In this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I sat down with Matt Loszak, co-founder and CEO of Aalo Atomics, a startup based in Austin, Texas, that’s reimagining how we build nuclear energy.
We recorded this inside Aalo’s 40,000 square foot factory, standing next to a full-scale non-nuclear prototype of their modular reactor. From their XMR (Extra-Modular Reactor) design to their fast-moving timeline and Texas roots, Matt and his team are attempting something most nuclear startups have only dreamed about: a scalable, repeatable, factory-built nuclear product, with a willing customer base already knocking.
This is part two in our emerging advanced nuclear series (check out my previous episode with Natura Resources), and I’ll have more coming soon.
Factory First: Why Aalo Is Starting with the End in Mind
One of the biggest problems in nuclear energy has always been cost and schedule overruns. Utilities want clean, firm power, but they can’t risk betting the farm on projects that might be delayed a decade or more.
Aalo’s answer: Build everything in a factory. Ship it. Assemble it on-site. Then repeat. Just like Henry Ford revolutionized cars, they want to bring manufacturing efficiency to nuclear energy.
Their first prototype, the Aalo Zero, is a non-nuclear testbed for design and production.
The full product, the Aalo Pod, will house five 10MW reactors and one turbine for 50MW of high-availability power.
Everything is modular and designed for rapid assembly. No giant poured-concrete domes. No on-site construction nightmares.
AI Data Centers: A New Catalyst for Nuclear
Why now? And why nuclear?
The answer, Matt says, is simple: AI data centers.
The U.S. is expected to need 40 gigawatts of new data center load in the next five years and that’s probably a conservative estimate. That’s the equivalent of powering 40 mid-size cities.
In other words: the perfect early customers to get new nuclear technologies off the ground.
And it’s not just a temporary beachhead. By targeting data centers now, Aalo hopes to come down the cost curve quickly and unlock other markets, from small utilities to developing nations, where price sensitivity is higher.
Not Your Grandpa’s Reactor: Aalo’s XMR Tech
Aalo isn’t doing SMRs. Or microreactors. Or molten salt.
Instead, they’re building a sodium-cooled, thermal-spectrum reactor that:
Uses off-the-shelf uranium dioxide fuel
Runs at atmospheric pressure (unlike pressurized water reactors)
Leverages sodium’s superior heat conductivity for passive safety
Is designed for factory fabrication, with minimal forging
And while sodium sometimes raises eyebrows (high-school chemistry students remember its reactivity with water), Matt points out that decades of operation with sodium reactors have shown a strong safety record, including EBR-II, which ran for decades in Idaho without incident.
Aalo’s twist: they’re using a thermal spectrum instead of fast, which allows them to skip high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) and use existing fuel to accelerate timelines.
Why Texas? Policy, Talent, and Its Own Grid
Aalo isn’t in Austin by accident.
Texas has its own grid (ERCOT), which means more flexibility to innovate.
The state boasts deep energy talent from oil & gas, Tesla, and SpaceX.
House Bill 14, passed in the most recent legislative session, includes $350M in grants to support nuclear innovation and possibly more to come.
Texas A&M just selected Aalo as one of four companies for deployment at the RELLIS Campus, just 90 minutes from Aalo’s factory.
"It just makes good sense that... oil and gas has received many billions of subsidies and has returned many, many more billions to the public. I think that's what can happen here, but honestly, probably orders of magnitude more." - Matt Loszak
From DOE Pilot to Gigafactory Ambitions
The first plant Aalo plans to build, the Aalo X, will be at the Idaho National Lab. Because it’s on federal (non-civilian) land, it will be authorized by the Department of Energy (DOE), not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which could dramatically accelerate timelines.
And they’re already working to:
Demonstrate a full working unit next year
Start co-locating with data centers soon after
Ramp toward gigawatt scale, producing modular plants at scale
The Next Nuclear Workforce
Aalo has grown from 2 people to 50 in under two years. They expect to be at 100 employees by the time their first plant goes critical.
With nuclear momentum picking up again and Gen Z increasingly pro-nuclear, universities like UT and A&M could be at the center of the new talent pipeline. That’s why having real-world reactors on campus matters.
And with so many small utilities, industrial customers, and eventually global markets in play, the demand for nuclear talent could triple in the next five years.
We’ve been talking about modular nuclear for a long time. Aalo might be the first company to actually build it, in a factory, at speed, for real customers with real money.
If that happens, it won’t just be a win for nuclear. It could be a blueprint for clean industrial innovation in Texas and across the country.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
02:00 – The prototype behind us on the video
03:00 – Aalo’s genesis, growth, and near-term goals
05:30 – Differences between XMR and SMR
08:00 – Can nuclear ever achieve a learning curve
09:00 – Data Center demand as the catalyst for new nuclear
11:30 – Nth of a kind: when can nuclear scale and compete?
16:00 – Difference in Aalo’s technology; sodium thermal spectrum design explained
22:00 – Why Texas? Policy, grid, and workforce advantages
24:30 – House Bill 14 and state-level nuclear incentives and policy support
28:00 – Federal / DOE support for nuclear test reactors
31:30 – Potential customers for new nuclear
33:00 – What’s really holding nuclear back: fear of cost overruns
34:00 – The solution: modularity and learning curves
36:00 – Texas A&M’s gigawatt nuclear ambition
39:00 - one last note: Aalo is hiring!
