Scaling Nuclear Energy, Saving The World – Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy
"The more nuclear meltdowns, the merrier."
This is one of Bret Kugelmass ’s hot takes. Bret is the founder and CEO of Last Energy , a startup developing modular nuclear reactors. He also hosts the podcast Titans of Nuclear , with a whopping 400 episodes featuring experts throughout the nuclear industry.
This episode is a deep dive into nuclear. We explore what the world could look like with an abundance of energy, why nuclear is the only true solution to climate change, and that "nothing has yet beat a 1968 nuclear powerplant."
Links to Platforms:
Great conversation with Bret, here’s what I learned during the episode :
A nuclear meltdown itself is not a problem. Radiation escaping is the problem. This is an important distinction. Meltdowns are an acceptable failure mode.
Renewables are cool, but they still have a carbon footprint. They may slow down climate change -- but only nuclear can SOLVE it.
The old nuclear industry benefits from fearmongering. They profit ten times more from selling safety equipment than from the actual electricity.
Regulations hamper progress in the industry. Last Energy is hedging regulatory risk by working in multiple jurisdictions at once.
Here’s another hot take: The background it takes to design nuclear power plants is a nuclear engineer. The background it takes to build a nuclear power plant is anything but a nuclear engineer.
Bret didn’t want to do another startup. But no one else was listening to his ideas and taking on the challenge. So he decided to do it himself.
His business model is simple: take the existing standard reactor design, shrink it, and eliminate as many risks as possible.
For example, Last Energy is using existing parts for every single component of their power plants to reduce supply chain risk.
Bret say soon we will have ten times the amount of energy, all driven by nuclear.
Energy is fundamental to prosperity, abundant energy has the potential of ending poverty and war across the globe.
This episode is sponsored by Athena.
Athena is a company completely dedicated to providing top-caliber executive assistants from the Philippines. I’ve had a conversation with Athena’s CEO and CCO in episode 38 of this podcast.
Get a free first month (Worth $3k!) when you sign up with my code: athenago.me/eric-jorgenson
Learn more about Bret Kugelmass:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
The Future of Nuclear Energy: Politics, Culture, and Technology with Mark Nelson
The Next Industrial Revolution w/ J. Storrs Hall: Nuclear Energy, AI and Nanotechnology
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Wait, wait, before you put your phone down, if you love this podcast, please give it a quick review. Okay, here we go.
Bret Kugelmass: I mean, listen, nuclear waste has never hurt a single person, place, or thing in all of human history. So the idea that nuclear waste is dangerous is insane. But once again, if your five closest friends and everyone you know always said nuclear waste is the most hazardous thing on planet Earth, I can't fault you for believing that. But yeah, it's just not true.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson. I don't know much, but I have some very smart friends to help me figure things out. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Together, we explore how investing, technology, and entrepreneurship will create a brighter, more abundant future. And that's especially true today on this special episode because the magic that's about to happen between my lips and your ears could very well save the world. Today, my guest is Bret Kugelmass. He is the founder and CEO of Last Energy, a startup that develops modular nuclear reactors. Last Energy is such a badass company name. He also started and hosts the Titans of Nuclear podcast. This guy's so good at naming stuff. That podcast has close to 400 episodes featuring experts from across the nuclear industry, engineers, founders, economists, regulators, and a bunch more. In this episode, it's a deep dive into nuclear. We talk about why we need more nuclear meltdowns, not less, a little counterintuitive take there, what a world with cheap, abundant energy could look like, and why, very importantly, the only true solution to climate change is nuclear energy. Bret is an encyclopedia of knowledge. He's not afraid to tell it like it is. It is a very, very interesting conversation. I had a great time with it. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter or invest alongside us in early stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com.
