4 Executive Orders to Support U. S. Nuclear Energy

Last week, the Trump Administration issued 4 EO's signaling the importance of expanding nuclear energy and acknowledging the role of the Federal Government in supporting the growth of nuclear energy

Yesterday, Doug Sandridge and Robert Bryce visited with Su Turley with Energy News beat and David Blackmon with Energy Impacts to discuss the four impactful Executive Orders issued by the Trump Administration in support of nuclear energy. You can watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or read the transcript below:

Is nuclear energy having a renaissance…..a discussion of Trump’s Executive Orders in support of nuclear energy.

Stuart Turley [00:00:21] Hello everybody, welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name is Stu Turley, President of the CEO of the Sandstone Group, but this is also a joint podcast with David Blackmon on Energy Impacts. Both of these will be available later on those two channels, but I have two fantastic Substacks. Gurus that i steal all their content i mean i that i really read their content and we've got Robert Bryce I mean not a Robert Bryce but the Robert Bryce of energy RobertBryce.Substack.com welcome robert we got a lot going on

Robert Bryce [00:01:00] There's more than a few things to talk about. I will certainly accede you that that is true

Stuart Turley [00:01:05] And next we have Doug Sandridge. And Doug Sandridge is an old friend of the show. I love all of my podcasts with Doug Sandridge. He is not only just an oil and gas land man. In fact, I think who was it that show land man was modeled after him. But not only that, we've also got his own Substack, but he is also a nuclear energy advocate and he founded the oil and gas executives for nuclear and was even at Germany trying to keep Germany's nuclear reactors open and you're somewhere traveling the world, Doug. How are you today?

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:01:49] I'm wonderful. I'm in Stockholm and I'm on my way to Finland and Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania this week. So I'm going to have I'm gonna have a ball

Stuart Turley [00:02:01] Outstanding. So, well, I'm going to go ahead this, I saw this, we had to get this group of Substack authors together and talk about this because the executive, um, orders that came around, we have our great secretary of energy, uh, Chris Wright. I mean, he is absolutely the man, the right man at the right job for the right time. Good pun. But when we sit back and take a look, what were these? And I'm going to turn this over to Robert. Can you give us a good kind of what your feel is? And then we're going to go right on over to Doug Sandridge.

Robert Bryce [00:02:40] Sure, I mean, a couple of top level things. One, these four executive orders are the most important endorsements of nuclear energy since Eisenhower's Adams for Peace speech in 1953. We've never had an American, love Trump or hate him, we've never had an an American president who has come out with this strong a position on nuclear energy and its remarkable turn of events and much needed. Second, and none of this is going to be, you know, reviving nuclear, the U.S. Nuclear sector didn't die overnight, didn't over the last week or the last month or the last year. It slowly withered over decades. So none of this is gonna be cheap, quick, or easy. I think, you know, one of the main numbers in the executive orders says that the, you, know, the goal is to quadruple U. S. Nuclear capacity by 2050. I'll be happy if we double. I think quadrupling is pretty much out of the question. But then finally, I think this is, you know, something that is going to take a concerted, long-term bipartisan support from Congress and the White House to make this happen, because there are several challenges that are very obvious, supply chain permitting, NRC, capital, regulatory issues at the state, and then, you know, fuel supply, waste issues, all of these have to be dealt with. It won't be easy, but this is very heartening and I agree Chris, right? I'm certain had a big hand in this and you see long long long overdue and much needed

David Blackmon [00:04:09] Yeah, anyone who's talked with Secretary Wright over the last few years knows he's a big booster, even though he's in the oil and gas business, he's a big booster of nuclear energy for the future of the country as a low carbon solution, and he no doubt played a major role in designing these executive orders to do exactly what they're doing.

Stuart Turley [00:04:32] Doug, you were there in Germany, and this is going to be a huge impact. There's a couple of things we need to talk about today. You were there as an oil and gas executive championing nuclear in Germany as they were talking about following the really dumb road of closing their nuclear reactors down. What are your thoughts on the executive?

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:04:59] Well, I have to agree. First of all, Robert, all of you guys have been doing great reporting on this subject and it's moving so fast you can hardly keep up with it. And Robert is entirely correct that these executive orders, President Trump is showing himself to be the greatest leader on nuclear energy since Eisenhower. That's absolutely true. And I really love what he's done. It's a message of great commitment and great support. It sets a tone. It acknowledges how important nuclear energy is. It also acknowledges the importance of the federal role in this. But Robert is also completely correct that it's going to be I hate, my friends are going to hate me for this. But the reality is that there is no way to quadruple our nuclear power capacity by 2050. And Robert did some great analysis. Other day, which I know some people think, oh, well, Debbie Downer, dog gone it, but the reality is it's even worse than Robert portrayed it because, you know, he said, well we're going to have to build x many nuclear reactors for the next year, for the Next 25 years. And it's really worse than that because we can't really rely on any or we may have some small nuclear reactors, small modular reactors, we may Have a few of them built at the end of this decade. But we're not going to have any meaningful amount of them online in the next 5 to 10 years. So you're really talking about gigawatt scale, you're talking about building a bunch of AP1000s or something equivalent to that. And so the reality is, if you got an announcement, let's just say we got an announcement today, or let's say June 1st, we got announcement that they've approved that 20 new AP1000 are going to be built in the United States. See if that happens next week. Then it would literally be, if you had the workforce and everything worked out, it would be 10 years before you got the first one online. Then you'd have to have 20 new AP 1000s come online in 2035. And that's how long it would take. It would take from an announcement to first turning it on and take 10 years. And you turn the first one on, you turn the first 20 on in 2035, and you're going to have to build 20 every single year for 2035 for 15 years. That's 20 years, 20 units times 15 years, that's your 300 gigawatts. Yeah. Let's just be real. That is not really attainable. I mean, it's aspirational, but Robert's absolutely right. If anything, he understated how impossible it is to get to 400.

