Behind the Scenes of a Nuclear Microreactor Startup with Matt Loszak, Founder CEO of Aalo Atomics
Back in the ‘50s, people dreamt eagerly of a nuclear-powered future. After a dark period in the ‘80s, nuclear energy is having a glow-up.
Today we hang out with Matt Loszak, founder of Aalo Atomics. Aalo’s near-term mission is to make nuclear microreactors that could achieve 3¢/kWh electricity. Long-term, they will provide abundant and reliable clean energy.
💰 Disclaimer: We are investors in Aalo through Rolling Fun!
In this episode, we cover the perception of nuclear energy and how it affects regulation. We talk about how reactor technology has improved and gotten safer. Aalo plans to build on these recent developments to help bring about the second atomic age.
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Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Matt shares he studied engineering and physics, did a stint as an acoustical engineer, then built a successful HR software business. Now, he’s turning his life’s work back to atoms and energy.
Matt was drawn to nuclear energy because of the disparity between its public perception and reality. Nuclear is an underdog technology.
The exponential growth of nuclear reactors worldwide plateaued around the 80s due to fears and uncertainties regarding nuclear safety, meltdowns, and waste management.
The perception of nuclear waste as harmful is misguided. Throughout history in the U.S., all the waste produced could fit on one football field stacked 10 meters high, and has never harmed anyone.
Radiation exists naturally in our environment, from all around us.
There is a tough catch-22: Regulators require test data for a new nuclear design license, but obtaining this data is impossible without the license.
There are challenges with relying solely on renewables since they are unpredictable. The oil and gas industry favors renewables because they know natural gas will still be necessary as a backup.
A global energy grid should have diverse sources feeding into it. While nuclear energy is reliable, it doesn't have the flexibility of coal or natural gas for peak load demands.
The Marvel reactor, an advanced reactor using liquid metal as coolant, is slated to be the first microreactor built in the US in decades. It's designed to be economical and safe.
Aalo plans to create a scaled-up version of the Marvel reactor, leveraging test data from Idaho National Lab to assist in regulatory processes.
The long-term objective is to reach economies of scale through mass manufacturing.
Ultimately, Aalo aims to produce a much larger 300-megawatt reactor that is affordable and can compete at a utility-scale.
Beyond producing electrical power, microreactors can be used for industrial heat processes, desalination, and replacing diesel generators in remote areas.
There’s a collaborative spirit among nuclear startups. The more the public supports nuclear, the more momentum all of these companies gain.
While having a background in nuclear is helpful, Aalo is hiring people from all sectors like software and aerospace.
The nuclear industry at large needs to triple its workforce to achieve its deployment goals, so there will be lots of new jobs in this area!
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Learn more about Matt Loszak:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Room-Temperature Superconductors and Nuclear Fusion with Andrew Cote
Scaling Nuclear Energy, Saving The World – Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy
The Future of Nuclear Energy: Politics, Culture, and Technology with Mark Nelson
The Next Industrial Revolution w/ J. Storrs Hall: Nuclear Energy, AI and Nanotechnology
Episode Transcript:
Matt Loszak: But just in so many ways, when you think about nuclear from first principles, it really should be the cheapest energy source. If you think about all the way, like the full lifecycle of this whole thing, so thinking from mining, all the way through to manufacturing to power production and operation, it uses the least raw materials and it's just insanely energy dense. Like, one thing people don't realize is one barrel of uranium, for example, is roughly equivalent to 2 million barrels of oil and gas.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson. I might not know the difference between fission and fusion, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. We believe technology, capitalism, and friendship can save the world, so that's what we focus on around here. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early stage tech companies, like the ones featured today, please visit ejorgenson.com. Today, my guest is Matt Loszak, the founder of Aalo Atomics. Matt left the 150 employees software company he founded to build nuclear reactors. Inspired by INL’s Marvel design, Aalo plans to build micro reactors that will provide cheap, clean, reliable energy while reducing climate change. In this episode, we talk about how Matt found this opportunity and how Aalo plans to scale up while meeting the stringent regulations for nuclear reactors. Matt shows why we're living through the beginning of the second atomic age and what that could mean for all of us. As I'm sure you know, nothing on this podcast is ever financial advice, but I want to offer a specific disclaimer or disclosure on this episode. I am a small investor in Matt's company Aalo. We invested through Rolling Fun, the early stage tech fund I manage with my two partners, Al and Bo. You can invest alongside us in great founders like Matt, which makes it a lot more fun to listen to podcasts like this when you know you own a little piece of the company. These episodes are so fun to do, but I do want to be really clear when we have a potential conflict of interest. These early stage startups often fundraise really quickly and really quietly through personal networks. We are really lucky to gain access to some of these, and we welcome you to join us through Rolling Fun; that's really our mission, to get capital where it belongs and share access to some of the earliest stage technology companies with you. If you love these conversations and supporting the next generation of founders building transformative companies, you'll love the portfolio and you'll love being a part of it. You can check out some of the podcast episodes with Al and Bo to learn more about Rolling Fun. I'm honored that more than 50 listeners have already joined the fund as investors. We keep the minimums low and keep things nice and easy and predictable to make it easy for individuals to invest. You can learn more at rolling.fun which is linked in the show notes below. Accredited investors can invest with us through AngelList today. If you have questions or you'd like to hear more, please reach out. Now, with both ears and everything in between, please enjoy this conversation arriving in three, two, one.
This should be great. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Are you ready to save the world, Matt?
Matt Loszak: Let’ do it.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, I think the right place to start, and you are a perfect person to kind of lay this groundwork, is to just talk about maybe for the people who haven't been paying attention to nuclear, like what the situation is or what the situation was maybe even like five years ago.
Matt Loszak: Yeah. So I mean, maybe rewinding all the way. So, nuclear in the 50s and 60s kind of went through this first atomic age. And it kind of all started at Idaho National Lab where they built 52 reactors in just a decade or two. And then kind of nuclear slowed down for a number of decades and they went down to three reactors there. And then as of just lately, there's been this kind of resurgence and a bunch of new reactors kind of being planned at Idaho National Lab. And so that's kind of been the history of research in nuclear. But that first Atomic Age ended up kind of springing a whole- I think about 400 reactors being built worldwide, mostly water based. And if you look at kind of the trend and the number of reactors built around the world over time, it was really growing exponentially up until the 80s, roughly speaking, but then it just totally plateaued. It's like a really stark plateau. And it's kind of there's a lot of reasons for why that is. But some of them are there was a bit of fear about nuclear, which partly came from uncertainty about the data on how dangerous meltdowns really were or how to handle waste. There's less uncertainty or less certainty at that time. But to date, there's been like 40,000 years of reactor operational history, and a lot of those questions have been answered. And also back then, global warming was less of a concern. It's just kind of a different ethos. And so now we have all this new data on the safety of nuclear. We have different kinds of social pressures. So, there's less fear and less familiarity with that history of nuclear weapons, and there's also more fear about future global warming. And so, we're kind of reaching this new threshold now where nuclear is getting a second look. And people are kind of realizing that actually, it's statistically the safest energy source tied with solar and wind. It's also the cleanest energy source tied with solar and wind, but it uses far less resources. And so it's just this kind of fascinating story of the psychology of the look at nuclear over time. And I think we're about to reach a really interesting period over the next few decades.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. What do you account that sort of rise and fall to? So we came out of like everyone just watched Oppenheimer, and we were like, oh, my God, nuclear, like nuclear weapons, which turned to then sort of science progressed on to nuclear energy. And we had this like huge take off, and there's a bunch of really incredible optimistic sort of science fiction around nuclear batteries, and nuclear space travel, and all this crazy stuff that was going to happen, and we built all these reactors. How did that turn?