If you love thinking about investing in and supporting the kind of amazing future that nuclear power can get us, you would love investing alongside us in today's great founders and great early stage tech companies. I started Rolling Fun last year with two of my most talented and trusted friends. We've all been angel investing for years, and together we've managed to fund a few billion dollar companies. This fund lets us invest your money alongside ours into some of these companies too. We will be investing in some of those promising founders we can find around the world to create this insane, abundant, incredible future that we all know is possible. If you love this episode, these conversations, and these lessons, you'll love the companies we invest in. You can check out some of our recent Rolling Fun podcast episodes. I record interviews with Bo and Al talking about the companies that we've invested in. Recently, number 53 is the most recent episode in that series. I'm honored that many readers and listeners have already joined the fund as co-investors. You can learn more at rolling.fun. It's linked in the show notes below. And accredited investors can invest with us through AngelList today. If you have questions or you'd like to hear more, please reach out to me. Now before we get to our conversation, a quick message from this episode's sponsor. And if you're pulling out your phone to skip this part, that's another really good opportunity to leave a quick review. Thank you very much.
This podcast is sponsored by Athena. One of the biggest jumps of leverage in my life was when I started working with an EA, an executive assistant, through Athena. I’m almost two years into that now and it's been simply the best thing I've ever done to buy back my time and get more freedom. Athena hires, trains, and matches you with a full time EA who's based in the Philippines, and then they provide you guidance and accountability and playbooks to be sure that you and your EA have a successful relationship together. And don't take my word for it. I'm going to read you two testimonials from people that I previously referred that signed up after hearing me talk about it on the podcast. It's been great working with Arthur. I don't know how I could do it without my EA anymore. In the long run, once I get more organized, I can even see myself working with multiple EAs. The challenge right now is continuing to improve my time management and delegation skills. Here's another one: Almost anytime that JC proactively comes to me with an idea, suggestion, or improvement, it is a good one. He's great at completing all assigned tasks. I use him especially for travel research, email marketing, publishing, and all tech and automation tasks. He's even been planning an extended trip for me, and it's been a total breeze. If you want to get access to the lifestyle, the ease, the sleeping in, the fewer worries, the shorter checklists that come with having a full time EA, open your browser, type in athenago.com, and sign up. There's often a waitlist to get matched with an EA, so plan ahead, sign up now today. There's no commitment required, and you will learn something just by going through their quick application process. To learn more about how to use an EA, the playbooks the experts use, and investing in the corporation of you, check out my episode with Athena's CEO and COO. It's episode number 38 and it is just overflowing with valuable ideas. It is still one of our most popular episodes, and it is one of the ones that I learned the most from personally. Once more, athenago.com. And be sure to list Eric Jorgenson as your referrer. I'm careful to only pick sponsors I believe in whose products I enjoy and I think you will, too. Thank you so much for supporting sponsors who help make this show possible. Now with both ears and everything in between, please enjoy this conversation arriving in three, two, one.
I think we met for the first time at a Foresight conference. And I knew in one sentence when you were giving your talk, and I was like I got to get this guy on the podcast, I want everybody to hear him. Do you have any inkling what that sentence was?
Bret Kugelmass: Probably something about more meltdowns, the merrier.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think you were like, we need more nuclear meltdowns, not less. And I was like, oh, this man has an interesting point of view that I would like to explore. Bring it on.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, well, we better explain the context of that at some point before we scare too much of your audience away.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's start there, man. Why do we need more nuclear meltdowns?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, the basic theory there is that there's a misunderstanding. People associate meltdowns with hazard. But it's actually not the meltdown itself that creates hazard. It's the movement of radionuclides. It's the creation of material that's adverse to human health into an area where humans would come in contact to it with. The actual melting isn't a problem. That's an important distinction because a lot of technologists use this concept around meltdown or meltdown proof to demonstrate value in a different strategy that often sacrifices many other qualities that you would want in your system, including simplicity and reduction of accidents or anything. It's just if you focus on the meltdown, which isn't really the right problem to solve, and you just use it as a proxy for your problem, sometimes you end up solving the wrong problem. So that's one half of the equation. The other half of the equation is that if you don't want people to be afraid of nuclear, you can't brand something that happens infrequently as catastrophic. Or if it's already perceived as catastrophic, you should make it happen more frequently and show people that it's not a hazard. So for instance, it's like every time that you light a candle, you're technically creating a fire, but you're not creating a hazard. But it does get people a little more confident with the concept of oh, not all fire means that you're burning alive in a building. So exposure to something that has a negative connotation to show other sides of it helps reduce like the inherent cultural fear with that event. And so that's more of the- we need more meltdowns not less. And also, it gets people's ears, ears and eyes lit up to listen to the rest of what you're saying.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, I think you're so good at some of these hooks or just like spicy takes that people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm going to need you to explain that. Because there's so much of this insane sort of like totally counter fact, counterfactual, counterintuitive, just like insane comparisons in nuclear, and nuclear in particular, that I think you're good at sort of laying out for people. I think another one that I've heard you talk about in some of your other speeches is exactly what you're talking about, like we are so afraid of nuclear because of how it's talked about and how its regulated in particular, that like the signals that the regulations give us make us so much more fearful than is like warranted by the physical reality of these things.