Resources
Texas A&M System Goes Nuclear (TAMU Press)
Transcript
Doug Lewin (00:06.264)
Welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Doug Lewin. My guest this week was Matt Loszak, the CEO of Aalo Atomics, a nuclear startup company with its headquarters in Austin. I first saw Matt speak when he was testifying to the Senate on House Bill 14, a bill that ultimately passed and did establish some incentives for nuclear. We talked about the state of Texas's support for nuclear, as well as some of the things happening at the federal level.
Doug Lewin (00:35.522)
talked about his technology and how that differs from some of the others out there. Some of you will have already heard the podcast I did with Natura Resources. This is the second one I've done on Advanced Nuclear. I do expect to do many more. I learned a lot from talking to Matt, really enjoyed being at his headquarters at their manufacturing facility in Austin. You can check out this podcast on YouTube and see some of the video associated with that.
Doug Lewin (01:04.878)
Also, this is a paid episode. I don't do this very often. Most of the episodes are free, but we do have quite a few now. We're up to just about 15 paid episodes on the site. Your support for this podcast and for the Texas Energy and Power newsletter is extremely important to us. Really appreciate all the support out there from the now over thousand paid subscribers. If you're not one yet, please become one today at douglouen.com and then you'll be able to watch the entire thing. There's a 15 minute.
Doug Lewin (01:34.68)
preview, is free, but the full podcast is available for paid subscribers. As always, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, please recommend the podcast newsletter to family, friends and colleagues word of mouth is the best way for us to grow. And with nothing further, let's start the podcast with Matt Loszak of Aloe Atomics. Thanks for listening.
Doug Lewin (02:01.132)
Matt Loszak, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. All right. I am really excited to learn what your startup company is doing. For those that are listening on the podcast, we are actually in the factory and have one of the reactors behind us. Can you describe for the people, whether they're watching or listening, what we have behind us here?
Matt Loszak (02:03.586)
Thanks so much for having me.
Matt Loszak (02:23.714)
Absolutely. So this is the Aalo Zero. This is our non-nuclear full-scale prototype. So essentially the reactor that we're commercializing is called the Aalo One. That is our 10 megawatt electric, 30 megawatt thermal reactor. And it's part of our larger product, which is really targeted initially at data centers. And that is called the Aalo Pod. So the pod, that is our kind of actual product. That's a five reactor, one turbine configuration for high availability for data centers, which they really care about.
Matt Loszak (02:53.678)
But what we have behind us is the non-nuclear prototype for one of these reactors. So we built this in the past six months here in our factory in Austin, and we're about to ship it to a site in Texas to do a lot of non-nuclear testing on it.
Doug Lewin (03:07.31)
Okay, great. So tell us a little bit about Aalo, its genesis, your role in it, how long it's been around. And I think probably what people are going to be most interested in is how long to scale. What are you guys looking at as far as runway and timelines?
Matt Loszak (03:25.974)
Yeah, I guess first of all, my name is Matt. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Aalo. And I think what often surprises people is we've actually only been around for around like 18 or 19 months. So yeah, 19 months ago, we were a two-person company. And in that past 19 months, we scaled from two to 50. Even eight months ago, we were like seven people in a WeWork. And so really the past six, seven months,
Matt Loszak (03:54.016)
We built out this 40,000 square foot factory space, built out the full scale reactor prototype you see behind me. And what might be even more ambitious is we are aiming to start construction on our first real nuclear power plant that will power an experimental data center in the next 12 months. So very, very aggressive timeline, but we're excited to be so far tracking well towards it.
Doug Lewin (04:18.71)
and you will construct the reactors here at this facility.
Matt Loszak (04:24.588)
Yeah, so this is our pilot facility. here we're making the Aalo Zero. We're making the Aalo X. That's the experimental plant I mentioned happening at Idaho National Lab, but fully being constructed here. So it's not just about the reactor, but it's also about really the whole plant. So this is kind of off camera, but if you look over there, that's one of our SC modules. So that's kind of more of the civil structure. And we make a lot of the secondary system, the civil structure, really the whole plant in this factory.
Matt Loszak (04:54.306)
So Aalo Zero, Aalo X, and the first few Aalo pods are commercial full-scale power plant product we made here. However, this is kind of a lower volume facility and we intend to expand to a gigawatt facility soon where we'll build out the capacity to be able to produce several gigawatts per year in this larger facility, which is really what these data centers need to meet their demand.
Doug Lewin (05:19.608)
So talk a lot about, I've heard you talk a lot about XMR. Most people are familiar with SMR, small modular reactor. What do you mean by XMR? What is that?
Matt Loszak (05:29.774)
So we kind of introduced this idea in order to delineate what we're doing from a lot of the other smaller nuclear projects happening. essentially, you have micro reactors. These are 1 to 5 megawatts. They're targeted at remote diesel, kind military applications. And usually the LCOE of these products is kind of 20 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour, which is a little expensive, but that's OK because their target market is these remote diesel
Matt Loszak (05:59.266)
type applications.