Matt Loszak: So I think it's a really interesting question. And it's obviously complicated. But from what I can tell, one of the core things was there was a lot of people who really wanted to abolish all things nuclear. And they wanted to do that because they thought the best way to decrease the likelihood of there being another atom bomb going off is just to basically try to forget the technology. And I think, that's kind of a problem for a few reasons. Like one is just once the cats out of the bag, you can't really forget that knowledge; it's already permeated the whole culture of humanity, and people know how to do this. So for certain groups who might want to do it, that knowledge is out there. But then, this comes back to the whole waste issue, which I think is one of the most interesting issues in nuclear. So I think, first, it's really important to acknowledge that during the kind of weapons testing era, there was a lot of irresponsible treatment around waste. So, just dumping carelessly and so on. But when you look at nuclear waste from the perspective of civilian nuclear power, it just was handled way more carefully. There’re way more stringent rules around it. And it's just one of the most interesting topics because there's such a fear around it, and yet, nobody's ever been harmed so much as, or let alone killed by nuclear waste. There's a super small amount of it. So, the entire history of nuclear power production in the US, you could take all that waste produced, and it would fit on a football field stacked roughly 10 meters high. So, there's kind of this stark contrast between the perception of nuclear waste and the reality. And so, I think some people kind of are confused by that. But what's interesting is I think there was a cohort of people who did understand that, but they purposefully kind of created a little bit of, I don't want to call it a lie, but just misinformation around how dangerous waste really is and leveraged that as a tool to try to abolish nuclear as a whole, whether it's the weapons or the energy source. And so I think that's really what society has been trying to untangle for the past number of decades is, well, actually, maybe there is a way for a society to leverage the amazing properties of nuclear power without leveraging the bomb. I think society is capable of that. But yeah, that's been a major sticking point I think that's caused a lot of the slowdown.
Eric Jorgenson: And when you talk to people who are close to nuclear, it's almost a laughable question, like the difference in technology and materials between a weapons program and an energy generation program are just like so, so starkly different that there's almost no overlap, except some of the nomenclature. Like most of the, if I understand correctly, most of the current nuclear reactors are not using weaponizable nuclear material, radioactive material anyway.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, exactly. So, there's kind of different levels of enrichment. So similar to when you're eating a hot sauce, you can have extremely concentrated hot sauce, or you can have really, really dilute hot sauce, and one will hurt you and one you barely notice. So it's the same kind of thing where this concentration of uranium, if you have 80 or 90 or 100% enriched U235, that's kind of the ratio of the U235 and U238. But the fissile stuff, the stuff that can rapidly release energy, when it's in the 90% range, that's where you're talking about a weapon. But then the fuel that's used in reactors today is much, much lower enrichment. So it's roughly 5% typically. In Canada, it's down closer to 1% or lower. And some of the advanced reactors that are being proposed are kind of around 20%. But that's kind of the max that's used in reactors.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s a really helpful- I can really get behind a hot sauce analogy. Hell yeah. On the nuclear waste issue, I think you did a really good thread. It was a little while back, but it was like a bunch of different gifs of I don't remember what era, it was 70s or 80s maybe. They were like testing different crashes or disasters that could happen to casks of nuclear waste. And they were like, okay, there's a cask of nuclear waste on a truck and it crashes into a wall. Are we okay? Yes, we're okay. Okay, now it crashes at 85 miles an hour. Are we okay? Yeah. Okay. The cask gets hit by a train going like 100 miles an hour. Are we still okay? Okay, yeah, we're still okay. Like, on fire for two hours, still okay. So to your point, no one has ever been hurt by nuclear waste, it's a scary thing. It's like the boogeyman in so many stories that now when I see, the oh no, there's nuclear waste that's like unaccounted for as like a Mission Impossible plot driver. I'm just like, oh, god dammit. Like, can you not? Can we not perpetuate this, the fact that this is perceived as dangerous, please?
Matt Loszak: Well, yeah, exactly. I think it's really interesting because humanity is pretty good at engineering their way around risks. And there's a lot of other things we take for granted that we do on a pretty frequent basis that are arguably more dangerous. So, as an example, flying. If you look at the history of flying, there used to be a much- it's way more- flying itself was almost way more dangerous than nuclear waste. Because with waste, you just have this substance you have to put in a concrete cast and maintain that enclosure for a period of time, within 600 years, you could stand next to the waste, and you'd be fine. So, all the gamma radiation for the most part has decayed away at that point. So that's like a problem that you didn't have to have anyone die to learn how to solve. Whereas airplanes, like there were tons of deaths before we learned how to really solve that. And now, it's one of the safest, essentially one of the safest forms of travel. And so, I think that's what's interesting. And also, with waste, part of the concern people have is say, well, in thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years, some of the waste to might leak into the soil, and then that might spread to the water, and people might drink it. And I think the thing people don't realize there is that there's already radiation all around us at all times. So, there's radiation coming from space, there's radiation coming from the earth. We actually are currently on a giant nuclear reactor of sorts, like the mantle itself, people don't realize this, but geothermal energy is actually in large part nuclear energy because the heat partially is decayed heat residual from the formation of Earth. But also, some of that heat is coming from radioisotope decay in the mantle. So, there's already radiation all around us. There's also uranium in seawater. So, people’s concern that there might be like a tiny amount that gets into water that you end up drinking, it's just it's such a low dose, even if that did happen, which is a big if, that the way more pressing concern is not deploying nuclear and having climate change and things like that happen in the much more short term. So yeah, it's just a fascinating litmus test for people's perception of risk and fear and so on.
Eric Jorgenson: One of the other sort of larger than life boogeyman perception issues is meltdowns, which I think is sort of worth addressing also. Bret Kugelmass came on the podcast a few episodes ago, a few months ago, and was like, the more meltdowns, the better. Like, people need to realize that this is not a big deal. And meltdowns can be a perfectly safe shutdown mode. Like that's what they're designed to do. So we've had a few- there have been a few like, quote, unquote, nuclear disasters, even though very few people were actually harmed in most of those through history. But I imagine that that was a huge driver of sort of curbing the growth around the first atomic age.
