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 is being paid to small modular reactors. Are they for real, and what is their significance to the continued growth in the nuclear industry?

Well, small modular reactors are 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 regulatory approval and commercialization, but we are starting to get meaningful announcements from some governments.

Where I live in Canada, we are starting to build three of these. The Tennessee Valley Authority has just approved the construction of its very first. You're starting to see very meaningful announcements being made by hyperscalers, which are the likes of Microsoft and Google, that are viewing this technology as part of their energy solution to power these very energy-intensive AI data centers.

There are a number of different partnerships and announcements that have been made in the last six months that are going to help bring these new designs to market. One part of the executive order that is really important is about streamlining the regulatory process, making it less time-intensive and costly to bring these new designs to market.

That's very important when you're trying to get new technologies to market. The US clearly wants to be a leader here. It's kind of wide open. There is no 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 AI, which I think a lot of the application is targeted towards.