David Blackmon [00:07:50] Well, he's just such a, an eternal optimist. You know, he doesn't never want to be negative.

Robert Bryce [00:07:55] Well, look, I mean, I'm with Doug, I think, and everyone that's in the nuclear space is applauding this, but we have to be very sober about where we are. And the numbers are the numbers. They're not my numbers, they're the numbers, and I see you scrolling through the piece I wrote the other day. I mean one, the costs are still stratospheric, and we'll come back to that. But remember, France in the modern era has had, well, there is only one era for nuclear, right? That's modern era. When they really were expanding their nuclear fleet, they were adding about three gigawatts a year. And Doug was right, you know, the idea of building, you do the simple math and say 300 gigawatths in 25 years, that's 12 gigawats a year, well, France was only able to add about three gigabytes a year and they did it with a standardized design. All of the reactors were designed by Framatome. Now we have 50, 50, five zero companies vying to market. Small modular reactors around the world. So we have too many designs chasing too few slots and we're gonna have to there's going to have to be some winnowing down and standardization of these designs to deploy them at scale and it's gonna have be a standardization not just on the design the chemistry light water or or molten salt or you know heat air gas cooled You know, all of them have their attributes, but we're gonna have to decide, and then we're going to have to decide on a certain number of sizes. Maybe there's one that's 20 megawatts, one that five, and then 200 megawattes and AP 1000s. That's four different designs, but you know, again, we're to have narrow this down both in chemistry and in output, and that's just one of the regulatory challenges that will have to be addressed.

David Blackmon [00:09:42] That's right. I, you know, and it, so it, it's all very aspirational, um, and for context, uh, and the piece I wrote for Forbes, I pointed out that going from 100 gigawatts to 400 gigawattes of nuclear power is like adding three grids, the size of what we have in Texas in just 25 years. Uh, that's a lot, that a lot. It's really, really big and it's really aspirational. And I think like Robert says, if we could, if We could double it. In 25 years, that would be a hell of an accomplishment, but of course, what, what the administration and I think Congress as well, they're trying to do the Eisenhower comparison is great because it's kind of like when Eisenhower, you know, tried to set what did set off a national project to build the interstate highway system, that really is what secretary Wright and president Trump want to try to create here with nuclear energy, but it's, you know, but just so much more complex and difficult. Today than it was 60 years ago, or I guess that's 70 years ago now. Um, so yeah, it's a, you're not going to get the 400, but boy, if you could get to 200, it can make a hell of a difference.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:10:55] Yeah, I think Robert really framed it. I believe this was you who framed it the other day and said, what we've just seen here in these four executive orders is we've seen the politics of nuclear energy. But the politics is not the same as the policy. And we don't quite, as much as we love these four Executive Orders, as much of the intentions were good, that they are not, they don't provide what we really need. In as far as policy and I heard someone else I'm not going to say who said this but someone else over the weekend said these four executive orders are unspecific enough to be meaningless. Now I don't want to say that that's my opinion but I mean it does kind of say there's a lot of talk but there needs to be action and policy congressional support to put teeth into these things because just saying it doesn't make it happen. And So we've set a good tone of what we want to do. We still need to do it. And when you think about, they basically said to the NRC, we need new rules. We need faster review of the designs and approval of the design. But ultimately, the NLC is still going to be the one that decides the new rules, so I'm not sure quite how much we've done to accelerate it, other than to get us all focused on what we need to.

David Blackmon [00:12:16] Well, there's a couple of elements of it that I think can have an accelerating impact. First is the use of the Defense Production Act, and that gives the president pretty extraordinary powers to bypass a lot of these regulatory holdups as we saw during the COVID process. Now, you know, what we sped up during COVID is, you know, is anyone's opinion on how productive that ultimately was. But we did see an incredibly fast paced approval. Vaccinations which are really therapeutic anyway I don't want to get into that

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:12:53] And I agree with you, David. I think that that is one of the strongest pieces we have now, because if we can shift this to DOE and DOD and get it out of NRC, we don't know yet whether that's going to happen. But most of my friends in the nuclear industry believe that this this Defense Department aspect of it is probably one of the most impactfully meaningful immediately because they can change the rule. They can write the rules that are different from NRC and bypass a lot of that, especially with supply chain and contracts.