Matt Loszak: Yeah. I mean, I think, to some extent, he's right, although I also would take a slightly different stance on this. So, on the one hand, I think, insofar as he's right, I think people don't realize that you can take a lot more radiation than you think you can. Like people think of radiation is a scary thing. It turns out, if you look at the statistics, which we've now learned from a lot of health studies over the past number of decades, both from Hiroshima survivors and other data, you can tell, for example, that it takes roughly 40 times background radiation levels before there's even a measurable impact on your health, meaning like some slight chance of you maybe getting cancer later in your life requires 40 times current background radiation levels. So, people I don't think realize that we have these repair mechanisms in our cells, which are able to withstand a certain amount of radiation. It's already all around us today. And so, there's even been studies showing that when you remove all radiation, your health decreases because you're not exercising those repair mechanisms. So, I think there's a misunderstanding there. But at the same time, I don't think it's necessarily fair to expose people to extra dose when they didn't agree to it. So, in other words, we should be doing everything we can to avoid meltdowns. I think Bret's point is more that if we had more frequent meltdowns, which isn't necessarily desirable, but it would at least make people maybe learn more about that it is relatively safe. But still, you want to avoid meltdowns. And so, I think this is something that we'll get more into later in the call, which is something that we've been looking a lot at at Aalo is if you live in a world with super widespread deployment of nuclear, how do you make sure that statistically, the number of meltdowns is still super, super low, despite ubiquitous nuclear power? And we definitely have some thoughts on that. We'll have to get into those later in the call or the pod.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Interesting. And then the final sort of thing I want to set up as just important context for like the nuclear industry before we sort of get into like your story and Aalo’s story is just how big of an issue regulation is because of these public perception things, because of the inherent risks, it has to be one of the most heavily regulated industries or substances on Earth. And for those coming from sort of a Silicon Valley tech background, especially for the last few decades of like software focus, it's weird to work in a space where there's a lot more regulatory challenge and risk than there is even engineering challenge or risk. I'm hoping you'll sort of talk about that and the NRC and a little bit of the challenges, the Catch 22 in the space.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is people over index a little bit on how big of a role the NRC has played and the reason why we don't have more nuclear. I think the first thing is there just weren't very many orders for new plants after the initial boom in the 50s, 60s, and even a little bit in the 70s. So, I think on the one hand, it is true that the NRC did have kind of more and more regulatory morass building up that did impact the economics a little bit. I think if you look more at the history, the orders were kind of slowing down even before that was happening. And so I think the thing is like utilities would have nuclear if they wanted nuclear, but there were a few things that just caused them to not want it. They could build natural gas and coal plants more easily. Those plants tended to be less of an existential risk to their bottom line. And so yeah, I think as it stands today, could the NRC be more efficient? Yes. But are they the main reason that we don't have more nuclear? I would say no. So I think the first thing is, can we get the world to want nuclear more, and that's slowly happening in different corners. Certain utilities certainly want nuclear more and more, others are still pretty against it. But I think that'll be a gradual process. And so yeah, I think it's a complex issue with different sides there.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we're seeing different states and different countries take like radically different stances. I think just was it yesterday, like Illinois voted to keep some hard limit or make it really difficult to add nuclear plants. And I think the day before that, Sweden, I think it was Sweden, just announced a plan to build 12 new ones or something like that. So we are just kind of like seeing these huge splits of what's going on. And I think you tweeted recently like there is a challenge where regulator's can't license a new design without reliable test data, but you can't get test data without a license to build the thing in the first place. And so it creates this really tricky- it's hard to get off the ground. It's hard to innovate in that space when that is like the catch point that you're stuck on.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, I think it's worth distinguishing here as well between water base reactors and more what's called advanced reactors, which use things other than water to cool the reactor core typically. So with water base reactors, the regulators are pretty used to regulating that; that's kind of what they've been regulating for decades. And so that's less of an issue, the Catch 22 that you mentioned, with them. But there’s this kind of question of, well, should we be investing more in advanced reactors? We believe you should. So, we believe that one of the core things here is advanced reactors have the potential to achieve the same grade level of safety that water based reactors have but potentially more economically. Because they have less safety systems to achieve the same grade level of safety, there's more intrinsic safety in the physics of it, happy to dive into details, but that's a big part of why we think those advanced reactors are worth investing in. But this is obviously a bold claim because other people have made those same claims about certain water base designs, and some of it somewhat panned out and some of it didn't. So we've got to prove it. But yeah, certainly for what Aalo is doing, we’re trying to say, yes, advanced reactors are worth investing in, they do have the potential to be more economical in the long run. And so, to your point, there is this kind of Catch 22 when you look at the advanced reactors where they do want you to have nuclear test data before they grant your license, but you can't get that license without nuclear test data. And so, this is one of the core challenges that Aalo is trying to address. And I think we'll probably get into that later in the call unless you want to dive in now.
Eric Jorgenson: No, it's a perfect segue because I think your personal background is really interesting too. So I think why don't we like start with a little bit of your path into the space and then the story of Aalo will kind of blossom out of that?
Matt Loszak: For me, originally, I studied engineering and physics at university, so I just thought that stuff was super interesting. I had no idea what I would do with it. I just wanted to study and took some pretty cool courses like relativity, quantum, lasers, had a couple of nuclear focused things. But yeah, so after graduating, I was like, well, I might as well use this degree for something. So for one year, I worked as an acoustical engineer, which is pretty cool stuff. It's like sound vibration control and architecture and large engineering projects. So, that was an interesting year, but I kind of became obsessed with programming and design during that year and just loved the idea of trying to build something that could provide value to people, people would use, have fun with. So, I ended up quitting that job, didn't really have a plan. But I ended up building something that was kind of like TikTok before TikTok. So it was called JamCam. We got to a million downloads. And one of the highlights was we did this Maroon Five partnership. This could actually be a whole story for a whole other podcast because a lot people don't realize TikTok, so it used to be called Musical.ly, but that whole design was completely stolen from an app called Mindy, which was this like some French founders who moved to the Valley and they raised 5 million. They did everything right. They had like Chris Soka, Troy Carter invest, they got all these influencers on their platform. But ultimately, Musical.ly and China and TikTok kind of won this battle. But anyway, that's another story. So yeah, as you know, that kind of startup is really binary; either it becomes the next big thing, or it's kind of hard to make money. So moved on and started something not as sexy but a better business model. So that is called Humi. So it's HR Payroll benefit software focused on Canadian small businesses. And that did much better. So we scaled it to about 150 employees and raised about 50 million in venture capital. But my kind of holy grail all along was to take those learnings from software in business and bring it back to science and engineering where I came from. So about two years ago, I left and sold some shares during a series B. And the time was right to start to explore these more technical areas and spent like six months just thinking and that was one of the weirdest periods of my life because I’d kind of just wake up and just think about what's meaningful to you and what makes sense to spend your time on working on and went down some really cool rabbit holes. I'm not sure how much detail you want to get into, but I looked into some really cool biotech stuff, a little bit of AI, robotic stuff, but just mostly was drawn to clean tech and especially nuclear, which I just perceived to be this underdog technology that should be playing such a larger role in our mix, and it's not. And I'd almost never seen something where there's such a huge disparity between a lot of the public perception of something and a lot of the realities. So, that just really lit this fire under me to say, okay, I really want to try and help push this forward, lots of smart people are already working on renewables or storage or what have you. And so that's kind of how I got into nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that period of time is worth sort of diving into because I find it- I always love talking to friends who are going through one of those sort of infinite crossroads things where they're like, okay, I've either like had a big win, or I'm leaving a chapter, and I'm a broadly capable person. And everybody's mindset going into that is so different. Some people are looking for best risk adjusted returns, some people are looking for a lifestyle, some people are looking for like a really pure mission. So I would love to hear you sort of give another layer of detail there on what was your mindset? What were you looking for? How did you sort of eliminate whole branches of possibility there? And what eventually made you really fired up about nuclear and sort of fission in particular?
