I wanted to listen to the people that actually lived on the Vogtle 3 and 4 site. I was fortunate, Steve Kaczynski, who was the CEO and chair of Southern Nuclear, Joe Klech, our chief nuclear officer, many of Joe’s colleagues. And that first year, we were kind of just, for the investor term, in stealth. Really trying to study the problem. What happened? And what are we trying to solve for? And really the best analogy, it’s not a great one, but the one that was told to me that I now repeat a bit is like, think of Airbus and Boeing, highly regulated, zero margin of error. You need to get the plane up and running 100% of the time every time.
Jonathan Webb:
But they don’t actually make the jet engine. GE and Rolls-Royce do. And so while the reactor is critically important, the reactor can be maybe 20% of the total project cost when you look at the overall materials. But even after it’s built, you look at China and how they’ve essentially borrowed in a loose term or developed on their own or have looked at every reactor possible around the world, and they’re building reactors similar to an AP1000. Once it is up and running, it’ll operate for about 100 years at 93% capacity factor, and that is very hard to achieve. And so you have other reactors that, you know, in China and Russia and France, even in the US, that you might build them on budget, but they get up and running at 20% capacity factor.
Jonathan Webb:
And so even getting a reactor up and operating at 70%, 80% capacity factor, if you look at the fine-tuned machine of what an AP1000 is and give immense credit to Southern Company and everyone involved that was able to complete the job, while the build was a challenge, the way they’re operating those units is just absolutely phenomenal. What we wanted to be a part of is enable, whether it’s a utility or reactor technology. I mean, the reactor technology is essentially IP. It’s a blueprint, right? So you have to drag the blueprint through a supply chain. You have to get thousands of people to install them.
Jonathan Webb:
Even if they’re small or micro, you still have to get people in the field and physically install things. You can’t manufacture everything. And then you have to get it up and running. So what I really wanted to do, our chief nuclear officer is really the head of deployment, ’cause we’re viewing this entirely through the lens of: What do I need to do to get this up and running safely at the highest possible quality, at the highest capacity factor?
Jonathan Webb:
And those last 18 months of delivery is where all the magic really begins. And so, you know, again, the team we’ve built, and the gap that we see in the market, assuming the country builds, right? We’ve got a goal of 300 gigawatts, is we’re gonna need a team to deploy these reactors, commission them, get them started up, get them running, and then service them.
Jonathan Webb:
And so we wanted to be, you know, that team that you can call that you’ve put your life and everything into the R&D of those reactor designs. But the AP1000 is an incredible unit, and you just gotta build it on time, on budget. And then once you do, it’s up and running, and now the question’s gonna be: Can we find other units that are gonna be built at a lower cost, at a faster pace?
Jonathan Webb:
But will they get up and running the way an AP1000 will? Will they last 100 years the way an AP1000 will?
Robinson Meyer:
Even a few years ago, this question of whether load growth was gonna show up, whether we would see the kind of rapid growth in electricity demand that we are now experiencing nationwide, was a bit of an open question. Obviously, it’s now here, and data center providers, utilities, just straight up industrial customers, governors are rushing to get all the electricity that they can.
Robinson Meyer:
Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the company. Like evidently, you were early a little bit to the load growth thesis. You kind of had the sense that it was coming, before it was a certainty. So just give us a sense of how the company started and how you became convinced that fleet scale nuclear and that ramping up nuclear specifically was the best option.
Jonathan Webb:
I mean, for me, growing up in a coal state, Kentucky, was very foundational. I lived in a moment where, in my early part of my career, graduated from public schools, went to a public university, but didn’t quite grow up in a community of world that talked about these global issues that much.
Jonathan Webb:
But you could kind of see the writing on the wall where we’re shutting down these coal plants, and for every gigawatt of coal, you need thousands, if not tens of thousands of acres of solar. And in my early career, was a part of building solar, and so ended up being a contractor, had a clearance, was in the Pentagon helping the U.S. Army build energy assets on military installations. Very foundational being in the Pentagon. So I think going from a coal state, understanding that it was very bizarre for me where wars, I think many people would say don’t work typically very well.
Jonathan Webb:
You create an adversary. And so this war on coal was a little bizarre to me to the sense of we should thank the people that powered us through the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars so that we could have the freedoms we have today. And many people don’t realize this, but 100,000 people have died in this country in coal mining accidents.
Jonathan Webb:
Unfortunately, my grandmother grew up on a situation where she was impacted, her dad died in a coal mining accident. And so when I hear we can’t build gigawatt scale nuclear in this country, I don’t take it very kindly.
Jonathan Webb:
There’s a lot of people that have had to sacrifice a lot to get to this point, and you’re telling me we can’t do something the country’s already done before in the ’60s and ’70s, and we have much better tools and technologies today, and we have all the lessons learned of the past. We have an incredible safety record in the operating nuclear fleet.