Doug Lewin (06:00.206)
where they're paying something like 20 to 40 cents anyway, so they're kind of used to it.
Matt Loszak (06:04.608)
Yeah, yeah. And then on the flip side, have SMRs, which are kind of scaled down large power plants. And the challenge we've seen is some larger incumbents are kind of taking their existing designs and just scaling them down, hoping to go after a smaller market. And in our view, that's maybe not the right way to do it. You've got to kind of start from the ground up and redo your design so it's fully modular, not only the reactor, but the entire plant.
Matt Loszak (06:31.88)
and really meant to be entirely made in a factory, shipped on site for rapid on-site assembly, and purpose-built for these types of large industrial loads like data centers. So not that the nuclear industry needs another acronym, but we thought XMR nicely encapsulated the spirit of that differentiation.
Doug Lewin (06:49.582)
really
Doug Lewin (06:49.842)
supposed to be sort of the X really kind of for flexibility, right? It's that flexible aspect of it. So what sizes are you guys looking at? said, think you have the zero, the one, the pod. The pod is what, a 10 megawatt? Is that right?
Matt Loszak (07:08.462)
Right?
Matt Loszak (07:08.882)
So the pod is five reactors. So it's 50 megawatts. OK. And then you have the five reactors so that when any one is down for refueling or maintenance, the others can make up the delta. And you can have power around the clock kind of thing. However, a lot of data centers, they're not just 50 megawatts. They might be one or 200 megawatt buildings. So we essentially would build four pods, for example, for 200 megawatts. And then you'd have redundancy at the reactor level and also the turbine level.
Doug Lewin (07:36.814)
Got it. So each 110, a pod equals the 50, and then you can sort of stack those around as well. And the real key to this, what I would think would be the key to your success as to whether or not this is going to actually work is that modularity. I mean, this has been talked about a lot in nuclear. I talked about it on a previous podcast I did on nuclear. I'm sure I'll talk about it on future ones. I hear it talked about a lot on other podcasts and interviews.
Doug Lewin (08:05.01)
really kind of comes down to that learning curve. Like we just haven't had that on nuclear, right? Like the large reactors across decades, pretty much a constant price, maybe even rising a little bit. In order to really get scale, you've got to be able to come down the learning curve. And for learning curve, you have to have modularity. You got to do it repeatable over and over and over again. That's what you're working on here.
Matt Loszak (08:28.49)
Yeah, that's exactly right. I think it's worth highlighting, we haven't really had the right set of circumstances to achieve this vision in the entire 70 year history of nuclear, right? Since 1950. And so it's worth kind of expanding a bit on why that is. So right now we have record levels of public support, government support, investor support, but almost, arguably most importantly, we have support from the right type of customer. So this is AI data centers.
Matt Loszak (08:57.634)
You know, we're talking about 40 gigawatts, four zero, 40 gigawatts of demand in the U S in the next five years alone, a hundred gigawatts globally. And I think most of the listeners understand that, but I mean, you know, for those who don't 40 gigawatts, that's like 40 new cities, know, 40 cities. That's like each city having a million people. And so that's a huge amount of demand. and the fact that they have a consistent demand for a consistent type of product is what's kind of new here. So.
Matt Loszak (09:26.382)
A lot of the gigawatt scale plants that were built in the past were kind of one-off in different cities, the different unique requirements. And so the fact that it's a consistent product and a high willingness to pay, that is what makes this kind of uniquely a good time. just a little bit more elaboration on that. Sure. If you try to go straight to other markets with a mass manufactured, smaller nuclear product, it's going to be a bit more expensive initially. And many of those other customers would say, you know, come back to us when you're below
Matt Loszak (09:56.366)
10 cents a kilowatt hour. But these AI data centers, they have so much demand and such urgency that they will pay a premium for clean base load that can be deployed quickly. And so that's really what kind of uniquely unlocks this gigafactory vision. And then when you come down the cost curve, then you can go after so many other fascinating markets. Because we know data centers are only currently 1 % of power globally, 4 % in the US. So it really is just beginning, kind of like books were for Amazon.
Doug Lewin (10:23.726)
You know, it's interesting. I'll be perfectly honest. the only reason I'm here interviewing you, the only reason that I did a previous podcast on nuclear and we'll do more is because of AI data centers, because of exactly that thing. I just think that like, if you're offering power and I'm not going to ask you to tell me what the cost is yet, because you're just getting started. And frankly, you probably don't know yet. We've got a lot of noise because we're actually in a working factory, which I kind of love. Power through this.
Matt Loszak (10:48.889)
There
Matt Loszak (10:50.131)
are some things happening.
Doug Lewin (10:51.234)
So yeah, mean, we're actually in a working factory. You're actually doing these things. The reason that I think this actually has a chance, if you're going to utility and saying, hey, sell to your residential and small commercial customers, whether it be 25, 30 cent power, even if it was 15 cent power, like there are alternatives that are available to them, whether it be solar, wind, storage, gas, that are going to be less than that. But like you said, with AI data centers, there is a very high willingness to pay.