Bret Kugelmass: And that's not an accident. That's actually by design. And so, you see this actually crop up in a lot of different industries. And so what happened in the nuclear industry where the incumbents at the time used something called regulatory capture to create a moat around themselves. And then over time, as their business evolved, they actually benefited from the fear of nuclear to create more regulatory moats. And so a lot of the fear from around nuclear doesn't come from environmentalists making stuff up. It doesn't come from the oil industry trying to be more competitive. It comes from the old nuclear industry itself, that over time morphed from a business model of selling power plants to selling fear, so they could sell safety systems. They could sell add-ons to the existing plans, which became 10 times as profitable as the original plant itself.
Eric Jorgenson: Wow. I have never heard that before. That is wild. I was just listening to Marc Andreessen talk about the two way nature of regulatory capture, which I think is really interesting.
Bret Kugelmass: I love listening to him. What was the platform?
Eric Jorgenson: It was a kind of obscure podcast. I can send it to you. It was like an acronym. It was with a journalist and an academic, but it's like a two hour long podcast pretty recently. And he talked about like you normally think of it as people sort of using the laws, like businesses using the existing- like getting the government to pass the laws, but there's also the government capturing the businesses to continue to enforce the laws. Yeah, it was a pretty interesting- he's like, it's a two way feedback loop. Most people don't recognize that.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I mean, what I think is even more interesting is his voice but then also other voices coming from this like the Silicon Valley Tech or maybe even just engineering community really drawing a different understanding of what regulations and even industry is just like from a totally different perspective that hasn't been done before by economists or social scientists. So it is very cool to see, especially such like a hardcore engineer as Andreessen give us his take on it. That is cool.
Eric Jorgenson: As a sort of an operator in the nuclear space, do you find regulation to be the biggest hurdle, the biggest impediment to progress for the industry as a whole?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, yeah, I mean, listen, regulation was used as a tool specifically to prevent progress. It was designed that way. And that's in the nuclear industry, but in some other industries, it's also designed that way. And sometimes, that's the explicit intent. And sometimes it's just like a confluence of incentives that drives things that way. But yeah, no doubt. And I'm not saying hey, throw away all regulations, but the way that these regulations were designed was specifically to inhibit progress.
Eric Jorgenson: Of new nuclear companies?
Bret Kugelmass: Nuclear installations and nuclear companies, yeah. I mean, the industry essentially cannibalized itself, cannibalizes its own assets in a very like rent seeking behavior to extract as much value not from the production of energy but from like the infrastructure itself.
Eric Jorgenson: It's such a shame. How do you navigate that as one of the startups who's kind of targeted and roadblocked by old nuclear, by existing regulations, by regulatory bodies?