Jonathan Webb:
So, A, saw the gigawatts were gonna need to be deployed, and there’s multiple ways to get there. So you could string together SMRs or you could string together large reactors. I’m pretty indifferent there. For me, it’s about safety and quality and speed and cost. But I do think the thesis of this company, for better or worse, depending on how you look at it, is only gonna become more extreme in the years ahead, where why can China build six gigawatts on one site and we can’t? Why are we talking about places around the world that — I thought we’re the US. I thought this is the most dynamic economy on planet Earth, that this idea that we’re gonna give up on big things because they’re too hard is unacceptable. So finding a team of people that believed in this idea that we’ve done it before, we will do it again, and yes, we might use different reactor technologies to achieve the same outcome, but we’re gonna go deliver dozens of campuses, and we’re gonna put gigawatts of nuclear on those campuses.
Jonathan Webb:
I don’t wanna get to the if we don’t, but I can tell you, unfortunately, going through some of these Appalachian communities and hearing from local leaders, what motivated me with this company was an ice storm in the region several years ago, where unfortunately I’d been read into a scenario where we were tipping close to a blackout.
Jonathan Webb:
And if a blackout in my state would’ve happened, we would’ve had, in zero degree weather, you’d likely, the number of casualties in a not well-insulated trailer park, elderly women, elderly men, young children. I don’t know about you, but that seems unacceptable to me. So we need to figure out how to work together and solve these problems.
Jonathan Webb:
We don’t really have any other choice, and what we’ve had over 30 years is the luxury of 2 to 3% load growth, and you and me and others all see that that’s radically changing quickly. And so while micro and small are certainly gonna be a part of the solution, we’ve also gotta be able to deploy gigawatts on campuses across the country.
Robinson Meyer:
I think that coal is actually kind of a useful, like, way in here because there was a small advocacy effort. There was an advocacy effort from some national environmental groups to shut down coal plants. But the only reason that could succeed is because coal was also facing this huge threat in the marketplace from natural gas.
Robinson Meyer:
Because at the same time, right, I mean, in the late aughts, in the mid-teens, the country found a new way of extracting natural gas, was able to tap these enormous natural gas reserves, and suddenly natural gas was available to producers extremely cheaply. And because you could sub in a gas turbine into what used to be a coal stack because gas was cheaper, it was cleaner, it produced far less pollution and was easier to manage, you could drop in gas into coal, and coal was basically out-competed.
Robinson Meyer:
Now, there were forces that were trying to subject all generation, right, to air pollution constraints, but coal was out-competed. And so —
Jonathan Webb:
Can I go on this one really quick? So yes, markets ended up dictating what happened, but I think what was not contemplated and what I maybe didn’t quite touch on when I was just explaining that is that coal, you have about three months supply. If you go to an operating coal plant, you have about three months supply on site.
Jonathan Webb:
So if there’s a disruption in supply, you have three months. Natural gas, you pipe in, and natural gas freezes at the wellhead and slows in the pipes anywhere around zero degrees. And so when we talk about climate, it goes up, it goes down. We didn’t used to have zero-degree weather too much in Kentucky.
Jonathan Webb:
We do now. It happens. And that, when I talked about that potential rolling blackout, it was because our coal plants were shut off, where you typically have three months supply. We’ve transitioned to a lot of natural gas, and while natural gas is resilient, it’s not nearly as resilient as coal because it can slow down in the pipeline.
Jonathan Webb:
And as a result, you can’t feed the plant that needs to consume it to create power. That’s why nuclear. We have the thing that we’ve done before that is clean, it’s reliable, it runs 93% of the time. It can run in ice, it can run in heat. And so yeah, this is why a diversified portfolio of power, but, you know, going full tilt and running the entire country on gas, whether you wanna debate about carbon or not —
Jonathan Webb:
There are studies and everyone can read. But separate from that and go to reliability, it is why both solar and wind and natural gas, they all have their vulnerabilities, which is why a diversified portfolio, but a country of our size not having large amounts of nuclear on the grid is borderline reckless.
Robinson Meyer:
It seems like another kind of advantage of nuclear at this moment is that it is an energy technology that both parties can agree on. The current administration seems to support nuclear for a number of reasons, including it’s resilient, kind of a classic type environmentalist doesn’t like it, which is a benefit in some quarters.
Robinson Meyer:
Democrats have — like nuclear because it doesn’t create emissions. You can bring on megawatts, gigawatts in one go.
Jonathan Webb:
Okay, you touched on the environmental thing. I’m gonna say it. I grew up in Kentucky, but I love nature. I walk around in creeks. I grew up this way. The worst thing we did as a country, and I don’t know why we got here, I don’t know if it was fossil fuel lobbies, I don’t know if it was just voodoo fear and panic of celebrities who were scared of nuclear but had no idea what they were talking about.
Jonathan Webb:
I don’t know if it was environmental, but my goodness, maybe the worst industrial policy that’s ever happened in this country, I might argue it could end up being one of the worst policy decisions in the history of this country, was not continuing to build nuclear. The fact that we have a 20% of our grid comes from nuclear power, and the fact that we’ve only built two reactors in 30 years, we’re living off of our grandparents who built one-fifth of our grid, and we shut that down.
Jonathan Webb:
My goodness, had we kept building and the amount of abundant power we would have and how low cost it would’ve been, I would argue probably the worst... I’m very biased. I live my life every day, so I see it through one lens of the world. But abundant, reliable, low-cost power enables civilizations since the dawn of fire, and I would argue this will be the singularly most critical issue that this country’s had that has allowed China to now beat us and potentially become the largest economy and certainly the largest energy producer in the world.