David Blackmon [00:13:26] That's correct. And that's the other element of it that can really have a very meaningful impact because number one, those secretaries that had DOE, DOE is another element of that. DOI is another of it. And the Pentagon have extraordinary authorities to, to determine how their lands are used that are under their management. And then the second aspect of that is by, by citing these projects on federal plans. Regardless of which department it is, you're able to bypass a lot of the standard holdups and permitting that hold up energy projects today. You know, you'll be able to bypass many of the endangered species and archeological holdups that you experience, rights of way, landowner rights. Well, hell, you got one landowner. It's the federal government. If the feds want to do something, they do it. If they want to give you a right of way you're going to have it. And so, and of course the... The acreage you need to site a plant or whatever it is. So those two elements of it can really have an accelerating impact. And because the Pentagon has installations all over the country, it can be national. Whereas, you know, with Department of Interior, it's mainly gonna be in the Intermountain West. But still, that aspect of it, I think, can really be helpful. But all the other elements have to be in place, including, and maybe especially, How's this all financed, right? Where's the funding gonna come from? And Congress tried to accelerate a little of that by expanding, you know, in last week's bill that passed, expanding nuclear projects, access to the investment tax credit, but that's just a small piece of what has to happen in that room.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:15:15] And where's the workforce going to come from?

David Blackmon [00:15:17] Right. And the workforce is the other huge one, right? I mean, you know, that's a big, big problem.

Robert Bryce [00:15:24] If I could just follow up on David's point, because I think it's worth fleshing out. And it is specifically mentioned, one of the executive orders focuses on the Department of Defense. And I was just looking up Project Pele, which is a reactor project that is underway now. And in fact, they've broken ground at Idaho National Labs. And the DOD doesn't have to go to the NRC and say, Mother, may I? They can do what they want. And the D.O.D. Has plenty of nuclear fuel, and they have decades of expertise in dealing with nuclear power. And I just found there's something on the NRC website about Project Pele and also nuclear power in the DoD. And it has something here that I didn't know until I'm just looking at it. The U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program ran from 1954 through 1977. Eight reactors were constructed, five were portable, each between 1 and 10 megawatts electric. Of various designs and for various purposes. So, and then, and it also says the first reactor to be connected to a grid in 1957 is an army reactor SM-1. So, you know, the DOD has that capability. They have the land, they have expertise background, they have the budget, right? So I think that that could be the area where we see the quickest response because it's one lever. That the federal government as a whole can pull, the executive can pull without going to the other branches and actually without having to finance it. They can do it out of their own pocket. And so that, and the territory, the footprint for the project is secure and it's good for the military, right? Get off the, you don't need to rely on the regional grid. You have your own power plants, something they've been talking about for a long time.

Stuart Turley [00:17:12] One of the same.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:17:13] Oh, sorry Stu, go ahead.

Stuart Turley [00:17:15] Uh, one of the things that this brings up is I've talked about it on a couple episodes again, and the news in my news channel and in things is activating the United States, uh, merchant Marines so that when we start our ship building and we start also looking at export as a service of micro reactors, Robert, you nailed it. The US has been doing this for a very long time and we need to maintain control of those, but look at monetizing it with the US Marines maintaining control of either A, those ships, or B, those sites. And I think once we integrate those into the merchant Marines or the US Marine Corps, I love this as being able to expedite nuclear and that's not being talked about anywhere, but it's always been in the background. Does that make sense?

Robert Bryce [00:18:14] Absolutely, I think that that makes a lot of sense and I think there's another part here that is worth considering and it's about, and Trump says this in the executive order, I think it's exactly the language in the one that was finalized, but something like 87% of all the reactors that have been built in the last few years have been Russian Chinese design. If you look at this from a global perspective, the US has led the world in nuclear energy now for decades and the Chinese and the Russians are sprinting ahead of us and they're way ahead of this right now. So from, it's not just national prestige, it is not just about export, it about technology and about leadership and about the Russians, they're going and exporting their technology to a lot of countries, Turkey, Pakistan, I think, Iran. Those are gonna be client states of the Russians for decades. And again, this is something that is not accidental. It's been a decades long effort and we're way, way, way behind.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:19:18] He's absolutely right. And I hear this all the time from my friends in Europe, Norway, Poland, Estonia, all of these countries, they want the US technology. Once you buy the technology, you're going to rely on them for the fuel, for the fue reprocessing. This is a 100-year marriage for some of these companies. And so they don't want to be tied to the Chinese and the Russian for 100 years. But right now we're in a really tough position because they're not able to compete with the Chinese and the Russians. We're not to deliver what they are. So there's a hunger for it. We need to find a way to deliver.

Stuart Turley [00:19:55] China just announced that they have 10 new nuclear reactors. It's going to bring their fleet up to I believe 58 or 70 somewhere and I have to go look at my article, but they could get their nuclear reactors down to 2.7 billion dollars per reactor. We are not there. We're at 30 billion. Whatever the number is I mean, it's unbelievable cost difference You just nailed a huge huge problem. And didn't Poland just buy two or is that a different country? But somebody

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:20:29] No, Poland has agreed to several different, they're going to build some small and some medium and some large reactors and right now all of their technology that they have, I believe that everything they've given to out forbid has all been American technology. They want the American technology and now we've got to deliver.