Bret Kugelmass: And by new nuclear too. A lot of new nuclear companies, they might think they have the intent to build, but their actions belie that truth. Instead, rather, they'd almost never build but just have forever science projects. And the people themselves would be happy with forever science projects. And yeah, I mean, you see this in other areas, too, all sorts of scientific endeavors that have like a pseudo commercial lens but are really driven off of government grants and government money. But a lot of the new nuclear companies are that. If you were to like, say, hey, would you rather have something actually built, and you personally be involved in something that's actually built, or work on your favorite technology, 90% of them would choose I'd rather work on my favorite technology and never actually see anything built.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So what's the playbook when you're doing- when the biggest risk in your company is regulatory?
Bret Kugelmass: Yes, I mean, that's like part of my entrepreneurial principles, is to always solve the right problem, identify what your actual problem is, not your proximate problem, like your root problem, and then design a system to solve that problem. And so, regulatory competence and regulatory strategy is a huge part of my company Last Energy, our like institutional prowess. And we have essentially hedged our regulatory risk by working in multiple jurisdictions. We are one of the few companies that does that. So that's a core part of the strategy. But also, working with regulators, I mean, I've spent the last five years getting to know regulators and meeting with them, hundreds of them across dozens of countries, and having amazing conversations. I mean, a lot of the individuals at these regulatory bodies are incredible people, and I love talking to them, and they're super brilliant and smart and have amazing perspectives and want to do good. My problem is mostly with like the institutions themselves and how they're set up that often handicap, they shackle their own employees’ motivation to like fulfill the stated objective of the regulator, but not the way that these bodies were actually constructed.
Eric Jorgenson: How global is sort of the approach for Last Energy? Like, are you hoping to work in the US? Is that sort of- or is it not possible with the existing regulation?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, we work through the US and we definitely are subject to different regulatory bodies in the US as well, especially as it comes to like export control. So we work very closely with the NNSA on the export of nuclear intellectual property as governed under Regulation party 10, Appendix A, which has like a fast track process to actually do this if you work with a set of whitelisted countries. So, we do work with US regulators, state commerce as well. But then when it comes to nuclear licensing of facilities of ground installations, there's a different set of regulators that are- which is like it's the sovereign right of any given country to regulate the physical property that's nuclear related on their country. And so they have their own regulatory bodies that we just work a lot more closely with. I'd say the US market for us is probably a half decade or a decade out. And there would have to be just some serious changes. And if other companies think they can pave the path here, great, we'll follow in their footsteps here while we focus on blazing the trail abroad.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I want to come back and spend a lot of time on Last Energy. But let's kind of- I'm curious, who are you? Like, what kind of background does it take to be a guy who builds nuclear power plants?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, I'm going to say something a little caustic here, maybe.
Eric Jorgenson: Not for the last time, I'm sure. Bring it on.
Bret Kugelmass: A little hot take. I'd say the background that it takes to design nuclear power plants is probably a nuclear engineer, which I'm not. The background that it takes to build a nuclear power plant is probably anything but a nuclear engineer.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Bret Kugelmass: I mean, listen, in this country, like it's pretty clear we haven't built any nuclear, I mean, they're building some stuff there. Vogtle’s finally coming to a conclusion, but half the people that started that project are dead at this point, by the time it's going to get finished. So when it comes to like nuclear building experience, the nuclear industry is really quite limited there. I come from a mechanical engineering background, and I built products, and I built frontier tech, and my first startup was a drone business. And so it had all the various disciplines, electrical controls, in many cases, much more complicated disciplines, autonomous controls, certainly mechanical and structural and aerodynamics. I mean, there's a lot to it, and then manufacturing. And then there's also a regulatory component to that, too. So that was a lot of the background that I had in my previous startup that I think helped inform many of the ways that I go about building this one.
Eric Jorgenson: And reading between the lines of some of your other appearances, it sounds like sort of the entrepreneurial zeal that you bring from your Silicon Valley operating background is thin on the ground in the nuclear industry.