Robinson Meyer:
I think one of the interesting things about this moment is that there’s bipartisan interest in nuclear. I mean, I think there was interest from the Biden administration, and I think there’s been programs from the Trump administration. And one of those big programs has been this effort from the Energy Department to subsidize, help organize and back, the creation of 10 new reactors across the country. How is that effort going, to the degree you can speak about it? And kind of what needs to happen, from on the government side to build nuclear at, let’s just say the scale that the country was doing it in the 1980s and late 1970s?
Jonathan Webb:
Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, a popular opinion, I have no idea. I try not to pay attention too much, just do my job. But I would say I have no idea what else Washington, D.C. can do for this community. The private sector needs to get a backbone and deliver. There are more than enough levers on the left side, on the right side, with this administration, with the last administration.
Jonathan Webb:
To me, the private sector making excuses about the regulator is just unconscionable. We have the safest nuclear in the world. No one in this country has ever been negatively impacted by nuclear power. Three Mile Island is our biggest incident, where, no casualties. The technology failed exactly the way it should.
Jonathan Webb:
We have a great regulator. We have great operators. So I mean, where we do need to turn our attention is what we do do right here, which is we have the absolute best nuclear operators in the world, the safest nuclear operators in the world. But my goodness, when it comes to getting out in the field and building, we have to empower workforce, we have to organize teams of people, we have to utilize technology to enable those teams of people, and we have to go deliver.
Jonathan Webb:
We need to compete with the other sources of electricity on pricing, and that’s it. There’s infinite supply demand for the electrons. More than enough people will buy the power. There’s more than enough capital to fund the projects. Private sector needs to sign up to a budget and a schedule and go deliver.
Jonathan Webb:
That’s it. But yeah, I would love to see more support in D.C. There’s a lot of support now. I hope the support continues, but they’ve done more than enough to ignite the industry, and we need to go deliver. It’s on the private sector.
Robinson Meyer:
Let’s talk about delivery then. So I think you guys are working with Brookfield in South Carolina on this old plant, VC Summer. The local utility spent billions of dollars about a decade ago to get a plant up and running in this site in South Carolina and didn’t get it done.
Robinson Meyer:
In fact, there was — it, they, I think it went bankrupt trying to get it done. Ultimately, that site has kind of sat fallow as this extremely over budget project in Georgia ultimately did reach completion. That was Vogtle. You’ve now gone back into VC Summer with, I think, Brookfield.
Robinson Meyer:
How is that going, and what’s gonna be different about it this time?
Jonathan Webb:
Well, I don’t take lightly the privilege yet obligation that the state of South Carolina and the people of South Carolina and, candidly, every stakeholder involved that have given us the right and opportunity to be there. We have about 40, 50 people on site at VC Summer right now, and every day we’re there.
Jonathan Webb:
People ask me, “When does construction start?” I mean, for me, I’m the type of person that construction starts the moment you put your feet on soil and you’re planning way in advance. So there’s a Gantt chart with a schedule and all these milestones and, you know, when officially FID to COD. But I can tell you our team has taken it very seriously, and —
Jonathan Webb:
I mean, you had $9 billion spent. It’s been sitting there since 2018. It was hard enough to finish in the first place, and now we’re stepping back in midstream to go finish it.
Jonathan Webb:
And we owe it to the state of South Carolina and the community there to get these units up and running. It’s not that we’re a Westinghouse company or an AP1000 company. It’s that we just believe that if the country’s gonna go deliver on this promise of gigawatts, micro, small, large, whatever it may be, we got something to finish.
Jonathan Webb:
And it’s to prove to not only the U.S. and the industry, but around the world, that if we start something, we’re gonna get it done. And so, I think we’ve developed a unique approach that we’re bringing to this project, but it’s gonna be results-driven. We’re gonna have to deliver a budget and a schedule, and everyone in the world’s gonna see that.
Robinson Meyer:
Can you give me an example of what better execution would look like on this project? I realize it’s, you know, tens of thousands of engineering decisions that go one way and not another way. But can you give me an example of an execution decision that maybe went wrong in VC Summer the first time around, or that often goes wrong with AP1000s, or that went wrong early on with Vogtle that you’re focused on getting right this time?
Jonathan Webb:
Well, one has nothing to do with this company and has everything to do with the technology itself, that you cannot go build commercial nuclear. I think it’s been probably proven over time at this point until the design is completed and you’ve finished some projects. So one just sheer baseline benefit is the fact that Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia were completed while VC Summer was not completed.
Jonathan Webb:
So at a bare minimum, we have the lessons learned coming off of what worked, what didn’t work, and how to solve these problems differently going forward. And we also have the team that did it. So we have people that lived on the job site, slept in the trailers, worked on, you know, that institutional knowledge is obviously critical.