Robert Bryce [00:20:51] It was three AP1000s in Poland and Chris Wright went to Poland, it was last month, right? It was, I think, three AP 1000s. But I have the numbers here because I wrote a piece, well, in my article where I talked about on Substack, talked about the cost issue, the cost issues that were the cost numbers were thrown out by TVA to build the first-of-a-kind BWRX 300. At Clinch River, you work it out, it's $18 million a megawatt. $18,000,000 a megawatts, that's cartoonish, that it's unaffordable, where you can build new gas for less than $2,000.000 a Megawatt, Vogel, I did the calculations, $16.7 million a Megawatts. The AP1000s in Poland, they're projecting $13 million at Ontario Power Generation, the Darlington, where they're planning to build four of the BWRX 300s. They're estimating about 12 million dollars a megawatt. Uh, and meanwhile, electricity data frost, they've completed Flamingville last year, and that was about $9 million a megawatt. So This is the other big issue here. We the costs have to come down and massively so

David Blackmon [00:22:00] you do that, you, you agree to a standard design and, and that enables you to gain economies of scale, right? I mean, that's one of the main ways.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:22:10] Much they reduced the cost at Baraka in Dubai from unit number one to unit number four came down 60 percent. They just completed those in subsequent years. So it can be done, but Robert's absolutely right. Nothing happens if we can't get the cost right.

Robert Bryce [00:22:28] China and Stu mentioned the Chinese reactors now. This is China and what can you believe that you know comes out of China?

Stuart Turley [00:22:34] I was trying to say that, but how do you get a word in edgewise?

Robert Bryce [00:22:40] Well, the numbers that they're putting out for those 10 reactors, they said that 10 were going to cost something like $27.5 billion. They're 1.1 gigawatts. It's $2.3 million a megawatt. That's a stretch, right? But still, even if you double that or even triple that, it's still less than Flamondale and still half or less of what Vogel cost.

Stuart Turley [00:23:03] That's why you're paid the medium bucks to be here. Robert, you're exactly right. And I was trying to get that out there is that a, we can't trust anything from China. We can barely trust anything. From our government, the fact that we can have our military operate small nuclear reactors and train high school kids, Doug, you brought up a huge training point on this is that is where are we going to get our workers? If the military can fire up a high school kid and throw him in a nuclear reactor as a nuclear engineer, we got to leverage our great military expertise and bypass the regulatory process. We are at a mission critical standpoint. If we don't take energy as an export service and use our military, we are stupid.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:24:00] Well, I got another idea. I had a phone call from a developer the other day and this person said to me we have all of the nuclear expertise that we need to develop this project. We have the financing, we have the accounting, we have everything we need and this person said I don't know where I'm going to get the workforce and this person said what about the oil and gas industry? We've got really competent engineering in oil and gas. You've got, these are the, these oil and gas companies are some of the few companies in the world that still build large things on budget, on time, around the world. And I think this is one of the, one of the synergies between nuclear and oil and gasses. We've got a very competent workforce. And as some of the folks in the oil of gas business have told me, we can build these big plants probably as effective as anybody and all you're doing is you're just putting in a nuclear reactor to generate rather than a gas turbine and so there's no reason they don't need to be involved in that aspect of it you can use a lot I think I think we're going to find oil and gas can contribute a really great workforce to this project.

Stuart Turley [00:25:18] If we only had a secretary of energy that understands nuke, he does. Dang, I love it. Chris Wright is so pro-nuclear that he was looking to nuclear-fy his energy liberty frag fleet. Holy smokes, Batman. Doug, you just nailed it out of the park.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:25:40] I think the Norwegians are looking at it that way as well. They've got an incredible Norwegian workforce. They work in really tough conditions offshore. They've great engineers, great employees. They would be the perfect people to bring in to start working on some of these projects when we have a labor shortage.

Robert Bryce [00:25:56] So if I could just follow up, go ahead. Well, just follow-up very quickly on the military side of this. You know, you look at anyone in the utility business, I go to, you know, I've speak to a lot of different groups and who are the people who are staffing a lot these rural co-ops, municipal utilities, et cetera. They're former Navy guys. You know the Navy is there, you can't swing a cat in the, in the utilities sector without hitting former nuclear Navy or Navy guys in general. So, they are already a source of... Important training for the utility sector in general. Second, just your point about Norway and shipbuilding, one of the areas that, I mean, we have a nuclear navy and the Russians are way ahead of us on this in deploying nuclear power ships. They've deployed one in PVEC in Siberia, they've taken their nuclear reactor technology, just slapped it on a barge, and then you have, suddenly you have a power ship that you can tie up at the dock and provide power on shore. Well, this is something I've seen myself. I saw it in Beirut, where in the Lebanese, we're leasing Turkish power ships running on fuel oil. Extraordinarily dirty process. And a lot of air pollution in the coastal areas where they were docked in Gia and around there on the Lebanes coast. But this is an area where there is enormous opportunity, market opportunity. And one of the companies that's pursuing it, the name will come to me in just a minute. The nuclear power ship idea is one that's very, has a lot of potential because so much of the world's population, particularly in the developing world, is in coastal areas.

David Blackmon [00:27:34] Yeah, the discussion about Chris Wright, understanding energy and being from natural gas and oil industry brings up another point that I haven't written about that, but I feel like this project, especially as it deals with putting these projects on federal lands, needs to be expanded a bit to include natural gas power plants, because you see so many of these AI developers planning a two-step approach to power their data centers. First with natural gas because it's already available or you can build it in just a few years, get it permitted and built in the short term. And then with a longer term view to having nuclear either mixed in with the natural gas or replacing the natural guests 15, 20 years down the road when it's actually feasible to do that. So I just feel like we're kind of missing a first step in all of this in the administration, not also You know, having plans to use those federal lands to house natural gas power plants, because, you know, we're having a hard time in many jurisdictions, getting any kind of baseload power built, right? And so to the extent you can leverage those federal lands to do that in the near term, seems like it would be a beneficial boost to what's already in those orders.