Matt Loszak: Yeah, so I guess my framework for this was, I would try to go down rabbit holes for maybe a few weeks and really research them in detail, try and map a framework of understanding how does the industry work? Like, how does the financing model work? What are the different plays people are making currently? And what does the world need? What are the big problems that exist in these different spaces? So one of the really cool ones, so I think biotech was really interesting because it really seems like something that will- obviously with COVID and some of the recent advancements there around these like lipid nano layered delivery systems or so on, it seems like there's quite a bit of cool stuff happening. One of the highlights was I spoke to an individual named Michael Levin who does really, really cool research into epigenome, so epigenetics. So, he looks at L voltages, and he tries to understand how these cells communicate to each other. And it's almost like you have neurons which communicate to each other, and they form intelligence, but there's a certain level of intelligence that cells themselves have. And the inner connectivity is a bit different. But he kind of looks at how these cells know when to stop growing, how to create a certain shape. And if you can reverse engineer that, you could do things like apply a certain voltage to, for example, someone's amputated arm, the end of it, and they would learn how to regrow all those cells and regrow the arm. And in fact, they did that in a frog. They had a frog that was missing a leg, and they applied the right voltages, and the leg regrew. So I think there's some pretty insane stuff there, and if you can master that, you could cure cancer, cure aging. Although, curing aging, I think, has a major social challenges as well. Like you don't want a bunch of people who are like living for infinite years with ingrained beliefs that are somehow, for example, that nuclear is bad. Anyway, that was a really cool rabbit hole. But the challenge I had there was I just had less of an intuition for it. So when I was talking to certain people, I'd have to go talk to my doctor friends and be like, hey, is this BS, or does this make sense? Whereas in the clean energy space and the engineering and physics space, I had much more intuition for, hey, what's promising in the short term and what is maybe more science fiction, which is a different story. So yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, interesting. So once you got into clean energy, I think there's a whole nother sort of set of triage steps you have to take inside that because there's a bunch of really smart, well intentioned people that are all trying to solve the same problem, which is like we need a ton more energy, we don't want climate change, and we don't want all of the sort of byproducts of a coal and oil full economy. And we also don't want to just create a crabs in a bucket thing for all energy because of humanity where we stop getting access to new energy, or we have to consume less energy is basically more poverty. Like that is not a good path for us to go down. So once you got into that clean tech space, how did you sort of navigate towards nuclear as a particular technology? And what was maybe the series of decisions there?
Matt Loszak: Yeah. So I think, yeah, it's worth mentioning that, in my engineering degree, I learned about the physics of solar panels and batteries and nuclear and so on. But I'd never really done a deep dive into the economic or social factors. And those were quite interesting. And so, I actually set up meetings with people in solar and in storage and even fusion and so on, but really kind of was drawn to nuclear. And not only is it a kind of underdog solution, but also I think it's just interesting because if you look at the past 20, 30 years, solar and renewables and storage have been painted as this perfect solution. And on the contrary, nuclear has been painted as this evil villain or something. And I think that the truth is much more in the middle. And so, I think it's interesting because people sometimes say, oh, you shouldn't have these battles or wars between clean energy solutions, we need them all. But as an engineer, I'm thinking, well, yes, we need them all, but use each one for which application is- for where it's best suited for that application. And you can't have a conversation about that without talking about the pros and cons. And it just so happens, everyone knows the cons of nuclear, some of which are true, some of which aren't. And everyone knows the pros of renewables and so on. But so you can't balance that without highlighting some of the challenges of renewables and some of the unknown pros of nuclear. And one of the challenges is when you do that, you come across like some kind of nuclear shell or something, when really you're just an engineer who's trying to present a balanced perspective to the world. So yeah, I think for me, when I was looking at renewables, there's a few things that struck me. So one is I kind of looked at the economics of what happens when you deploy it at full scale. And with renewables, so people, the common narrative is okay, everyone knows the sun doesn't shine all the time, wind doesn't blow all the time. So you need storage. Okay, cool. So when you do that, if you want to power the whole grid, you also need to build extra panels or extra turbines because not only are you powering the current moment, but you're saving extra energy for later. Okay, fair. So you've got three components there; you've got your core panels or generation, you’ve got your excess or overbuilding, and you've got your storage. And the thing is this is all a probabilistic game you're playing. And so if you want to try and in some imaginary world have 100% renewables, then, in order to match the statistical nature of the weather, you have to like asymptotically build more and more and more panels or generation or batteries to make sure that you never have a blackout. And obviously, an asymptote or some kind of exponential thing going up to infinity, that's not economically feasible. So you got to draw the line somewhere. And after you draw that line, then you do need some kind of full backup system. And it turns out that the best backup for renewables is natural gas, which this gets into some of the more conspiracy sounding area where it's like this is why the oil and gas industry likes renewables because they know that in a world where it's only renewables, they're still needed. But that's kind of the way things shake out. And so, from what I've seen, nuclear is really what would be best for kind of the grid where you need 24/7 energy, but renewables could be awesome for something where you don't need 24/7 power. So, it's kind of like fitting the product to the need. And there are certain circumstances where you don't need 24/7 power might be, for example, carbon capture or synthetic fuel production or hydrogen production. And in that case, it's again complicated because sometimes those types of electrolyzers or products, they want to be run all the time. So you still kind of want 24/7, but let's leave that aside for the moment and just say, let's say your capacity factor on solar is 20%. And let's just imagine the capacity factor on nuclear is 100%, meaning it works 100% of the time, and solar is working 20% of the time, roughly just colloquially speaking. So that means that your nuclear could afford to be 5x as expensive, but you still have the same ROI as those solar panels because you're only producing 20% of the time with solar. So if you look at the economics of nuclear, it ranges place by place, but there are places where the energy alone can work more in solar’s favor there. So solar can be cheaper than a fifth of the cost of nuclear in some places. So, in that case, I think solar is great. And wind, the same thing there. But anyway, I think that's the key thing is we have to look at which energy source is most well suited to which application. And, of course, this is all in a vacuum. In reality, we live in a messy world. All the grids will be somewhat mixtures of these things based on local politics and beliefs and how things shake out will just be more in the middle. But I think this is a form of communication that needs to happen more.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you had a very interesting, I think it was a map, if I can remember the graphic correctly, that was sort of which parts of the world are best suited to have an economic advantage in one particular form of energy generation. It's like, yeah, Iceland is going to crush at geothermal. And everywhere in sort of the like equatorial region is going to thrive in solar. And there's all these kinds of different pockets. And just like seeing it that way just felt like oh, my God, all of this sort of energy renewables dialog is just like the fable of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, strongly stating that like there is no other way other than geothermal because of where they happen to be and that any sort of robust worldwide grid is going to have like a ton of- a wide variety of things feeding in with all different kinds and we need all of it. Because the characteristics are very different. It's not just nuclear, if I understand correctly, it's super, super reliable, but can't get like dialed up and down in the way that coal or natural gas can. And so, when you need to reach peak load during a heatwave or something like that, then all of a sudden, we need these really flexible sources. If you need baseload when the sun's not shining because we've depleted all of our storage, all of a sudden, you need a ton of other things. And so just the slow progress of replacing the bulk of the coal and natural gas probably with nuclear baseload feels extremely sensible to me and doesn't preclude nuclear at all or doesn't preclude any other form of renewables I mean. But just it's hard to get that kind of nuance out of anybody with skin in the game, any particular like flavor of skin in the game. And it's so hard to know who to trust and who's talking what book as they sort of- as you work through the dialogue.