Bret Kugelmass: I'd say there's a lot of entrepreneurial zeal, just not a lot of entrepreneurial experience. So most of the entrepreneurs in the nuclear sector are nuclear PhDs or nuclear professors and don't have a previous startup under their belt. And maybe that is one of my advantages here.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, the talk I was watching this morning, you were pounding the podium, like faster, faster, no excuses, stop yelling, stop waiting for patient capital and become an impatient operator. I'm paraphrasing, but it was castigating a roomful of supposedly nuclear entrepreneurs for just not bucking up and being operators.
Bret Kugelmass: I know. It’s crazy. It's like, so I was giving this talk. It was a pretty awesome panel. It was like Bill Magwood, who is like the head of the nuclear part of the OECD, Bill Gates was on this panel. And then there's this professor, I won't name his name, but it's a Berkeley professor that has a nuclear startup. And his one advice to the audience was, take things slow, go slow and steady in your nuclear entrepreneurship. He literally said those words. I almost couldn't believe it. And so, I rewrote my speech on the fly to totally take him down. I mean, like in a very nice, polite way. And I want to be respectful as well. But just like from a philosophy perspective, I just thought he was sending totally the wrong message. I couldn't believe it. Like, if I were any of his investors, I would have pulled out in that exact minute. I just like, I could not believe it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I don't think anybody's issue with the nuclear space is that it's moving too quickly. Though, I understand if most of the relationship you have with that word is fear based, then you're forced to move slow for a bunch of reasons.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, it's part of your business model sometimes, too. And yeah, with this company, they essentially hype up the fear around nuclear waste, so they can sell a nuclear waste solution. It’s like ridiculous.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so what was the transition between drones and building nuclear?
Bret Kugelmass: I started a research institute called the Energy Impact Center, which is just my own money and a vehicle for me to hire people and do business out of and start really just taking a first principles look at climate and energy. And very quickly realized nuclear was misunderstood, totally underleveraged. And just based on like a raw physics basis should be like the core pillar of our energy transition. It just made sense. And what didn't make sense was everyone's reason why we didn't have more nuclear. Everyone just kept going back to the same thing that you hear growing up, or that you hear- I almost can't fault people, when everyone, just like the sum of people's knowledge on any given subject is usually what their five closest friends around them say on that. So you almost can't fault people if most of culture has been saying the same thing over and over again, for them not to requestion that assumption. But in many cases, they're still dead wrong.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, hopefully, we're fighting fire with fire with this podcast, like trying to replace some of those narratives.
Bret Kugelmass: I think what’s funny is I think even the people who come away from this podcast like agreeing, it's not necessarily going to be like the merits of the argument that they agree with, it's going to mostly be they're also contrarians, and they're like latching on to something that kind of makes sense, or seemingly makes sense, I should say. It definitely does make sense. But to them, it seems that it makes sense and it has a contrarian spin to it. And they're just going to relate to that and maybe parrot what I'm saying. But they still probably won't have fundamental like source material research to back it up. But that's okay. I'll take them.
Eric Jorgenson: It's interesting how many times that like the shallow opinion precedes the deep research. Like you form an opinion and then go do the work to like, wait, let me find out if that's as true as I want it to be.
Bret Kugelmass: Totally. It's one of the cognitive biases. I think it's like in the category of like selection bias. You only- like you're looking- you seek facts, even without realizing, that support the thesis that you already have.
Eric Jorgenson: So let's plant the thesis that nuclear is good and work backwards from there.
Bret Kugelmass: I think most people at this point actually do intuit that. And over time, it's just going to get more and more.
Eric Jorgenson: It wasn't until doing research on you for this conversation that I realized that Bret Kugelmass, guy who started Last Energy is also Bret Kugelmass guy who started Titans of Nuclear podcast, which is something I've been listening to for a while now as I've tried to kind of understand, tried to build rationale for my hopeful, optimistic opinion that nuclear is amazing.
Bret Kugelmass: I had a similar experience with Joe Rogan. When I heard the first podcast with him, I didn't realize that was the same like Fear Factor guy, the same comedian guy, and then took me like- it took a little while for me to like put all that together.