Stuart Turley [00:28:59] You can sure take a look at the natural gas power grid and the natural gas power lines, all those that are approved and all those that are underway. And when I take a look at The National Grid as a whether or not it's going to meet demand, there are very few spots in the United States that A, I would build a data center and B, that I think have a long-term and those are Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and New York. And I'm like, I'm where's the rest of the United States following along on this. They ain't there. It's a problem.

David Blackmon [00:29:40] And not for nothing, talking about the engineering expertise, ExxonMobil is getting into the natural gas power plant business. Mr. Wright, if you're watching, you might want to give the folks at Exxon a call.

Robert Bryce [00:29:56] Well, Chevron is doing the same, right? They both announced major gas-to-power initiatives. The question, to follow on Doug's point about the labor, the other is going to be the cost issue. And it's not just on the cost of labor. It's going to on transformers, breakers, switch gear, all of the electrical kit, all of the grid-related equipment. All those costs are going up dramatically, and so are the wait times for a lot of delivery of these commodities, and they are commodities, but high-power transformers in particular, we're not building many of them here in the U.S. We have to import them. So all of this is of a piece, and it all has to be addressed at once, and that's why I've said before, I'll say it one more time, nothing about this will be quick, cheap, or easy.

Stuart Turley [00:30:45] Quick, cheap, or easy, that's a t-shirt waiting to happen.

David Blackmon [00:30:49] No, all the quick cheap and easy is in solar and wind, right? You know, that's what they tell us.

Robert Bryce [00:30:54] Yeah, right. Yeah, the lowest levelized cost of energy, right? Yeah, that's right.

Stuart Turley [00:30:59] You know, Germany has always been a poster child of the left green new deal, uh, and net zero. And now that we've seen deindustrialization take hold in Germany, we, they're the poster child. Of what not to do. And Doug, are we seeing them get ready to fire their nuclear reactors back up?

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:31:21] You know, I don't know. They had a conference here last week. Well, let's back up. In January, Radiant Energy Group came out with a really great report that talked about what could be done to restart German nuclear. And they're trying to tee it up in case they got a new government this spring, which they did. And the report said... That there was, I think it was eight plants that could be brought online in the next six years, re-brought back on to online in next six year. And each of these plants is in some various level of decommissioning. Rady did a really good job of reaching out and identifying local people on the ground who are personally working in these plants and familiar with the circumstances. And they were able to determine plant by plant what needed to be done. I believe they had one plant that could re-open this year. And maybe another two plants that could be open in the next two to three years, and then a total of six or eight plants by the end of the decade. So I think they could. And then the new government came in, and the new government is pro-nuclear. The problem is, is they don't have a majority. They have to, you know, form a coalition over here with somebody else before they can do anything. But anyway, a radiant energy group and some other organizations participated in a forum in Berlin on Thursday, and I've heard that it was just. Well received, well attended, everybody's raving about it. I was unable to make it to the conference. I still am waiting to see, again, like everything else, if talk translates into action. But there seems to be a really strong movement in Germany right now to try and at least bring back some of these recently decommissioned plants. So that's kind of the update.

Stuart Turley [00:33:04] At least they bought a large chunk of uranium from Russia last year. You got that going for them.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:33:11] It's a little signaling that maybe somebody's thinking about it. I'm not going to predict it's going to happen. The politics over here are just crazy, but I think that there is a big push and I think there is chance that Germany could reopen some of those closed plants.

David Blackmon [00:33:28] Very cool. That actually brings us to the next aspect of these four orders. And that is the incentivizing the acceleration of uranium mining in the United States to try to reassure the supply chains for actual uranium. So much of which we now get from freaking Russia, uh, for no good reason at all, other than, you know,

Stuart Turley [00:33:51] I wonder how much of the stuff we're still buying was sold to Russia from Hillary Clinton that we're buying back. I'm just asking. This is just a question.

David Blackmon [00:34:03] It is a valid question, but I'm not going there.

Stuart Turley [00:34:07] No, neither am I. I just was asking.

Robert Bryce [00:34:11] But well, I think that the I think the that point on mining is well taken, David, that it's also the the enrichment and turning it into fuel. And this is the part where the US is, in fact, the latest data from the EIA. And I wrote about this was one of the reasons why the five reasons I'm piece on substack five reasons why the US won't quadruple nuclear capacity by 2050. We don't have a secure fuel supply chain. And we're now remember the Russians are Russian fuel as of this summer, there'll be prohibitions on the importation without asking the grant of an exception from the federal government. And then by, I think it was 2027 or 2028, it will be forbidden to import Russian fuel. And depending on whose numbers you believe we're now still getting 20, 25% or about 20%, I think of our nuclear fuel for our nuclear fleet coming from Russia. So, again, all of this has to be solved at once and Cintris is the company that has an American-owned company. They need, they're gonna need federal money, federal loan guarantee or a loan of some three or $4 billion to ramp up their fuel enrichment capacity in Piketon, Ohio. So again, this is gonna require Congress, it's gonna require concerted and sustained effort.