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, no, I think it's all great points. And it's definitely true, like a lot of these energy sources are somewhat location dependent. So solar is great for where there's often sun and infrequently clouds. And wind is great where it's windy, obviously. Hydro is good where there's lots of volumes of water moving. Geothermal is great where there’s magma pockets close to the surface of the earth. And nuclear is kind of cool because current reactors do kind of need to be close to water, but other advanced reactors don't have to be so they can be anywhere. And also I think it is worth mentioning nuclear can also load follow quite well with the right design. But it just typically hasn't been used to do that. Because economically, this is what's interesting, one of the key differences between nuclear and oil and gas, so the nuclear plants have a much higher upfront cost, like a CapEx, and then it has typically lower ongoing operational expenses. Whereas oil and gas plants are a little bit easier to build, so lower capex but then higher OpEx when you factor in the cost of that fuel on an ongoing basis. And so this is kind of why fundamentally people think oil and gas would pair better with renewables because you're building this asset that's much cheaper to build upfront. And sure, it's more expensive to run on an operational basis thereafter, but that doesn't matter because you're not using it that often. And obviously, this ignores the fact that it's dirty, and we shouldn't be doing it. But yeah, I think it's fascinating, this kind of patchwork quilt of how things shake out and where they're best suited.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's probably worth saying we've got some very old nuclear plants that are still operating, functional, safe, and well into their sort of like productive and profitable generation, even despite that sort of large, upfront capex, which could get way lower, if we built a bunch more of them or if we lowered some of the regulatory barriers or if we had a more robust supply chain, all of which I want to, I guess, get to in your specifics a little bit later. But let's talk about Aalo’s sort of strategy and how you transitioned from hey, I think I found an underserved- a hero to bring forth in like this technology exploration that you did and how that turned into a company.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, so I guess similar to that six month exploration phase than I did before settling on nuclear, it was kind of similar in the initial months once I mentally committed. So I had this spreadsheet, and I just started to meet people in nuclear. And I think today, it's like got 400 people on it. So like, just always try to keep track of what I'm learning and who I'm talking to. But I guess the earliest kind of questions I was asking was like, okay, coming at this as an industrialist or like a business side, what are the big risks that need to be addressed? And it seems like, like I said before, advanced reactors do have the potential to be more economical while maintaining that level of safety. But they have this Catch 22 that we talked about already with the licensing. And so, this is really this elephant in the room. Like, if you look at all the advanced reactor companies, some have kind of made great progress. But it's an unfortunate reality that no one yet has been approved. And obviously, it's a complex issue. But this is one of the reasons why it hasn't happened yet. And so, this is actually, after many, many meetings, this is one of the most exciting moments is when I came across the Marvel reactor from Idaho National Lab. So it's really interesting. Essentially, it's going to be the first new micro reactor built in the US in decades. So it's being built at Idaho National Lab, and it's a government project. And if you look at kind of the history of nuclear, like I said before, the first atomic age was those 52 reactors built at the National Lab, INL, in 50s and 60s, it went down to three, and Marvel is going to be the first new one, which will hopefully be ushering in a number of other reactors thereafter. In fact, there’s one called Project PELE where it is our friendly rivalry. It is a DOD reactor. They're trying to see who will actually get to claim being the first reactor belt. So they're both roughly scheduled to go critical and turn on and go online next year or maybe early year after. We'll see how that shakes out. But yeah, so this is a, just to give you a bit of detail about it, it's an advanced reactor, and it uses liquid metal as the coolant. So, most reactors today use water as the coolant. Liquid metal is cool because it takes the heat away really fast. So if you touch a metal, it feels cold because it's taking heat from your hand quickly. And what that means is you can have a more powerful reactor be much smaller, and when it's smaller, but it's achieving the same power output, that should tell you the economics can be better. So that's one thing is economically it should be good. And then secondly, it uses a fuel called uranium zirconium hydride. And this is a fuel also known as triga fuel, which is commonly used in university research reactors. And it's really inherently safe, which is why it's used in these research reactors around campus, which students offer it-
Eric Jorgenson: You introduced me to this whole world. Like I had no idea that there were like certainly many, I don't know if dozens is fair, but like just nuclear reactors operating in the middle of college campuses all over America and potentially the world in just unmarked buildings. And people walk by it every day tweeting about how nuclear power isn't safe and I don't want a reactor in my backyard. It's like, yo, you already have one, you just didn't even know.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, exactly. And they don't even have like a big concrete dome. Like there's no- like you said.
Eric Jorgenson: It just looks like a normal office building.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, yeah. And so a big part of what enables that is this really cool property of the fuel. And so you think about how we can make things safe, this can happen at different scales. So when you kind of make things safe at a big scale, like an engineering scale, like put a big concrete dome over something, that's one thing, but you can also make things safe at a much smaller scale, I guess what you consider like a physics scale. And this fuel is able to do that because it has a strong what's called Doppler effect. So, the hotter the fuel gets, in other words, if it were to approach a meltdown, the less reactive it gets. So, it kind of inherently shuts itself off. Now, why hasn't this been used in commercial power generation? Well, it doesn't really pair that well with water because it's a bit finicky. So it would shut itself off too easily. But with liquid metal fuel, it takes the heat away really quickly, which means not only do you get that great power density, which should be great for economics, but it also is great for safety. So anyway, that's kind of why they're building this. One other thing is it is kind of similar to a design called Snap-10A, which was actually launched into space in the 60s. So currently, the only reactor the US ever put into space is orbiting Earth as we speak, and it will be doing so for another 4000 years.
Eric Jorgenson: Whoa. Is it still like reacting and was it intended to generate power?
Matt Loszak: So it was generating power for a short period of time, and then they had an unrelated electronics issue, which they just shut it down. And so now it's just- just orbiting.
Eric Jorgenson: What was it about the Marvel, like what else about Marvel, sort of like why did that become the basis of Aalo?
Matt Loszak: Yeah, so the main thing here is it really helps to address that Catch 22 we were talking about. So essentially, the Idaho National Lab, they want Marvel to be kind of like an open source reactor. And so for our company, we're going to be making a scaled up more economical version. So, rip will be around how to scale it up and what changes to make and so on. But it'll still be similar enough that from a regulation standpoint, we can leverage that nuclear test data from Marvel. And so when the regulator comes knocking, we can say, yes, we have nuclear test data, we can get it right now. And so we will also have to pair that nuclear test data with non nuclear thermal hydraulic data, which we will gather by building our own kind of non nuclear test loop. But for the most part, this should really help give us an advantage when it comes to the regulation side and just giving comfort around this more advanced novel design.