Jonathan Webb:
Brookfield’s gonna be controlling much of the joint venture that we’ve announced with them, and we’re here to deliver based on, you know, how they decide to run on a go-forward basis. So I’m not gonna talk too much about VC Summer. So what I will say about what we’re doing unique and what I can talk about there is when I did start about three years ago on this effort after bringing a lot of people in and kind of hearing about the stories of Vogtle 3 and 4, again, the two reactors that were completed in Georgia, it was budgeted around 14 billion.
Jonathan Webb:
The project came in at around 35 billion, 36 billion. It was supposed to take seven years. It took 12 years. It was supposed to take 5,000 people, and it took about 10,000 people. So I was like, all right, these are pretty astronomical numbers. How did we get here? So the thing we have to solve for sounds like rocket science.
Jonathan Webb:
It’s really not. It’s pretty simple. Well, interest on debt, so if you’re carrying $20 billion of debt over 12 years instead of seven years, so time. Oh, shocker. So we need to do this faster. Okay, that makes sense. And then less people. If we have 10,000 people on a job site every day, which you’re in — I think you said you’re in New York City — buy a ticket to a concert venue that holds 10,000 people.
Jonathan Webb:
Go to that concert, look around. Think, those people have to show up and leave every day on your construction site. And a lot of this was being managed not with advanced work packages, not with... I’ve got a lot of friends in the tech community. We hosted a Deep Tech Week event at our office recently. I look at the technologies this country has to offer, and I look at mega project construction sites, not even necessarily unique to nuclear.
Jonathan Webb:
Why are we not equipping our men and women with the most advanced technologies to organize and execute? It’s unacceptable. So the first year was studying the problem. The second year was okay, and that’s where we partnered with Palantir and others. But we developed what we have in-house.
Jonathan Webb:
This is a nuclear operating system, AI-enabled, you know, logistics, supply chain, real-time information. But to get to the point, those 10,000 people at Vogtle 3 and 4 were maybe working 15 to 20% of the time labor productivity. Now, some people might say, “Okay, lazy Americans.” I take deep offense to that. I, me and my wife, we, I lived on a construction site in an RV at one point.
Jonathan Webb:
Can tell you there’s some hardships in rain and cold. Our men and women need the best and latest technology, and so everything we’ve tried to build is for that frontline worker. How do I get them the information they need? How do I get them the training they need? How do I prepare them on the ground so that they are ready to show up at 6:00 a.m. in the rain or 9:00 p.m. at night when their shift starts?
Jonathan Webb:
We have technologies that are available today, and if you and your friends go walk around on a construction site, you’re gonna think we’re in 1975. So, again, I can’t speak for the joint venture, and I’m not gonna speak for Brookfield, what’s happening there, but I can tell you we are closely going to announce our own sites where we’ll be developing our own projects, where it’s still in the phase of site selection, still in the phase of technology selection.
Jonathan Webb:
But I look forward to hosting you and some of your colleagues sometime and you can come see, we’re going to be unleashing the American worker in a way that we know is possible to get that labor productivity to 60% and 70%, or even north of 80. And that’s through just real information in real time, and we can do it.
Jonathan Webb:
The technologies are available today, but we have to enable our workforce, and we can’t think like, “Okay, we’re gonna go build like we did in the ’60s,” when we have tools and technologies available today.
Robinson Meyer:
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is the better execution comes from software, which is, maybe, like a Musk world lesson because this isn’t as frequently discussed. But when you talk to folks who’ve worked in the Musk companies, what they say is that engineering software is actually what’s so good and often isn’t shared.
Robinson Meyer:
So is that part of the play here?
Jonathan Webb:
Absolutely. And I’m fortunate to have a lot of people that have worked in those camps. Brad Buss just joined our board. He was on the board of Tesla for 10 years. Mike ran security at Tesla for about 10 years. He’s with us. Yeah, it’s, it’s — that is our internal tool of how we’re going to take millions, if in some cases not billions of data points, and get people real-time information.
Jonathan Webb:
I mean, here’s an example. So if you have 138 people that are supposed to install some object on the site at 7:00 AM, I’m on a site in the Ohio River that site is connected to a rail that connects to the Port of Norfolk in Virginia. A ship was supposed to arrive sometime at 3:00 AM or pick a time, 1:00 AM, and that object was supposed to be unloaded.
Jonathan Webb:
It never showed up. In today’s world, unfortunately of what we’ve seen in nuclear or other industry, you wouldn’t know, and those 138 people would be there at 7:00 AM. Now, why would we not be able to, with AI and logistics integration, have real-time updates? Okay, here are the 138 people. Here are their skill sets.
Jonathan Webb:
Here are their talents. They’re not gonna be able to do that work at 7:00 AM, but they can do this other work, so let’s now send them an update on their phone when they’re waking up in their RV at 5:00 AM. Here’s a tutorial of where you’re gonna need to go to the site. Here’s what we’re gonna need you to do.
Jonathan Webb:
I don’t take kindly to this idea that Americans aren’t willing to work. I think we’ve put the blue-collar and frontline worker in unimaginably difficult working conditions, and our job is to reduce that friction, make their life just a little bit easier, remove the constraints every day, and we can do that through technology.