Doug Lewin (11:21.026)
There is a need, and I've done podcasts on load flexibility for data centers, and I do think there's some of them that are going to be flexible, and even within a data center, there'll be flexibility sometimes, and not others. But there's no denying there are going to be data centers that are going to be baseload as well, and will have a very high willingness to pay. So that gives you a chance to get to that what is often called nth of a kind. And I want to kind of ask you about that.
Doug Lewin (11:46.412)
What is the nth of a kind? You have talked publicly about getting down to seven cents a kilowatt hour. Does that take five deployments, 10 deployments, 100 deployments, 500 deployments? What is roughly the scale before you get to the point where you're at a seven cent? Again, I know you've talked even about getting lower than that. How long does it take to actually get to that kind of level in your plan?
Matt Loszak (12:11.214)
So we've done a good amount of financial modeling on this. I can say within just a few kind of doubling periods of deployments, we do get down in the modeling pretty far below $0.10 per kilowatt hour. So a few things to maybe highlight. We can't speak publicly yet about making promises on these things. at a high level, what we're trying to do here is start with these customers like data centers who really have this urgent need for the higher cost electricity.
Matt Loszak (12:40.99)
And it's worth highlighting, for example, a single agreement with one of these partners over a 20-year PPA could be, for example, $60 billion in revenue. So it's a massive market right off the bat.
Doug Lewin (12:53.758)
Say
Doug Lewin (12:53.95)
that again. What is 60 billion per year?
Matt Loszak (12:55.872)
So for example, a installation for a few gigawatts, I'm going to use big numbers here, but a few gigawatts for a 20-year PPA. OK, got it. We'll translate to that. So really a lot of opportunity in that regime. the whole goal is we want to reduce costs because we want to open up these other markets. so in terms of what those markets would be, you've got some of the municipal utilities. There's a whole long tail of these smaller utilities in the US who don't need a gigawatt scale plant.
Matt Loszak (13:25.71)
but they want something more in the 50 to 100 or 200 megawatt regime. And they want something around nine or 10 cents or below. So we think we can get there. And the eventual goal is to get costs low enough to go to developing nations and help bring a lot of humanity out of energy poverty, basically. So the idea there is even though our first product, the AlloPod with the Aalo One, 50 megawatts, we think it's not going to really get too much far below
Matt Loszak (13:55.616)
seven cents a kilowatt hour. We do think that our second product, the Allo2, that is hundred megawatt reactor, 500 megawatt pod, could be the right balance of economy of number and economy of scale. And really that's kind of what we're trying to home in on is sometimes going bigger isn't always better, right? Because you're to have some diseconomies of scale there. And we want to make a product that can remain a product, remain mass manufactured.
Matt Loszak (14:23.254)
fit on everyday roads when it's shipped from the factory and come in many kind of compact modules and be kind of at a size that is kind of befitting to a wide enough set of markets that allows us to then mass manufacture it. That is kind of our calculus on this optimal size balance. And so that second product, if you look at our website, we have this ambitious target, three cents a kilowatt hour. Of course, nuclear today can produce at two or three cents a kilowatt hour.
Matt Loszak (14:51.0)
but only once it's paid off. Right, once it's fully paid So we're talking about the ambitious goal of doing that during the payment cycle. So that's a longer term vision. But really, to do that, it's not just about size. It's going to be a combination of thousands of optimizations across the board. Just if we're letting our imaginations run wild, for example, refueling might initially be this two week process for each reactor that's very hands on and manual.
Doug Lewin (14:53.102)
appreciated and all that.
Matt Loszak (15:20.866)
But one day that could look like a Formula One pit stop. Or another one is you look at currently gigawatt scale nuclear plants and you compare it to a gigawatt scale natural gas plant. And the nuclear plant has 400 staff and 200 armed guards and sniper towers. And the equivalent gas plant has 20 staff and a key card system. you kind of ask yourself, yes, nuclear has special kind of characteristics that require extra care.
Matt Loszak (15:49.314)
What are the best ways to optimize that and achieve the same safety profile in a more economically favorable way? And I know you're an expert on policy and that's a big part of this as well, but there's lots of really interesting areas for optimization here, which we think can actually make nuclear the most cost competitive energy source globally.
Doug Lewin (16:08.536)
So before we get to policy, I do just want to go a little bit further into the technology just for a minute. So when I talked to the guys at Natura, they really emphasized that they had low pressure, high heat. They were doing that through kind of a molten salt system. Can you talk a little bit about your technology, how it's similar, different maybe than other, some of the newer advanced nuclear technologies we're seeing come to market?
Matt Loszak (16:38.254)
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so we are a sodium cooled thermal spectrum reactor. And that might surprise people because people would have heard of high temperature gas reactors, pressurized water reactors, molten salt reactors, or sodium fast reactors. But we are none of those. We are sodium thermal spectrum. And I think what that highlights is we've been really careful in choosing every single aspect of the system.
Matt Loszak (17:06.69)
to be mass-manufacturable and a really good fit for data centers. So to be more specific there, sodium in general is a really nice coolant. It's very thermally conductive. So it's 100 times more thermally conductive than any of the other coolants in nuclear, molten salt, water, or helium. And what this means is you can then avoid certain situations like, for example, in Fukushima, where when you have the control rods inserted, the reactor is shut down.