Eric Jorgenson: That is super interesting. And like thank you to the government for funding and being willing to build the test reactors that can become the commercialized version of it. Like for all the complaining that there is maybe about some of the regulation, there is also the grants and the funding to these government programs and universities that is what enable companies like this to go get built. So I think that this symbiosis is important to appreciate. It's not like the government is all headwind. So let's talk a little bit about sort of the market for it. We talked a lot about the energy market. But I also learned from you that there's a much broader market than just energy when it comes to nuclear reactors. There's other products and a ton of specific use cases, like a much broader diversity of market conditions or market demand than I would have expected. So do you think you could take us through some of those?
Matt Loszak: Yeah, yeah. So, the obvious one is electrical power. But there is also quite a few other markets that have more to do with industrial process heat and also kind of more off grid applications. And so right now, I'm speaking in broad strokes. I'm not necessarily speaking to exactly which markets we'll go after. But if you look at all the advanced reactors that are out there and all the possible markets, you do have things like decarbonizing mining, decarbonizing industrial process heat, desalination, rural communities, anything with diesel generation currently. And one of the other cool ones that I think isn't talked about as much is as we electrify all the vehicles and trucks on the highway and the interstate and our streets, if you think about what would be easier between building a ton of new generation capacity and a ton of new transmission wires, or a square kilometer of solar panels, you could just install these little micro reactors that are about the size of a shipping container along the interstate that are just as safe as these university research reactors, for example, that are powering 16 Tesla's at a time, or for these trucks, like Tesla has a one megawatt charging cable for some of these trucks, which is crazy. And when you're fast charging a Tesla, it's like 225 kilowatts or something like that. So that's a pretty intense power demand that this kind of thing could help resolve in the next few decades. So there are also spaces like that. However, when it comes down to the economics here, I think it's really worth pointing out, there's a real difference in the economy of scale and the economy of numbers. So, lots of people point out accurately that it's really hard to compete with economies of scale. So, a lot of reactors today, they're quite big, and they're big for a reason. It's generally cheaper with nuclear to make it bigger. But that being said, there's also been this kind of challenge in the west with these large engineering projects. So some of these nuclear plants have gone way over schedule, way over budget. It's worth pointing out as well that in China and South Korea, they can still build nuclear right now cheaper than coal. So, this is not a problem everywhere. However, maybe an antidote to this challenge in the West is to leverage more modular construction, do smaller reactors, and do them in a factory. And so there's some people that have looked at the economics of this. One is Jacobo Buongiorno from MIT. He kind of looked at what's the optimal breakdown or the balance between the economy of scale and the economy of numbers, and it looks like maybe somewhere in the 100 megawatt kind of size would be still very modular, still manufacturable in a factory, but still giving you that size and economic benefit. And then also this does vary by reactor type. So for example, high temperature gas reactors are much less energy dense than liquid metal reactors. So you might have 10x the power output in the exact same form factor. So anyway, these are kind of some of the considerations, and I think which reactor is best suited for which application will be kind of a function of not only the economics they reach, like their cents per kilowatt hour but also what temperature they reach which can determine what applications they are used for and so on.
Eric Jorgenson: Really interesting. So is part of the vision of Aalo to sort of be that manufacturing company that can reach economies of scale on the manufacturing side, not on a like we just build one enormous facility side? Because it's another way to reach economy of scale is build the same thing a lot of times.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, definitely, it's one of our objectives. I just wanted to say so our first product will be 20 megawatt thermal. And we do not anticipate this to be cheaper than the largest nuclear plants. But it'll have a good high temperature property and it'll have a certain physical property that will make it good for lots of these initial applications where they're willing to pay higher prices per kilowatt hour. But in the long run, we also want to hit that sweet spot, and we think we can make a 300 megawatt thermal reactor that will still be very manufacturable in a factory at scale. And that's where we think we actually get into the three to five cent per kilowatt hour range. That's ambitious, obviously a big challenge, obviously lots for us to prove, but that's roughly our goal. And so at that stage, we could compete more utility scale. But until then, it's kind of a question of what are some applications where they need the higher heat that traditional reactors can't provide, or more remote, where you're competing with diesel being shipped frequently, adding to the cost, and so on.
Eric Jorgenson: What is some of the manufacturing process that goes into a nuclear reactor? Is this one of those situations where it's like just kind of a bunch of normal parts that come together to make something exciting? Or is there something inherently tricky about the manufacturing process?
Matt Loszak: Well, it is definitely looked at a little more closely. So there are special materials, special processes, special codes you have to conform to. And then obviously, procuring nuclear fuel is not the same thing as procuring oil and gas. So there are differences. And I think it's also worth mentioning there's a bunch of questions that will have to unfold over the coming decades as these things become more prevalent. So one thing is the operation model. So will we be forced to have a certain number of operators at each micro reactor, or will you be able to have maybe a slightly centralized one who monitors a number of reactors in a certain area, or one central monitoring location for a whole country? So there's things like that. Also, safety and security, what can you do around the design of the reactor, or personnel to like simplify that a little bit. Because there's some things that if you require too many people to operate or maintain the security of these things, it could ruin the economics. So there's things like that as well beyond just the manufacturing.
Eric Jorgenson: Which we have some of today. And I don't know what your opinion on the necessity of this is, but there's like the security overhead of nuclear reactors of like just teams of armed guards standing outside them at all times, like whether or not that actually adds to the net safety. There’s all kinds of stuff like that today that is, whether it's an overreach or not, part of the regulatory burden that nuclear carries that oil and gas doesn't necessarily. And I imagine part of that is because oil and gas has a really large lobbying budget and nuclear does not yet because it doesn't have the same like scale of industry, which is another little like Catch 22. So it's hard to exert your opinion on Capitol Hill when you don't have any money to do it and other people do.
Matt Loszak: I think there should be a way to make this work. And I think you're right, to some extent it would come down to lobbying. I think there are also special requirements that nuclear has that other energy sources do not. So I think it's a question of finding the right balance. But just in so many ways, when you think about nuclear from first principles, it really should be the cheapest energy source. If you think about all the way, like the full lifecycle of this whole thing, so thinking from mining, all the way through to manufacturing to power production and operation, it uses the least raw materials, and it's just insanely energy dense. Like, one thing people don't realize is one barrel of uranium, for example, is roughly equivalent to 2 million barrels of oil and gas just in broad strokes. So it's just the insane energy density should really lend itself to good economics. And obviously, some of the economics will be eaten up by the extra safety requirements and so on, but it really should be the best.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you see sort of a strengthening of the whole nuclear supply chain coming to your point around there's a lot of oversight of specific things, you need the fuel, we need practice with all of these motions to sort of reach the economies of scale? I know Aalo is one really promising company in this space, but this is the sort of effort that takes like a whole industry sort of maturing at the same pace. Do you see other people sort of in your class and like that turning tide and more talent and energy and focus coming into this kind of at all levels?