Jonathan Webb:
So I would love to say we’re splitting the atom or sending a man to the moon, but really all we’re doing is taking technologies that are available and ensuring in a secure and safe way, which is what’s difficult with the IP related to nuclear, ensuring that we can have the data integration and real-time information, but be able to get our teams real-time updates just so they can do their job.
Robinson Meyer:
I think you might actually be splitting the atom, although I, maybe that happens upstream.
Robinson Meyer:
You’ve hired the team that executed the Vogtle projects, and both of the Vogtle projects were AP1000 reactors, this American design from Westinghouse. That’s the design, as you mentioned, China’s building. Why go with AP1000s in the first place? Why bet on that technology?
Jonathan Webb:
It’s the only thing I can build today. I get this question all the time, and it’s — there’s only one permitted reactor that’s been built a few times that I can go build today. And maybe that’s the only reactor we build. Maybe we build five different ones, and the market will dictate how that plays out. I have met so many different teams that are designing new reactors, and I am rooting for every single one of them.
Jonathan Webb:
The reality is we’re probably not gonna have 100 different reactor types. There’ll be a few in different class and category, and they’ll be used in different applications. So a few micro, a few small. Small is relative. So, all right, there’s a gigawatt reactor, which is the large light water reactors. A lot of the reactors in the U.S. are gigawatt reactors. Coal plants are gigawatt coal plants. So, gigawatt, there’s 1,000 megawatts in a gigawatt. So when we even say SMR, small modular reactor, that’s somewhere in the 100 to 300, maybe a little above 300 megawatts.
Jonathan Webb:
Still not small, but small enough to modularize. So the theory was, well, let’s take thousands of people off the construction site. Let’s move them into a manufacturing facility. Let’s manufacture off-site. And then that’s even further downstream to the microreactor, where you’re looking maybe a megawatt, five megawatts, 10, maybe 20.
Jonathan Webb:
I don’t know if there’s an exact number on the categories, but essentially micro, small, large. And we’re building the AP1000 because we believe it’s a... Well, there’s no belief. It’s a great machine that’s running incredibly well right now in Georgia, and got up and running very swiftly to 93% capacity factor.
Jonathan Webb:
While I think some of these other technologies you might be able to build at a lower cost, theoretically, there’s also the challenge of getting them up and operating and getting them to 93% capacity factor. So it’s a bit of whack-a-mole. So okay, is it easier to build?
Jonathan Webb:
Well, I’m a little more concerned about the 100-year operating asset that you’re then stuck with on the other side. And so is it a low-cost fuel? Is it low cost to maintenance? Is it low cost to service? Is it low cost to operate?
Jonathan Webb:
And then the other one is, I mean, there’s really only, for better or worse, and I don’t know why, but one individual in this country that’s really figured out manufacturing at scale.
Jonathan Webb:
It seems like there’s a lot of others that have tried, but Elon’s one of them. So this idea that we’re gonna manufacture things at a lower cost, it’s like, okay, well, call every car company that tried to do that that wasn’t able to, right? So this idea that we’re just gonna manufacture off-site and it’s gonna be cheaper, again, a great idea in theory, but China’s not figured that out, and China has endless buckets of capital.
Jonathan Webb:
They’ve been doing this for decades, and they’ve concluded that the lowest cost, most efficient, best way to deploy gigawatts of nuclear in their country were to do what we did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So while I’m rooting for every technology, we’re trying to figure out which one of the few are gonna actually going to work across the spectrum, and we wanna help enable their success.
Jonathan Webb:
So that’s a long, very long-winded way of saying why the AP1000. So it’s available today. I can build it today. We can get it up and operating today, and I hope there are many other reactor types that’ll get there, but for better or worse, at the moment, we have one to work with.
Robinson Meyer:
Are you looking at this Toshiba — ’cause there is another NRC certified, boiling water reactor. It’s this Toshiba boiling water reactor that got built in Japan and Taiwan, and was gonna get built in South Texas, hasn’t been. Is that something you’re looking at, and how does that compare to the AP1000?
Jonathan Webb:
I’ll say our team has looked at every viable technology on planet Earth, both in the US and abroad, that’s available.
Jonathan Webb:
I’ve got a bunch of engineers upstairs right now that are all evaluating every day what’s coming to market, what’s in market, what’s been in market. So when you asked early on, “What are we?” So I didn’t quite get to this, and sometimes I go off and don’t explain the company very well, so —
Jonathan Webb:
That is where we see a core part of our role, right? So everyone’s coming out saying, “I got the new Bugatti engine. I got the new Lamborghini engine. I got new this engine, new that engine.” When the reality is, like, not every engine’s gonna be the best race car engine, right? So again, if I go back to that original analogy, which I think I talked about when the airline industry, you know, we have the best airline operators in the world.
Jonathan Webb:
These are safe airplanes. They fly. We’re, you know, I know we all go to the airport and get a little frustrated at times, but typically speaking, our pilots are great. Airline operators are great. Very safe, high quality airline industry. The utility industry, the electric utility industry in the U.S., exact same.
Jonathan Webb:
They’re elite. Best nuclear operators on planet Earth. Just data. We operate these plants at a 93% capacity factor, have the best safety record in the world, 100% safety. What we are trying to do is evaluate a wildly complex market that’s evolving every day, every week, to figure out how do we get operators the best airlines, best airplane to fly.