David Blackmon [00:35:30] Maybe we could repurpose some of that money that went to Stacey Abrams in December for that purpose.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:35:36] Yeah, I'm less worried about the uranium than I am the processing of the uranium. I mean, we there are a lot of plate there. We have a lot uranium here. It's going to be hard to mine. It's hard to mind anything here in the U.S. But we can do it. And there are lot of other friendly places like Canada and Australia and other places. Kazakhstan, we can get uranium. It's the processing. But another aspect of this is we need to gear up our reprocessing. Look at all the spent fuel that we have seen all over the country. And there's several hundred years worth of fuel sitting there if we can just get our reprocessing facilities up and running. So to me, processing and reprocess are the two big keys to that.

Stuart Turley [00:36:14] I think the, the other piece of that puzzle, Doug, you just nailed it on that. And I, I, when I get a conversation with Robert Bryce, Doug Sandridge, and David Blackman, my head spinning, cause I've got all these side conversations rolling that this is really important. You sit back and look at the spent fuel is waiting to be taken advantage of. You take a thorium reactor, you can take that spent fuel and that's brand new fuel for a thorum reactor. If you did that in in micro reactors. And through those out, you would never have to have any fuel problems whatsoever. Um, Copenhagen electronics or Copenhagen atomics has already got that thing moving for the thorium reactors. Why can't we do that? Um, and then the other piece of this puzzle is, uh, there is uranium mining using oil and gas drilling techniques. I interviewed a CEO on that and that there is a way to get uranium out of drilling and not strip mining. But the 90% of refining mineral ore that China does is probably the biggest non-talked-about issue that we got to get stateside and that ain't going to happen. I mean, the geranium, we'd have 50% of our needs now. We can finally do in the United States this year. I was surprised by that one. I mean, the rest of them, we can't.

Robert Bryce [00:37:48] I'll just jump in one quick thought, you know, the thorium reactor idea, I'm not opposed to it, but I, you know, again, we're gonna have to standardize. I mentioned the PowerShip company, that's Thorcon, my friend Robert Hargraves is one of the founders of that company. They're getting some traction with permitting in Indonesia. But again, they need, you know, a billion dollars to build their first PowerSip. So Yeah, thorium, you know, again, I'm agnostic on what the chemistry should be, what the fuel, you know HALU, TRISO, you now, or regular light water. I, you, know, I, I just at the point like, I'm Harry Truman, show me, we need to build, we need the build the damn things. And, and it's a combination of all of these challenges. And if I could step, just, you know, put nuclear aside for a minute, because, you like used to, I have a lot of thoughts in my head about things we could talk about here, but. What is the reality in the near term for the US power grid? It's gonna be gas. It's going to be gas and more gas and more gas because that is what can be built quickly and deployed fairly rapidly. And we have, I don't know, I don't want to get too technical. I think this is an allowable on podcast, a shit ton of natural gas in the US. And so all of the AI projects that are being built, whether it's Stargate project and Abilene or others, they're going to to be using gas because that's what's available. The recommissioning of Three Mile Island, the recommission of Palisades, those projects, those nuclear plants, that's gonna happen, but that's going to take years. And meanwhile, gas is gonna be the story. One final thought. In March, Energy Transfer, the biggest pipeline company in the US, in their investor deck said they had inquiries from 70 data centers in 12 states. Their latest investor deck said they have 200 inquiries from data centers in 14 states. Now, is that an indicator of hype? And the fact that now that we've reached peak hype on AI and data centers, maybe. But nevertheless, presenting in Louisville on Thursday, yeah, went from 70 data centers in 12 states in March to 214 states in May. Holy smokes.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:39:58] Well, and then a corollary to that is transmission, because I had seen in the last 10 years, transmission, we've only built, you think about how much gas production has grown. Transmission has only grown 25% of the amount of the growth in volume. So we're trying to cram more volume, but we're not building the transportation, the pipelines at anywhere near the same scale as we're growing the volume. So transportation. And pipelines is a big part of that problem.

David Blackmon [00:40:30] And then transmission on the power grid.

Stuart Turley [00:40:35] Go ahead, a real quick question. Are those 14 states, Republican led states or Democrat states? Cause I have a theory that green energy policy states are not going to be getting data centers and I'd kind of be curious to that. You talking about Colorado?

Robert Bryce [00:40:56] Well, energy transfer doesn't disclose where, you know, where that they just have it's a little box on their in their investor deck. So they're not disclosing what those states are. But I'm presenting in Louisville, I said to the Public Energy Authority of Kentucky, on Thursday, and of course, I'm going to be talking about gas, because that's they're a joint action agency that's gas focused. But a lot of this data center activities just it's going to be concentrated in a handful of states, it's gonna be Virginia, of course. Texas, second, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, and Indiana. And those are the numbers from data center hawk. And so obviously Texas is gonna be just, right now they're projecting 15 gigawatts of new data center demand in Texas, 34 gigawatths in Virginia. But I don't necessarily believe that number. I don't think they have enough gas deliverability there. But Ohio, Arizona, these are the states where this... Yes, electricity demand in the US is going to grow, but it's going to be very specific about where that demand growth happens, and particularly when it comes to AI.