Matt Loszak: Yeah. I think when I speak to other nuclear founders, it's generally the kind of thing where everyone wants to help each other because it's a pretty massive industry and most people are in this for the right reasons of wanting to better humanity. And so I think it really is the kind of thing where a rising tide floats all boats, certain things like supply chain around fuel is helpful to everyone. Certain things like supply chain around key materials is helpful to everyone. And the most important one is the more the public wants nuclear, the more work all these companies do to make the public want nuclear, the more it helps everyone, too. So I think it's definitely quite a collaborative spirit.
Eric Jorgenson: Have you felt public opinion sort of changing in the time that you've been in the space?
Matt Loszak: I'd say definitely. So when I speak to people who've been in for longer, so for me, it's been maybe three years, for others who have been 6, 10 years plus, it's most interesting talking to people who had been in for like 50 years. But even looking at the past 10 years, let's say, there has been a real shift. So, obviously, Fukushima set the industry back a little bit. And I think that's an interesting question as well is next time something like Fukushima happens, and just statistically, it may well, how do we look at that? Because a lot of people have said, well, if that had happened in modern day like today, it can almost be portrayed as a good thing instead of a bad thing. On the one hand, you have the relocation, which is clearly bad, but also you could use it to portray exactly what the risks really are of those radiation levels. But obviously, overall, we want to avoid those happening. But if you talk to pro nuclear advocates from the past five or six years, for them, there was a big shift in the middle of that period. And so I think it's probably a combination of things. This is actually an interesting question I should talk to them about to find out more, but I think it's a combination of even the past few years, the increasing concern around carbon emissions and so on, but also just people realizing that nuclear is safer than they thought. And I think it's hard to say exactly why in the past few years that started happening.
Eric Jorgenson: It was obviously because of your tweets.
Matt Loszak: Yeah, obviously. I think it really is amazing to me how big of an impact small groups of people can have. So as an example, there's a pro nuclear advocate named Chris Keefer in Canada, and for him and a couple others who have kind of formed Canadians for Nuclear Energy, they've been able to save entire large nuclear plants. And same thing in the US. And there's other groups who were very small that have done this amazing thing. And it's really important because it's one thing to try to want to build new plants, but if we're not keeping existing ones open, which have already been built and already have the economics baked in and then now are just kind of pure profit, so to speak. If we can’t keep those open, then that's- that's priority number one. That's the first thing we should be solving.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there are a number of people that I follow that are I think finding really a lot of success in being pro nuclear advocates. Isabella Boemeke, Isodope is one, is like very popular, did a TED talk. I think, is it Miss America this year, who's like a nuclear engineer? So, she's out there being like pro nuclear. Grace? Yeah. There's just so many cool things. Like to our nuclear waste cask thing earlier, there's like becoming this trend of pregnant women nuclear activists who like go hug a cask of nuclear waste while they're pregnant. And like, oh, my God, the replies on those tweets are this incredible flame war of people who are like, you're the most irresponsible person ever. How could you expose your baby to nuclear radiation? And other people who reply like she has a PhD in Nuclear Physics and knows what she's doing. You're an idiot, stop it, delete your account. It is an incredible microcosm of the decades of debate that we're talking about happening in one thread. But yeah, it's such a fascinating thing. And I know you are on the frontlines often sort of talking to the politicians and industry experts. Did I see you had a visit to the Capitol recently?
Matt Loszak: Yeah, that's right. So I was there with a firm that we've contracted to kind of help introduce Aalo and some ideas to some folks on the Hill. And so, there's a few things that we’re kind of introducing to them and talking to them about. But I think for the most part, a lot of like the nice thing about nuclear is it is generally- it does have bipartisan support. So that's a nice thing is that generally, it's more kind of state by state where you see the pushback, less so at a political level with different parties at a party level. But yeah, it was a great visit. We were also kind of talking a bit about something called the Chips Bill. So there's a couple large omnibus spending bills in the US. The Chips Bill was one that was originally focused on microchips but has a bunch of other stuff kind of crammed into it. And one of the aspects of the Chips Bill is what is authorized but not yet appropriated for $390 million for up to four new research reactors in the US in the next five years or so. And so this is something that we really hope goes through because we think the country needs more new research reactors, these things can have higher flux to allow more radiation studies, they could train the next generation of nuclear operators on newer technology, and it's just a great way for the country to maintain competitiveness with other countries that are doing a lot more in nuclear. So we think it's just one example of something that the government should get more behind.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's very cool. It has been really exciting to sort of come along on your journey. Like we met through Chris Ho, who you used to work with at Humi, who's a fan of the podcast, good friend, works at Athena, investor in the fund, and just like we all just geek out on all the various ways that technology can save the world. And seeing somebody like you who has gone so far down the rabbit hole, looked at all of these different things, and come back up saying I found something, it's awesome, I'm going to dedicate my life to furthering this specific thing, and then attacking it in all the different ways that you're attacking it, sort of from public perception, education way, like through social and through podcasts, your Twitter is amazing. I recommend everybody follow you for these kind of like fantastic breakdowns of really simplifying the science behind different things. And then going and educating the public on the political side of things and raising the money and building the reactors and taking them to market. I think your impact is going to be absolutely huge here. So that's actually one more, a few more kind of closing questions here. I'm curious what kind of support you've seen in the tech and frontier tech and venture capital world? Is this something that you saw a lot of excitement for? Or did it feel like you were kind of dragging people up hill to get them to believe that this was the time for a resurgence in nuclear?
Matt Loszak: I think it was really case by case. I mean, I try not to spend too much time trying to convince someone to completely to switch their mindset on certain things. But I think the nice thing is there is a cohort of a bunch of VCs who made some good money from software in the past 10, 20 years, and now they're kind of looking at what the next big thing will be in. And quite a few of them do have this thesis around physical infrastructure. So for example, a16z and American Dynamism, those founders found a bunch of others that are really taking on this thesis. And it's really interesting, I think there are some VCs who are betting much more on something like fusion, for example, and then others who believe that that is more of a science project and that fission is where it's at, and so on. And so, generally, while I have my own opinions on these things, I try not to try to convince these people of changing their fundamental beliefs. And the good news is, yeah, there has been quite a bit of different firms who do have their own formed thesis on fission and other energy infrastructure projects. And it's just a question of finding them and aligning.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you closed a very robust, I’m not sure if you called it a pre-seed or seed round led by Fifty Years, which I think- I know so many people were sort of excited to participate in. Fifty Years is an incredible firm and very- I think, leads in a lot of these very long term oriented sort of utopia driving technologies. So it was really cool to see that, and I can't wait to see how you sort of- what you're able to do with that war chest. What does the next little bit look like for you? What's coming down the pipe?