Jonathan Webb:
And I can tell you it is dynamic, evolving, and we’re trying to stay ahead of it, and that’s our team’s job every day. Again, our job is to be objective and just review the data and try to figure out how to bring reactors online at the lowest cost, the fastest speed, the highest quality, and the safest.
Jonathan Webb:
So we’re bullish. I mean, we think the country has a great reactor right now. It’s the AP1000, and, very fortunate to have the Cameco team who owns half of Westinghouse. You hear about Brookfield a lot. What you don’t hear about is the largest uranium miner in the Western world, our partner friend up in Canada, Cameco, who owns the other half of Westinghouse.
Jonathan Webb:
Really wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without a few of their team members helping early on, kinda helped me get into the industry. While we’re incredibly bullish on what they have and they’re gonna have an incredible run at getting these AP1000s in market, there are a lot of others that are coming, and there’s some others that have been in the past that could be brought back off the shelf.
Jonathan Webb:
And so again, our team’s job, we’ve had some of the largest electric utilities in the US visit our offices in the last few weeks. And our job is to look them in the eye and be able to say, “Look, you, you fly the best airplanes. You run the power plants.”
Jonathan Webb:
So our job really is to stay ahead of the market, evaluate what’s possible, evaluate these reactors, and then try to cut through the sales job of, you know, which engine’s better than the other engine, and just data-driven of what is actually gonna perform better in the end.
Robinson Meyer:
What’s changed about your company’s thesis since you launched back in 2023?
Jonathan Webb:
Not much, a couple additives.
Jonathan Webb:
So my motivations surely are gigawatts on the grid at a low cost as quickly as possible. I think that thesis unfortunately is becoming more true by the day, where we are way behind the queue.
Jonathan Webb:
We’ve got AI data compute that anyone who’s been following AI for at least five years could have seen the ball a bit. Re-industrialization, we knew we had to make more stuff in this country. We outsourced for a long time, so we’re doing that. And the electrification of everything. So those three things happening at once are, you know, we had a luxury in time with that 2% to 3% load growth, so that means power went up 2% to 3% demand.
Jonathan Webb:
And part of that was because we outsourced our manufacturing, so load growth went down a bit. We did have energy efficiency technologies, but all that stuff’s happened. So now it’s, you know, we’re gonna have to figure out 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% load growth in this country. So the thesis I think is right. The only thing we’ve added to is we did get into nuclear services.
Jonathan Webb:
There’s a lot we don’t talk about with this company, and this is one that I think you’re gonna hear us talk more about next year. But we are now servicing over 40% of the operating nuclear fleet today, and I don’t know that many people even know it.
Jonathan Webb:
And so then people ask me, “Okay, why did we do it?” Well, two things. One, we are in a business. As much as I’m mission-oriented, we gotta return capital to shareholders, and I gotta pay employees so we can recruit more people, and it’s gonna take a while to build projects. So we started in services because, okay, great, I could tell my CFO it’s a good way to get revenue.
Jonathan Webb:
But, more importantly for me is it’s a good way for us to build credibility in this industry, show the utilities that we can show up and fix, and maintenance, and assist in their operating fleet. So we did add services. So when I say —
Robinson Meyer:
When you say services, kind of what do you mean? Like maintenance and repair?
Jonathan Webb:
Yes, sir. That’s, you know, we’ve got a team right now that’s out doing work that I would say, we probably doubled, tripled in the last year. And so it’s work that’s needed throughout the year to keep the fleet up and operating, right?
Jonathan Webb:
So another way for us to build relationships with trades, build relationships with frontline workers. I mean, again, I look at what is my job, my client is the frontline worker in the end. If we do this right, I’m probably one of the more relevant people, and I would say much of our corporate team and even board and even whoever’s buying the power in the end, that’s not really our client or who we work for.
Jonathan Webb:
Our job is to reduce the friction, understand the constraints of the frontline worker. And so it was a great opportunity for us to build those relationships with tradesmen and women to understand what do you need to be successful? How do we get you on and off a site more quickly? How do you do this where we can train you in a better way?
Jonathan Webb:
It’s been an incredible jolt for our organization. I can tell you one example on training. I was someone that couldn’t read too well until I got into the third grade. Retain information differently. I can absorb information differently. That didn’t go well in average curriculums. But if you look at how we’re trying to train our tradesmen and women, it’s black and white pages, PDFs.
Jonathan Webb:
I read one 84-page document. It was a very specific way to train on one specific part. I tried to read the 84 pages. By the time I got to the end, I could barely remember the first part of it. It’s just, my brain doesn’t work fully linear always that way. But we took that and with the software and technology we’ve developed and agentic AI quickly turned that into 3D models, 3D renderings.
Jonathan Webb:
Now you can take, you know, maybe a young man or woman who didn’t graduate from high school but is very talented and maybe is gonna struggle in a classroom. To contribute, we can meet them where they’re at and we can do it in a way where technology’s available, which is again, what gets me deeply frustrated when we say the American worker can’t work.