Matt Loszak (17:35.426)
is still producing decay heat, you can naturally circulate that and convect it, remove it out of the system. And different reactors that are advanced, like molten salt designs, also have similar mechanisms that are done in different ways.
Doug Lewin (17:46.028)
Passive cooling or passive shutdown, essentially, right?
Matt Loszak (17:51.022)
Yep.
Matt Loszak (17:52.162)
One of the other advantages of sodium is it's so much molten salt, it's atmospheric pressure, which means, again, better for mass manufacturing because we can actually plate roll. So back there, you can kind of see one of our plate rollers, our welding station. So this is 5 eighths inch, 316 H raised stainless steel that we don't really need to do heavy forging on like you have in traditional pressurized water reactors, which again is all about, we're thinking through.
Matt Loszak (18:19.778)
factory mass manufacturability. Now, the interesting kind of trade-off, so you look at the history of nuclear, water-based reactors have the most operational history, sodium has the next, then high-temperature gas, and molten salt has very little so far. There's trade-offs there. Now, sodium, people might know from high school chemistry class, is very reactive with water. And some people get afraid of that. But the nice thing is, if you...
Matt Loszak (18:48.94)
If you look at the history, in the past 60 years of sodium operation, even any accidents that have happened with sodium plants have caused no radioactive release. And that's really, you know, part of this as well as if you want to deploy thousands of these things, you want any accidents to be your problem, not the public's. Right. So that's kind of, that's kind of what these sodium reactors can help unlock as well as just if things happen like a leak or a clog, which if you deploy thousands of these, it's going to happen.
Matt Loszak (19:18.99)
It's not a radioactive release, right?
Doug Lewin (19:21.87)
Stupid question, where are sodium reactors really active? I think of mostly like the light water reactors as what's most common in the US, right?
Matt Loszak (19:29.678)
That's right. Yeah. So some of the most famous ones globally would be EBR2. So that was in the US and it operated from the 60s to the 90s. And it was a 20 megawatt electric reactor. It powered much of what is now called Idaho National Lab. Okay. And that operated very nicely. So it operated for a few decades without any major issues.
Doug Lewin (19:53.472)
Okay, and that is where this technology comes out of, is Idaho National Lab, and you guys have sort of a first project that is gonna deploy in Idaho, is that right?
Matt Loszak (20:03.932)
that's right. But so one quick thing to highlight before we move on is I kind of teased how we are not like any other design, right? We're sodium thermal, not sodium fast. So it's worth doubling down on that. EBR2 was sodium fast. what it was doing is it was proving the idea that you can actually close the nuclear fuel cycle. You can use nuclear waste as your fuel, in future reactors. And in fact, right now, if we were to use water-based reactors,
Matt Loszak (20:32.728)
for continue to use water as a coolant. At current, let's say we powered entire, of humanity's energy use with this, we'd run out of uranium in a hundred years. But if we switched to sodium fast reactors, it would last 4 billion. You'd have enough nuclear fuel, thorium and uranium and seawater and so on to power humanity, even with its growth with AI and everything for 4 billion years. So basically what that means is the long-term
Matt Loszak (21:01.888)
inevitable nuclear technology is sodium fast spectrum reactors. So again, why are we not doing a sodium fast reactor? I was just going to say, not what you're doing? OK, go on. So the reason is because to do that, you need HALU, higher enrichment fuel. And data centers have a lot of demand today. So we've made the very conscious decision to start with the fuel that's available today to hit more aggressive timelines on our first deployment.
Doug Lewin (21:10.456)
Didn't you just say that's
Matt Loszak (21:31.65)
and on the scale up. So we're using off the shelf, uranium dioxide fuel used and pressurized water reactors around the world today. Got it. And this is a design that is not one of the standard designs that people talk about. And it kind of highlights the fact that we have made a lot of decisions gone against the grain to have a solution that can actually power data centers at scale in the next five years. Not in the 2030s.
Doug Lewin (21:56.066)
Got it. Okay, thanks for that. Important to kind of ground ourselves on what the technology is. I do want to talk about policy, a lot going on at the federal level, but I actually want to start at the state level. House Bill 14 recently passed. That was the product of this advanced nuclear working group, which I think you were active with as well. Can you talk about, I guess, two sort of questions here?
Doug Lewin (22:24.782)
One, the importance of the policy support from the state. And I think also sort of related to that, like why Texas? I mean, there's the obvious of there is some policy support, but what other reasons are leading you to have your headquarters here in Texas, supposed to anywhere else you might be?
Matt Loszak (22:41.806)
Yeah, so we we chose Texas for a bunch of reasons. So One was definitely just the fact that it's a behemoth and energy, right? You got oil and gas obviously, but also, you know, a lot of people don't realize I The windiest areas of the country are right down the middle and the sunniest are down the southern border and Texas is at the intersection of those two things So that's why we also have a lot of solar a lot of wind and two nuclear plants But there's a long
Matt Loszak (23:10.466)
history of energy leadership to draw from. that means knowledge, for example, know, Texas playing such a big role in natural gas going from kind of this small source in the year 2000 to surpassing coal, I think in 2016 or something for electricity production in the US. It's incredible that the changes that happen even in the past 20 years driven by Texas, right? Yep. So it's things like that. It's also a great place to hire from.