David Blackmon [00:42:00] To answer Stu's question, of all those states you named, only one has a Democratic governor. That was a fluke.

Stuart Turley [00:42:08] And they happen to have a nuclear reactor sitting there. So that makes a difference. No, Oregon has a Democratic governor.

David Blackmon [00:42:17] Oh, I missed Oregon. Sorry. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And they always will.

Stuart Turley [00:42:23] But Oregon has a baseline of dams and hydro and whenever you match baseline to the grid and then you add renewables to it, the grid can survive a little longer if you've got hydro, but the folks in Oregon have taken down so many dams because of the environmentalists Sierra Club, they've lost that long-term ability. Uh, for sustainability in their upper grid up there.

Robert Bryce [00:42:58] And they're and they're gas constrained in Oregon as well. So, but I think it's one of the reasons why we're going to see a lot of this demand growth here in Texas. I don't know what you all, I know David you're here in in Texas and Stu you are as well, but some of these ERCOT numbers that have come out, what is it 60 gigawatts they're projecting of growth by 2030 something like It just that makes my head spin. I just think it's not even possible, you know, and I'd

David Blackmon [00:43:23] Yeah. And it's so much higher. Okay. Then like embarrass, I talk to embarrass all the time. They're predicting maybe 20% growth in the grid by 2035 in Texas and generation need, whereas ERCOT is talking 60%, right? 70% almost by 2025. So that's a huge gap there in projections. And I, I gotta be honest, I trust the experts and embarrass a lot more than I do at ERCot. So. Sorry folks at ERCOP, but you know, it just the way it is.

Stuart Turley [00:43:57] Thanks so much for getting them on the podcast We'll never get them oh well

David Blackmon [00:44:00] Yeah

Stuart Turley [00:44:02] I'm just kidding.

David Blackmon [00:44:02] Kidding, because I get embarrassed anytime I need to.

Stuart Turley [00:44:06] Yeah, in various good, good, good people there on the sales block, though they're looking to be sold. So you sit back and take a look at, um, uh, the numbers from, uh, in Varis are great, great people. I absolutely respect all of them over there. Now Urquhart, we're dogging Urquart a little bit. I'm going to give them a little bit of a attaboy for surviving this. They seem to be the best out of the three sections of the grid in the United States. The other ones happen to be bigger, but every Texas is a legend in our own mind, and we rightfully should be, but I will give them an attaboi for trying because the next five years, you look at the growth. Of the natural gas plants of planned versus permitted and rolling, Texas is the only one with planned and turbines bought. And when you take a look at turbines bought as a piece of that puzzle, it's a big one.

David Blackmon [00:45:10] Yeah, I mean, there's still plenty of problems on the grid, but a lot of them have been corrected and it has been pretty well stabilized since 2021, obviously. A lot of that's been political and the legislature actually doing some things that needed to be done a decade ago, but they finally got them done. But there's, you know, there are still issues. The incentivization program that they passed in the 23, 23 section. And had a huge initial response. But now so many of those projects are being backed off on because of financing and inability to obtain turbines and some of them. And so there's still issues there, but by and large, the ERCOT grid is far more stable today than it was in 2021.

Stuart Turley [00:46:01] Robert, let me ask this of you, and that is microgrids are gonna become more and more prevalent for data centers and taking a look at, you mentioned Stargate. Stargate has got a natural gas power plant going in there that will power 96,000 homes that will not be attached to ERCOT. So you're taking a looking, I was visiting with Steve Reese about this in that you've got not necessarily that data center, but you've natural gas coming out of the normal distribution system to supply dedicated microgrids for the AI. And this is complicating my formula, trying to figure out if the United States is on track or not. What are your thoughts on that? That's a complicated process.

Robert Bryce [00:46:46] Well, it is. And I think that from talking with people who are working on this with the hyperscalers, the hyparscalers know that they don't have an option but to go behind the grid, or behind the meter, rather. That if they want firm power, they're going to have to build it and own it themselves. Because they're getting pushback from the RTOs, they're going to push back from the utilities and from the public. And I thinking in many ways, that's absolutely right. The general rate payer should not be subsidizing Amazon. Bezos has a 500-foot yacht that has a yacht. We don't need to be subsidizing Bezos anymore. We've already done that. But I take your point, and that is that it goes back to the point or the issue of is there going to be enough gas to go around, following on Doug's point about we're not building enough transmission. A gas transmission, high voltage transmission for electrons is another issue, but. What I fear overall, it's one of the reasons why I'm, I won't say fear, but is a real concern, is our electric grid is becoming too dependent on a single fuel, that's natural gas. And that we've got to be very clear-eyed about what's happening, because the amount of gas fire generation in the US has nearly tripled since Enron went bankrupt in 2001. And I'm pro gas, I love me some natural gas, but. It's a just-in-time fuel. And as we saw during winter storm Uri, as we had a near disaster during winterstorm Elliot in 2022, you're not out of gas and bad things happen.