Jonathan Webb:
It’s like we’re not even giving them a shot. If you wanna go tour community colleges and trade schools with me, you will look around and you’ll go, “Wow, this is incredibly uninspiring. This is not acceptable.” We have VR, we have AR, we have the best technology in San Francisco. We have AI. Why are we treating people and teaching people with Word, you know, PDFs and pieces of paper?
Jonathan Webb:
So again, services for me in this company is less... Well, it’s very important to our CFO, so we’re gonna double revenue year over year. He’s excited about that. But more importantly, it’s our ability to build a relationship with those tradesmen and women, understand what their problems are, figure out how to fix those problems now so that when we have to go mobilize 5,000 people on a construction site, I can train them in six weeks instead of six months.
Jonathan Webb:
We can get them tools and technologies on the construction site to help assist in their work so they can be better welders, better pipe layers, and better craftsmen and women. And unfortunately, our country’s not doing that right now.
Robinson Meyer:
I mean, I was curious because I think when the nuclear company first came out of the gate, you guys were kind of the only nuclear project managers, developers out there.
Robinson Meyer:
I think since then there have been a number of companies that have announced, that have been founded or kind of entered a similar space. There’s —
Jonathan Webb:
Yeah, we —
Robinson Meyer:
— been Elemental. So what makes you different?
Jonathan Webb:
I don’t know the teams incredibly well, so I can’t say what they do specifically, but I’ve, you know, some interaction here and there. We’re maniacally focused on nuclear, so I know some are trying to bridge nuclear to gas and natural gas to nuclear.
Jonathan Webb:
We think nuclear, in delivering gigawatts of nuclear, there’s plenty of space for us to run. So we’re solely dedicated and focused on the nuclear industry. There’s others that are out buying land and trying to permit the land and trying to get financing for the land, which is kind of what you would see in like a typical solar developer world.
Jonathan Webb:
We have a team and a deep bench of capability to deploy, operate, and service nuclear power plants. And, you know, if someone develops a piece of property and they need a team to go deploy the reactor, that’s a perfect place for us to step in. So, people try to ask me again all the time, what, project manager, developer.
Jonathan Webb:
Yeah, those are small segments of like what we do. Like I would say maybe two, you know, two people on our team do like siting work at this point, and there’s a couple hundred. So yeah, that’s a piece of what we do, but I would say very akin to what we do and what I’ve not found a direct corollary to yet, although I’m starting to try to reach out more into the community to collaborate.
Jonathan Webb:
We hosted a bunch of, actually hosted a bunch of people in our office that, quote unquote, “competitor.” I hate that term. How do we partner and collaborate? What do we do? But as far as deploying the asset like an Airbus or Boeing airline industry, I don’t see anyone doing that. We have a team that can take a reactor, turn it into a power plant, get it up and running, and service it.
Jonathan Webb:
If there’s people in the world that can partner with us to do that more efficiently, our really only competitor in the Western world, we as an industry, it’s China, and they’re winning. We’re all losing. They’re building 10 gigawatts a year in perpetuity. They’re about to be the largest nuclear operator on planet Earth, and we as an industry have got to work together and lock arms and go deliver.
Jonathan Webb:
And so I personally don’t find anyone in this industry to be a competitor. I also don’t find anyone exactly yet doing what we’re doing. But we’re happy to collaborate. We’re happy to, you know, I would say look at our joint venture with Brookfield as a great example. You know, there’s a lot a trillion-dollar allocator Brookfield can bring to bear.
Jonathan Webb:
There’s a lot Westinghouse to bear, and on that specific joint venture, we’re trying to be an enabler of that success. And I would say to those listening that are in the industry, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. We are going to win as an industry or we’re not, and the consequences of not winning as an industry has much more impacts than people’s balance sheets.
Jonathan Webb:
It’s our country’s at stake. We need more power, and we need to work together to get that power online efficiently, safely, and at a high quality as quickly as possible.
Robinson Meyer:
What do you think China does here that the US isn’t doing?
Jonathan Webb:
Well, they started where we stopped in the ’80s. So essentially you look at the, when we offshored manufacturing, when they started in the ’80s, when we slowed down in the ’80s.
Jonathan Webb:
There’s this idea in the U.S. that technology is going to just save so many... Like, and then you look at people like, you know, who ran Redwood, the former CTO of Tesla, JB. It’s maniacal execution.
Jonathan Webb:
It took China decades to get to where they’re at today. They’ve been doing this since the ’80s. They’ve tried to build every reactor type on planet Earth. You do it over and over again. You train people, you get better, you figure out how to whittle away costs. It’s the repetition. So I would end with fleet scale deployment in this country.
Jonathan Webb:
We’ve gotta design once and build many. We need to get reactors out, small reactors, micro reactors, also gigawatt scale reactors. And we need to print and print and print and print and keep getting these reactors in the field. And you will talk to some of the people that built the power plants down in Georgia.
Jonathan Webb:
You had people outta school, people with not great college degrees necessarily, that were the most brilliant people in the industry now because they lived on that construction site. One year on one of these sites is like 10 years in a classroom. So China’s done the hard work. They’ve enabled the industry, and this country needs to get back to building, and we need to build at fleet scale, and we need to not only double but triple the current operating fleet we have today.