Matt Loszak (23:40.268)
companies like SpaceX, Tesla, which we've done, given the huge manufacturing focus we have, as well as hiring from oil and gas. There's a lot of really sharp people in the industry, obviously, a lot of skill that we can tap into. So hiring. And then another reason is it has its own grid, So AirCod, it's kind of its own special snowflake of a grid, not tied to any others, and that gives freedom, and it also, frankly, needs our solution. So there's that.
Matt Loszak (24:09.138)
And yeah, lastly, to your question, there's a lot of capital, a lot of government support here. The government, from what we understand, even somewhat recently has become much more bullish on nuclear and wanting to deploy a lot more. So like you said, you've got things like Reed Clay's effort with the Texas Nuclear Alliance. You've got Jimmy Glutfelty and Governor Abbott with the Texas Nuclear Working Group. And these have been...
Matt Loszak (24:35.608)
fantastic efforts to help raise awareness and frankly just gain more support for nuclear in the state. And so it's really exciting with House Bill 14, as you pointed out, it's kind of starting off with around 350 million in grants that are kind of based on refurbish or paying people back for what they've already spent. So it's not just an outright grant. And then there are also clawback possibilities if things don't go to plan.
Matt Loszak (25:04.726)
It's meant to really help catalyze industry, but in a responsible way. then from what I've heard, there's the desire to do up to 2.7 billion even in the next few years. let's take it wherever you want to go, but I would just say, I think it's really promising because so much of the wealth in Texas has come from oil and gas, obviously. it just makes good sense that I think in the past 20 years, oil and gas has received many
Matt Loszak (25:33.698)
billions of subsidies and has returned many, many more billions to the public. I think that's really what can happen here, but honestly, probably orders of magnitude more. think oil and gas is great. It brought us a lot of wealth and wellbeing, but it's also just dead plants and animals from millions of years ago and there's only enough to last a few hundred years. All of civilization is currently propped up on that. That sounds crazy to me. Whereas nuclear can power us, like I said, for four billion years and it's clean.
Matt Loszak (26:03.182)
And so I think it's a very smart decision for Texas to be supporting this.
Doug Lewin (26:08.588)
Yeah, and it is interesting. I was really actually impressed with the way that nuclear working group, I interviewed commissioner Gladfelty for the podcast and we got into this a little bit of how the working group wasn't just about deploying nuclear on the ERCOT grid. That was certainly a part of it, but it was really about trying to really leverage what Texas does well on energy to build that industry here in the state of Texas. So it's really exciting to be here in the spot and actually see that it's
Doug Lewin (26:37.912)
that it's starting to happen. Another thing that Texas has going for it, you were talking about data center loads and all that data center growth. And frankly, the numbers that you cited might be too low. When you're talking about 40 gigs for the country, know, ERCOT's looking at something like 50, 60, 70 gigawatts of growth just within the state of Texas. Now, some of that's controversial. We don't really know, right? mean, that's the God's honest truth is nobody knows how much data center growth there's going to be.
Doug Lewin (27:05.282)
But whatever data center growth there's going to be, Texas is going to have a very large share of it. Part is because there are lower cost renewables available. Part of it is because it's its own grid and you have different interconnection. But I also think the state's willingness, not just willingness to help develop nuclear, but actually to jump in and get involved. think there's a sneaky part of that House Bill 14 that could end up being the most important part, sneaky in the best sort of way, is the office that will help coordinate.
Doug Lewin (27:34.254)
like where are you actually going to go with these nuclear plants? Like having a single point of contact for a state government, I don't know if you see that in other states, but it seems fairly innovative to me. hopefully we'll see all that develop. You want to talk a little bit about at the federal level too, where are you guys with permitting? Are there federal policies in particular that you're looking at that will help nuclear to scale?
Doug Lewin (28:00.686)
quicker, different policies you think maybe we need at the federal level that we don't have yet.
Matt Loszak (28:05.324)
Yeah. Yeah. So maybe some context that'll be helpful to the audience is so the Aalo X, our experimental power plant, we're building at Idaho National Lab, starting construction next year. And what's unique about this plant is it's DOE authorized, not NRC, because this is on a non-civilian soil. And we have a lot of experience doing this because our team came from the Marvel program. So this was the first reactor.
Matt Loszak (28:34.668)
to ever get approved by DOE for construction.
Doug Lewin (28:37.761)
When was this? What was the timeframe for this?
Matt Loszak (28:39.182)
So
Matt Loszak (28:39.422)
that, was kind of a napkin sketch in 2020. Okay. And it got approved in 2023. Okay. So a few years ago. kind of, for context, in the first atomic age, 1950 to 1975, there was no such thing as the DOE and no such thing as the NRC. But there was the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission, and they both regulated and promoted nuclear. And that under that, you know, regulatory environment, we had all the innovation.