Stuart Turley [00:48:14] That is for sure. We've got just a few more minutes here. Doug, what are your thoughts after this conversation and kind of lead us into where you think you thought, because you had some plain time on your way over the pond to conger around on all this. Tell us what you got going on in your mind up there.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:48:38] Well, you know, I think I'm going to go back to my opening statement, Robert's opening statement. I love what Trump did with these orders. I think it sends a great signal to the country about how important nuclear energy is, how important energy is in general. And we have seen some really great things happen in the nuclear industry in the last four years. You've heard me use this analogy before, people say, I don't see anything happening. And I say You got a duck sitting on a fast running river and he's sitting still and what you don't realize is how fast his feet are paddling underneath to keep him still. And so I think that's where we are now. The nuclear industry is paddling really hard right now under the surface. And so there are a lot of things going on, but we haven't done anything yet. And so now we got to translate all this aspirational a desire and all this hard work and all the advocacy that's been going on everything that's done to make the... Present a good political environment to do stuff, now we have to start building. We should be build, baby, build. And that's what we gotta get going.

Stuart Turley [00:49:47] David, what do you got?

David Blackmon [00:49:49] Well, I agree with everything Doug just said. I think this is not the end of the game. It's the start of the games, these four orders. There's a lot more to do and the best part of it is we can all feel good about the fact that we have people running our major departments in our federal government who actually understand all of this. It's not just Chris Wright. It's also Doug Burgum over at DOI and it's the White House. Has people in the White House who understand all of this as well. Lee Zeldin at EPA as well, and so it's, we're in a really good spot here and the potential for this administration to keep pushing this ball forward is stronger than really any other administration we've had in our lifetime as it relates to energy. So I just, uh, it's it's a great way to start. Uh, I know there's a lot more, many more steps that have to be taken here. And we can rest assured that the people leading the charge understand that.

Robert Bryce [00:50:53] I'll add just a quick point on that and I'll add to what David and Doug have said because I agree with their points. One of the critical issues here is going to be the future of the loan programs office at the Department of Energy and under Jigger Shaw, they did a lot of questionable deals. Shaw hasn't answered questions about it. I put questions to him. He refused to answer them unless I had him on a podcast and I said well that's not going to happen. Why did you rush out all these deals right at the end. You know, they're investigating something like $15 billion worth of deals that were done just in the last few months of the Biden administration under the loan programs office. So there's, you know, some intent of, I won't say scandal, but discredited entity within the DOE that they're going to have to get rid of that stink and that stain and to get credibility back with the LPO. But the L.P.O. Will be critical, and there is, I think, a consensus, and I've talked to my friend Emmett Penny about this. That you're not gonna see a major build-out of nuclear in the U.S. Without the LPO providing loan guarantees or other grants or something else and the DOE and the federal government, it's gonna require cash and it's going to be federal cash. It's gonna have to be on the table to catalyze this movement. So let's make no mistake. It's not just political support, it's money. And in this environment where the U S government is overextended, we have way too much debt. We have this... I think this silly reconciliation package where we're not gonna tax tips, oh great. Well, I mean, we're insolvent if we keep going this way. So we have to be very sober again about what's gonna be required to make this happen. I'm hopeful, but I'm very sober about what the prospects are and the LPO is gonna be one part of this big issue, all the issues that have to be addressed.

Stuart Turley [00:52:44] I'll tell you what, this seems like a great way to kind of end this with some thoughts just real quickly on this and that is I love having four sub stack authors on here trying to have fun in the discussion. Not only are we all podcast kind of guys as well too. So I think we've got some future discussions on this one as well. I think we hit a few high points. Uh, again, I want to thank you guys for taking the time today because I rely on all of you as expert advisors, and I truly appreciate each and every one of you. Uh, Doug, tell us how people get in touch with you.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:53:27] You can put my business email. I'm happy for you to do that. Put it in the show notes if you want to. Doug @ Fulcrumef.com. I'm also very active on LinkedIn. So reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I do write energy ruminations substacks. So if you're looking for something entertaining, I write what feeds my heart, so.

Stuart Turley [00:53:50] I'll tell you, and it's a great substack. I love your articles and your great work that you've done on a lot of things and outstanding. And Robert, tell us about where to find you.

Robert Bryce [00:54:03] You can't escape me on the Google I'm I'm all over the interweb. I'm on I'm on RobertBryce.substack.com I'm on TikTok. Yeah, I'm on TikTok, hell yes, I am on TikTok! I'm on LinkedIn, I m on YouTube, yeah, all that stuff. So I'm easy to find. But my Substack is where I'm, I love sub stack, by the way, total plug for Substack. I m a total homer after being in journalism my whole career to be able to write what I I want, when I want with the content. With the pictures or the charts that I want. It's fantastic, love it.

Stuart Turley [00:54:35] Isn't that great? And David, how do people find you?

David Blackmon [00:54:40] Uh, Blackmon.substack.com. I repost everything I write anywhere else there. I, you can find me at Forbes. You can find it, the daily color, petroleum economist, world oil magazine, LinkedIn. And, and on X, uh, you, can't find me by name, but you can find me Energy Absurdity.

Stuart Turley [00:54:59] Which is absolutely a great X account to follow as well, as well as your anything else. So with that guys, my name is Stu Turley, President of the Sandstone Group. I'm on TheEnergyNewsbeat.substack.com and also energynewsbeat.co. You can always find me on LinkedIn, which I try to now ignore because it shuts me down. So anyway, with that, we thank everybody for having such a great day. I had a blast. We will see you guys soon.

Douglas C. Sandridge [00:55:27] Thank you.