Jonathan Webb:
And the only way to do that is to get in the field and build.
Robinson Meyer:
So they built up the know-how. I mean, it sounds like in other words, right? They’ve accumulated kind of human capital and know-how over the decades to be able to execute now at this high level.
Jonathan Webb:
Yeah, you look at France, they built 40 reactors in 15 years.
Robinson Meyer:
It’s interesting ’cause this would be the case for SMRs. I mean, this would be the case, like, right?
Robinson Meyer:
I mean, it, this would be another lesson you could take from the Musk companies is that modularity wins and manufacturability wins. But it kind of sounds what you’re saying. Ultimately, nobody has figured out how to make these things manufacturable. And so even though in theory modularity wins for —
Jonathan Webb:
I can tell you I’m trying to decons- I’ve got like drawings of cranes that China has on how they’re moving like one of the largest cranes in the world to move large reactor vessels, you know, advanced rail cars. I mean, somehow China hasn’t figured it out. So I don’t know about you, but I personally didn’t want to bet my career against China.
Jonathan Webb:
I assume if there was a cheaper, more efficient way to do things and get things up and running, they have a pretty large country that built a lot of stuff at a very low cost, and they have a pretty good way of, you know, finding out maniacal execution. So I’m not saying it won’t happen. I’m just saying to this point, China hasn’t figured it out.
Jonathan Webb:
It’s certainly gonna happen. There will be a few of the micro and SMRs that work, and we look forward to enabling their success and be a part of that. Hopefully, they’ll choose us as a partner. But it’s all gonna be hard. Manufacturing is hard. Field erecting things are hard. Thousands of people in a manufacturing facility is hard.
Jonathan Webb:
Thousands of people on a construction site is hard. All of it’s very challenging. We just gotta roll up our sleeves, do the work, and I’m a big all the above. So where we started earlier on in the energy portfolio and solar and wind have attributes, batteries and natural gas, nuclear’s got attributes, but with inside of nuclear, you know, there’s going to be applications where different reactors are gonna play better, but we gotta get in the field and do it, and my only thing with this company was can we not give up the thing we did before and act like we can’t do it again?
Jonathan Webb:
That to me just seems flatly unacceptable if we wanna continue to act like we’re the greatest country in the world and have the largest economy in the world.
Robinson Meyer:
We’ve used the plane analogy a lot to talk about kind of nuclear development and how Rolls-Royce or GE make the engines and then Boeing or Airbus make the planes.
Robinson Meyer:
It does seem though there’s a lot of like reasons why a company that makes the reactor would wanna eventually bring project development in-house. And you’re working with Brookfield actually in South Carolina, so what’s your theory of like why it makes sense to have a standalone nuclear developer basically as opposed to this eventually being vertically integrated within the reactor companies?
Jonathan Webb:
So again, I would say deployment operations services. Anyone can develop a property and go permit it and get financing and, you know, developing solar is vastly different than deploying these assets. I, again, go back to the airline industry because it’s one of the most heavily regulated industries. You need to be 100% all the time, and probably one of the better corollaries to nuclear power.
Jonathan Webb:
Not to say some wouldn’t, and they should. I mean, I hope so. And, and just, you know, but Westinghouse tried it before and that didn’t quite work well, so others have tried it before and haven’t. I would say having a team, back to at some point midstream we were talking about being objective, so, I mean, personally, again, I’m biased.
Jonathan Webb:
I think there’s value in having an objective team that can look out and work through. So if you, again, we throw this word develop, you know, what is our role? In many ways, we are trying to figure out, depending on what region, what community, where we’re working, you have local regional assets and supply chain.
Jonathan Webb:
You have local regional construction teams and engineering teams. You have large EPC firms nationally and globally. And so what is our team’s responsibility is to look at, okay, what is the IP? What are the blueprints? What are the drawings? What’s the best supply chain to efficiently run those drawings through?
Jonathan Webb:
And then how do we deploy these on sites with teams? And so evaluating, we do have great constructors in the U.S. We have some wood to chop and get a bit better, but there’s good constructors, but they’re not good at everything, right? So understanding, you know, which EPC firm should take this portion of the work, which regional firm should take this portion of the work.
Jonathan Webb:
What can we do to accelerate, auxiliary buildings, annex buildings, road? That to us is the deployment aspect. So could these companies do all of this in-house? Absolutely, and we hope they do, and some of them will. Do we think there’s gonna be a place in the market for what we’re doing? I would say all we’re doing is what U.S. utilities used to do in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, which is you didn’t have the reactor team be the team to get it up and running and get it deployed. And so the question for us was, you know, does every U.S. utility wanna go build our team and invest in technology, or can we help enable their success? But to answer your question head on, there will absolutely be a few companies that can figure it out full stack.
Jonathan Webb:
And maybe we can be a part of their success as well in some ways, but we’re gonna be here for those that have a gap in the market and need our help.
Robinson Meyer:
Well, we’re gonna have to leave it there, but Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on Shift Key.
Jonathan Webb:
Thank you.
While spot prices are coming back down, they're still far above recent years. EIA
President Trump speaking at the UN. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