Matt Loszak (29:07.758)
at the National Reactor Testing Station, which is now INL, where all these 52 test reactors were built and innovated on. And then the NRC came in and regulated the mature technology. So it's this kind of nice poetic hearkening back to the first atomic age, right? And so we're doing DOE authorization because it's a non-commercial experimental plant. We might actually be able to put a data center next to it, which would be potentially the world's first co-located nuclear plant and data center.
Matt Loszak (29:36.662)
We can't sell the power, but it would just be used via demonstration.
Doug Lewin (29:40.302)
Basically,
Doug Lewin (29:40.632)
like I and L's own data center or they partner with some. But roughly 10 megawatts for that first or.
Matt Loszak (29:43.982)
We'll announce more on that later. OK, all right.
Matt Loszak (29:49.198)
So, know, the product is the all-oh-one reactor, which is 10 megawatts electric, but we're going to kind of under, operate it a bit below the capacity nameplate because of certain, we just want to streamline some of the environmental permitting. Okay. So we'll just keep it below 20 megawatt thermal. But anyway, the point is, that's the context now on the federal level, as you know, with your question on the executive orders from
Matt Loszak (30:18.722)
President Trump and Energy Secretary Wright and Doug Burgum. there's this desire to not lose to China and Russia on AI and nuclear. Yeah. And so one of the ways that the government wants to make sure that we do well there is they want to streamline the deployment of a lot of co-located nuclear plants and data centers on non-civilian soil.
Doug Lewin (30:32.439)
Seems important.
Matt Loszak (30:45.742)
And this would be in the executive orders, there was the fourth one. So it was defense critical electric infrastructure. And the idea there is, they want to potentially allow the deployment of commercial nuclear plants and data centers on government land, non-civilian soil, with DOE authorization. there was a lot of good stuff in the EOs, but this one stood out to us because to our knowledge, we're the only vendor in the country
Matt Loszak (31:13.848)
doing DOE authorization for a plant that will produce power. so, you know, it's just kind of dovetails nicely into our plans. yeah, frankly, could really accelerate things further. So that's what really stood out to us. But there's other stuff at the federal level as well, if you want to get into it, but that's a high level.
Doug Lewin (31:35.948)
As I'm thinking about this and here you talk about this, like your addressable market is probably, if you think of like a hierarchy of where your addressable market is, you obviously talked about data centers and they're very high willingness to pay, but it's not just a willingness to pay, right? It's a desire to come down the cost curve, actually scale this into the future and the willingness to pay. Then you've got military.
Doug Lewin (32:03.182)
sort of government sites where you can have DOE approvals, but then also military, the high emphasis on being resilient to cyber attacks and natural disasters. You mentioned public utilities that have a little higher willingness to pay maybe than other kinds of utilities, but not as high as some of the others. And then I think of like X energy without chemicals. So you could even think of like other industrial consumers besides data centers.
Doug Lewin (32:31.616)
Is that kind of the universe of the addressable market or are there others that maybe, you know, I'm just not thinking of?
Matt Loszak (32:39.97)
Yeah. Well, I think it's worth taking a step back and thinking about how much capacity can nuclear really produce, right? And traditionally it takes 10 years to build a gigawatt plant, one gigawatt. So, number one, regardless of who the customer is, is how do you flip that on its head? How do you produce several gigawatts of capacity per year in the factory, regardless of who it's going to, right?
Matt Loszak (33:09.926)
And if you can do that, then you can unlock a massive opportunity. And really what you're doing there is you're, let's take a step even further back, is you're solving really the main problem in nuclear today, which is fear of cost and schedule overruns. this is the reason we don't build more massive nuclear is because it's not the regulator's fault. There's actually aid utilities that have approved licenses to build large nuclear power plants and they're choosing not to.
Matt Loszak (33:37.698)
because they're just frankly afraid of existential overruns and cost and schedule. Who is? Yeah. Yeah. It's just an existential balance sheet risk.
Doug Lewin (33:43.53)
afraid. The utilities are afraid.
Doug Lewin (33:49.292)
Basically, if I could just finish your thought and if I get this wrong, stop me and let me know. But basically what you're saying is you want to actually roll off a line, prove the price you're at, do another one, come down a little bit. You're not asking these utilities or other customers, except for the first one's more like the data centers, to kind of like, we're not sure what the price is. They're actually going to see it and then each additional
Doug Lewin (34:17.71)
production run you're doing, you're coming down further and actually proving that price. Is that about right?
Matt Loszak (34:23.998)
That's
Matt Loszak (34:24.378)
basically it. Yeah. So you really have to start the tree trunk of the problem, which is solving for the factory and solving for the go-to-market path along that cost reduction curve. I think we've got the right technology, the right supply chain, the right team, largely from top nuclear and manufacturing and government kind of allies to pull off and finance the factory, get the first few plants built.
Matt Loszak (34:52.75)
improve the economics, improve the reliability, get the second factory built, the gigawatt factory that will have capacity of several gigawatts per year. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, we'll have to talk to people in Texas and see what happens. All right.
Doug Lewin (35:00.494)
Hopefully in Texas too, right?