Eric Jorgenson: That guy looks familiar, what’s going on here? So quick shout out for your podcast, which is 400 episodes or so over the last four years, which is a crazy output, interviews a ton of amazing people in that space, which I love, like all over the map too, not just like CEOs and founders, but operators, regulators. And it's a really interesting sort of overview of the space.
Bret Kugelmass: The shout out goes to my team, Olivia, who's been managing the podcast for the last few years, now Sarah is taking it over, they just do a tremendous job. And then I should also mention the other podcast that we also run, which we don't tie any of these brands together, which is maybe where some of the confusion comes from. But it's called Energy Impact. So there's another 100 episodes there that speak to energy issues in a context more broad than just nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: Nice. How did the podcast figure into the founding of your company? I think it was about two years before that you started Titans of Nuclear and you were like doing this sort of research process. But how did that, what sort of role did it play?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I mean, I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn from the best, I wanted to have like easy access to all facets of the industry. And so the podcast, I didn't know this at first, but I tested a few things, and the podcast ended up being a channel that enabled that, that reduced the, I think of it in terms of like customer acquisition cost. Obviously, these aren't really customers. But let's say like stakeholder relationship cost. Any given relationship that you want to create from cold outreach has a real cost to your time and effort. And if you want to totally maximize those numbers of relationships that you develop, given a limited resource environment, you have to optimize along those parameters. Hence, the podcast was simply an optimization.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So talk to me about the process of what you learned through those two years of research and sort of mapping the idea maze towards what became Last Energy.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I mean, it took a year before I felt comfortable saying anything controversial because I just always was just thinking, even though like the answer seemed pretty obvious, I was always just in my head thinking, I don't know enough, there's something I'm missing here. And then I gave a talk at Oak Ridge about a year in to summarize some of my learnings. That was the first forum that I said something controversial, mostly about like the meltdowns not being a bad thing and a few other things, too, starting to critique the nuclear industry for its problems instead of blaming outside industries. And people started getting up and clapping. Like, I couldn't believe it. I was like, I thought I was going to get booed out of the room, have stuff thrown at me. And people literally stood up one at a time and started clapping. And one person voiced an opinion, I mean, they said out loud, like you were saying the thing that we've always known but nobody is like okay saying out loud. I know, I feel like I'm just like complimenting myself here, but this was like a really pivotal moment of validation. And you know that expression, you can't get someone to understand something when they're paid not to, that was essentially the encapsulation of that idea, like all of their jobs, anyone who's an expert in nuclear, their job is like, literally, their livelihood, their family, putting food on the table for their family is tied to toeing the line of the existing nuclear narrative, which is designed not to sell new plants but to sell fear. And so, it's very refreshing for them to hear this outsider opinion. And that gave me all the confidence I needed to refine that message for the next couple of years to come.
Eric Jorgenson: So what does it feel like inside the nuclear industry now? Are there people who are clinging tightly to that kind of fear mongering business model and people who are like hell yeah, let's build, build, build?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, there's like this whole new component to, let's say, not the industry, but like the sector of like all of these advocacy groups, and they're incredible. And I can take zero credit for anything they're doing. They're creating these like global movements. This guy like Mark Nelson and then there's others, a lot of them came out of like the school of Shellenberger.
Eric Jorgenson: We had Mark Nelson on this podcast.
Bret Kugelmass: Oh, my God, I should have done my research. I'm going to go back and listen.
Eric Jorgenson: I want to have Chris Keefer on too.
