How the U.S. is Trying to Become a Leader in Modular Nuclear Reactors to Power AI

All right, John, let's switch gears a little bit.

A lot of attention being paid to small modular reactors.

Are they for real?

And what is their significance to the continued growth in the nuclear industry?

Yeah, well, small modular reactors are basically an evolving technology.

They're often referred to as the fourth generation design, and they are for real.

I mean, they're still early stage in terms of their uh regulatory approval and and commercialization, but we are starting to get meaningful announcements from some governments.

There's where I live in Canada, we are starting to build three of these in uh Tennessee.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has just approved the construction of its very first.

And you're starting to see very meaningful announcements being made by hyperscalers, which are, you know, the likes of Microsoft and Google and whatnot that are viewing this technology as part of their energy solution to power these very energyintensive AI data centers.

And there are a number of different partnerships and and and announcements that have been made in the last 6 months that are going to help bring these new uh designs to market.

And one part of the executive order that is really important is about streamlining the regulatory process, making it less time inensive and costly to bring these new designs to market.

And that's very important when you're trying to get new technologies uh to market.

And the US clearly wants to be a leader here.

It's kind of wide open.

There is no, you know, there's no leader leading country here.

And the US I think has rightly determined that it needs to make these investments and incentivize the construction of these plants so that it will be a leader in in AI which is I think a lot of the application uh is targeted towards.