Matt Loszak: Well, first of all, the Fifty Years has been an amazing partner. They're awesome. So for anyone in deep tech looking to fundraise, would definitely recommend reaching out to them. Oh, yeah, definitely. So, the fundraise has been great. That was our seed round, starting off with about 6 million. But in terms of next steps, so we've obviously been hiring a bunch. So we're opening our office in Austin, which will be opened up kind of end of September, early October. So that'll be a big thing for us, get the first kind of 10 people there, hoping to be about 15 people as a team size by the end of the year. I just want to underscore one of the ways we think about ourselves is we really want to be kind of like a skunkworks style team, so really efficient, not too bloated, and just getting stuff done. I think we really try to take a lot of inspiration from what the Marvel team has done at Idaho National Lab because they've been able to kind of create this DNA of efficiency at a government entity, which you don't typically see. Clearly, there's often a lot of red tape to get through. And they've done a good job of kind of operating efficiently in that domain. So that's a big part for us is trying to copy what we can from that DNA. And then beyond that, the big focus is on regulatory approval, getting the design completed, and then looking at the first one or two deployments. Because if you think about that factory vision, you want to have a factory, you want to produce hundreds of reactors per year. But the question is how do you bank and build the first one or two? And who wants to buy those before you've proven the economics, proven the safety? So this is one of the key challenges is the first one or two customers, how do you identify those? And this is something that maybe we could talk about at a future date. But we've really tried to identify initial customers where there's unique advantages with regards to funding, regulation, etc. So more on that to come.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a conversation I wish we could have today, but I recognize it's not the time. But I really think you have one of the most thoughtful market approaches I've seen in any founder, in any industry, and part of it is you've had to because it's a complicated industry. But watching you sort of map this maze and figure out how to put all the dominoes in the right order to find these initial customers and navigate the regulation and the financing is absolutely fascinating. And I look forward to unpacking that whenever you're ready to show the map of the maze because I think it's fascinating and it's so different from the common knowledge of software entrepreneurship. Like software has been most of tech for most of our last few decades. And so, we've conflated like startup advice with software startup advice. And there's a lot of ways in which those ideas don't apply quite as much when you're building reactors, nuclear reactors that cost a lot of money and that have one important first customer. And there's a lot of things, there's a lot of nuance to tease out in that that I think is fascinating. I would also say in this conversation, I've recognized a pattern that I'm working on the Elon book, and I saw like his first two companies were software, low capital effort endeavors, like good things to start as a younger person doing your first company, and then rolling that capital all into a high capital effort that's more manufacturing, more atoms, more industrial, larger scale, longer timeframe. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. So one more thing I want to ask you is to sort of share the best of your recommendations of whether it's specific material on getting up to speed in nuclear or just for anybody else who wants to kind of approach a space and reorganize and reorient themselves in the way that you have to find something- to transition, if you have any recommendations on that, I'd love to hear those.
Matt Loszak: Yeah. So I'd say in terms of nuclear recommendations, the Decouple podcast by Chris Keefer is awesome. Titans of Nuclear by Bret, the guest you had recently, is also awesome. Nuclear Barbarians is another one I like, Emmet Penney. And then obviously our adviser Mark Nelson, who's been on lots of different podcasts and news shows and is big on Twitter.
Eric Jorgenson: Mark's been on this podcast, too. Yeah, he's great. Mark wants to know why you haven't grown a mustache if you're going to work in the nuclear industry, by the way. That was the question he submitted. I'm so glad I crowdsourced questions because you come up with gems like that.
Matt Loszak: Yeah. And then also, Atomic Awakening is a book by James Mahaffey that is quite good. And also Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop by Devanney. So those are good resources. And then otherwise, I think, in terms of making a change, I think the big thing is just trying to learn as much as you can, talk to as many people as you can. And what starts to happen is, if you talk to enough people, then you start to have- you act as the connective tissue between people and you start to learn things that can be valuable to other people who might have been in the space for much longer than you. But then as soon as you can also provide value to them, I think it becomes much more easier to establish more and more connections, learn more and more, and just work your way into actually helping solve problems that already exist in a space.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I think if you told people, hey, I went from a software entrepreneur to like spending three years in the nuclear space and now I’m founding a nuclear company, a lot of people don't even think that that would be possible. And so I love sort of highlighting stories like yours. I know you had the educational background to sort of have an intuition for it, but I think that's a really important story to highlight. It's just the way you spend your first 10 years of your career isn't the way you have to spend the next 50. So don't be afraid to kind of step back and retool and find stuff that's really important to you that you're proud to spend your life on. And in that context, what do you look for when hiring? Do you need people with a nuclear background or a specific educational background? Is there sort of some of those roles at Aalo that you're hiring for just generalist, high organization, like badass folks that can help the mission even if they don't necessarily have the industry background?
Matt Loszak: Yeah, totally. So this is something that we really want to be core to our DNA. So I mean, if you look at nuclear, if we're going to make as much, as many deployments as we plan to as a whole industry, currently, I think there's about 100,000 people in the industry, and it has to be 300,000 in order to hit those goals. So what that means is we’ll have to recruit a lot of people who are not currently in nuclear, so whether that comes from software engineering or aerospace or what have you, that would be critical and I think not only from like the sheer requirement of having more people, but also there are benefits of having those diversity in backgrounds and experience and so on. And so definitely looking for anyone who is comfortable wearing a lot of hats but also has strong engineering talent. And also if anyone out there currently or previously worked at the NRC, we are looking for a senior regulatory documentation specialist. So please reach out if that's you as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Very specialized and important skill. Okay, Matt, where should people follow, subscribe, plug themselves in so that they can follow along with what's going on, see the opportunities, watch the news rollout?
Matt Loszak: So we have a company Twitter account, which we post to infrequently. That's at Aalo Atomics. And then personally, I post stuff as I kind of come across it, and I'm at Matt Loszak, and yeah, we'd love to connect with anyone interested.
Eric Jorgenson: So those are both on Twitter. We'll link those in the show notes. There's so much going on in this space. And thank you so much for taking the time to teach us and for us to be your podcast premiere of the company and your nuclear story. Like this is fascinating. And I can't wait to see what's next. And hopefully we get to do this again soon with a whole bunch of new updates and exciting stuff to share. Thanks for saving the world, Matt.
Matt Loszak: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. If you liked this episode, here are great episodes to queue up next. Two of them we actually talked about during this episode number 45, Mark Nelson is a good friend of Matt's. They travel around together. Mark is an advisor to Matt's company. Mark talked to us about the history of nuclear, the complications of energy markets, and a lot more that's a little bit even deeper dive into the nuclear industry and the history if you enjoyed that part. Number 58, Bret Kugelmass we also mentioned. He is the CEO and founder of Last Energy, talked about why nuclear meltdowns are good, a lot of counterintuitive ideas and a really clear vision for building a very economic nuclear future. Other quick episodes that you would love, number 34, Josh Stors Hall talks about how nuclear can help power the next industrial revolution along with AI and Nanotech and how those technologies feed into each other and the incredible compounding effects that can have, and the most recent episode with Andrew Cote, talked about superconductors, talked about nuclear fusion, and how quantum materials could create invisibility cloaks. He is a really crazy, very smart guy, very smart friend. It's what this show is all about. Sign up for the Smart Friends email newsletter at ejorgenson.com. Invest with me and my partners through Rolling Fun. Links to both are in the show notes below. To support the show, please text this episode to a friend or co worker who you think would enjoy saving the world instead of building SaaS for dogs or optimizing Pay Per Click ads. Every episode you listen to, every good idea you learn brings us one step closer to utopia. So thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.