Doug Lewin (35:06.274)
Yeah, Governor's office. Yeah, keep in touch with these guys. We need it to be here. Yeah.
Matt Loszak (35:11.586)
But yeah, that's really it is saying, well, once that factory is set up and as you're coming down the cost curve, you can almost say, well, which markets you go after is just a function of your price point. then the last thing that's just worth highlighting there is, you know, we want to come down to cost as fast as possible and service these other markets. But the data center market is big. And, you know, there's an advantage to really having a great product.
Matt Loszak (35:40.76)
for a customer and just really tapping into that and leveraging that and helping them as much as possible. you know, we'll see, but I think if we play our cards right and if this momentum goes right, we'll just really be supply constrained. So.
Doug Lewin (35:58.766)
Yeah, it's definitely possible from these data centers. There'll just be so much demand for the product. You're on back order. Let's hope for your sake that's the way it is. One other thing I want to ask you, Texas A &M made a really interesting announcement that they're going to have four different companies they picked to do some experimental work at the A &M Relist campus. And you guys were one of those. Can you tell us about that and maybe give us some insight into timeline when we might look at seeing some ground broken out there?
Doug Lewin (36:26.624)
It may still be kind of speculative, I don't know, but curious. I know there's a lot of Aggies that listen to the show.
Matt Loszak (36:31.31)
Oh, nice. Yeah, so we were really honored to have been selected by Texas A &M Relos campus for... So they wanted to build a gigawatt and they want that to come from some combination of four companies who they've named and were one of them. And the timeline is kind of this function again of the cost and of the capacity. We do want to move forward on that as fast as possible, but we don't have exact...
Matt Loszak (37:00.59)
dates that we're talking about publicly just yet. But yeah, the idea is there is there's going to be a data center. So our product will be a really nice fit. And I mean, it's, you know, 90 minute drive, which will be convenient for shipping all these modules from this factory right to their site. And, you know, I think it also, one other thing that's worth highlighting is there's actually a lot of people don't realize there's around 25 or so schools in the country that have nuclear reactors on campus already.
Matt Loszak (37:31.272)
And these are used as research and test reactors not to power things. But this is kind of also the added benefit is like, you know, just frankly, the education aspect for these students, you know, to hit these milestones, we have to at least triple the workforce and nuclear in the next five years, probably more. a lot of those five years is eons in school time, right? Because like kids in high school in five years will be just about to enter the workforce or entering the workforce.
Doug Lewin (37:35.391)
UT and A both have them, right?
Matt Loszak (38:01.314)
So I think having this technology on the site of these schools is a really powerful thing because it inspires the students to get into this space and see that things are happening again. It's not a second atomic age. And there's never been a better time really to get into nuclear because I think this atomic age will be here to stay.
Doug Lewin (38:18.99)
You know, it's interesting you say that because there is definitely something going on with young people and nuclear energy. I don't know what it is. speak to groups sometimes. I speak to people about energy, especially if somebody hears what I do, they want to talk about it. And if they're under 25, almost universally, they want to talk about nuclear. So I think, you know, having these test facilities at A &M and hopefully at other campuses, I think will really...
Doug Lewin (38:45.838)
spark a lot of interest. And one other thing on that, Matt, as you know, House Bill 14, we haven't talked about this yet, but within House Bill 14, there is a component focused on workforce for this industry. So that'll be something to watch as to how that plays out with the governor's office, the workforce commission, et cetera. So I had read a quote from you where you had said, you you want to be for nuclear and these factories, Aalo will be for nuclear, what?
Doug Lewin (39:14.648)
Henry Ford was for the automobile. It's really a treat to be in here and start to see the beginnings of this. Before we end, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I would have or anything you just want to add for the audience?
Matt Loszak (39:28.213)
I would just say we're hiring. So check out our website. We're going to be doubling the team. Again, 18 months ago we were two people, now we're 50. We're going to be around 100, I think, a team will be required to achieve criticality and turn our first power plant on. So if you want to be one of those next 50 people and help us make history, please reach out.
Doug Lewin (39:50.542)
Aloe Atomic, check out the job page. will, Matt, of course, put a link to that jobs page on the show notes for this so that people can find it really easy. It seems like it'd be an amazing place to work. think it's going to be a really interesting journey for you and the company. Matt Loszak, thanks for being on the Energy Capital Podcast. Thanks for tuning in to the Energy Capital Podcast. If you got something out of this conversation, please share the podcast with a friend, family member, or colleague.
Matt Loszak (40:08.398)
Thanks for having me.
Doug Lewin (40:18.902)
and subscribe to the newsletter at douglouen.com. That's where you'll find all the stories where I break down the biggest things happening in Texas energy, national energy policy, markets, technology policy, it's all there. You can also follow along at LinkedIn. You can find me there and at Twitter, Douglouen Energy, as well as YouTube, Douglouen Energy. Please follow me in all the places. Big thanks to Nathan Peavy, our producer, for making these episodes sound so crystal clear and good.
Doug Lewin (40:48.374)
and to Ari Lewin for writing the music. Until next time, please stay curious and stay engaged. Let's keep building a better energy future. Thanks for listening.
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