Bret Kugelmass: Chris is the man. It’s so funny, Chris and I, like I feel like Chris is one of my best friends, even though we actually hadn't met in person. We’ve known each other for two years. I mean, I literally listen to this guy when I go to sleep because that’s like the time to listen to a podcast. And then he listened to my podcast. So we had this whole like relationship without actually being- we had this like asynchronous relationship which was just like so weird. But so I've always felt like- and I just feel like I know him. I mean, he's such a good guy. And what he's doing is incredible. And he's so smart and hardworking, like incredible dude. And I finally got a chance to meet him in real life. And it was as if we had known each other the whole time. We met for the first time two years in. It was crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, will you give like a 30 second background on Chris, just for people who want to look him up and follow him? Because I think he's hilarious, but you'll explain him better than I will.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah. So his platform is called Decouple podcast. And his background is he's an emergency room physician. So like he's got- I think it's like- it's super cool and super key that he has this like unimpeachable credibility. A lot of others, even when they're super pro nuclear, are just simply accused as being like stooges for the industry, unfairly, but it's like almost impossible to overcome that. But he wears his like medical badge around to these conferences. He's like a real doctor like saving lives in an emergency room as his day job and just does this out of the passion of like wanting to do good for the world. And so people are almost forced to take him more seriously, and it has an incredible impact. I mean, he's been able to make movements at the highest levels of government in Canada as just like some guy, not some guy, but like some guy who's a doctor and has a podcast. And now like the Prime Minister listens to him. I'm not sure which of the ministers, but there's ministers that listen to him. Let’s just put it that way.
Eric Jorgenson: There's some hilarious videos of him like rolling into parliament or whatever Canada calls its Congress with like this amazing mustache and just chilling out and being like guys, guys, guys, nuclear is rad. I have the floor for five minutes. Let me explain in small words how important this is. It's just hilarious.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, and Nelson's got the mustache, too, occasionally at least.
Eric Jorgenson: Maybe you should grow a mustache.
Bret Kugelmass: I had one when I started. I feel like I should get a little credit for that. But I haven't had one. It looks a little too goofy to be in a professional setting. So I haven't had one for years.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, something about that nuclear 80s like throwback mustache.
Bret Kugelmass: That's right. That's right. It's like a throwback.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, how did you decide- Okay, so picking up from sort of finding your feet with like resonance in the nuclear industry, how did you go from I'm just trying to learn to I think I got my head around like a business model or an opportunity that isn't being tackled? How did you decide what form Last Energy should take when you started this company?
Bret Kugelmass: Well, so yeah, I spent that year of like just learning and then a year of being invited to like keynote all these events. And so I had this forum now to test out my thesis and get a lot of feedback from like thousands of people, and I put the videos up online. I get back from even like global communities, and I used that to essentially tell everyone what our strategy was for Last Energy over the course of a year and get feedback. And at the end of that year, I felt like we're- and I was also actually, man, I forget sometimes, but I really did not want to start another startup at the time because I’d just done that. It was like so brutal, like personally, it's just like so brutal. And I had just come out of one. I was like I don't want to do that again. But yeah, I was telling everyone what to do. And nobody was listening. And so I just, at some point, did it myself.
Eric Jorgenson: What's the it?
Bret Kugelmass: The it is don't reinvent the reactor, just take the existing standard reactor, shrink it down, reduce the risk, like you don't even have to reduce the cost on paper, you just have to reduce the risk of cost overruns in reality. So it's like pretty simple. So just do that, and you're going to have the cheapest, cleanest energy mankind has ever seen. And either people refuse to believe that it's that simple, or they're incentivized not to follow that path. But that's what we're doing.
Eric Jorgenson: It seems so simple when you put it that way. So like what is special about this approach?
Bret Kugelmass: I mean, I like to say we're innovative in how un-innovative we are. Like, we are not introducing material science, chemistry, fuel, physics, supply chain risk, we're just not doing that. Like, if you just look at the existing nuclear installations, they're already the cheapest power mankind has ever produced. You can look historically and look at their build costs and their build schedule. Nothing to this day beats a 1968 nuclear power plant. And it produces baseload power, produces dispatchable power, produces clean power, power with energy security, every characteristic. If you want to write down what you want out of a power system, a 1968 nuclear reactor does it. So just like try to get as close to that as possible, and yeah, that's our thesis.
Eric Jorgenson: And you’re going to just build a shitload of them as quick as you can?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah. And then you get the cost down even more. I mean, we're going to demonstrate a world where not only energy is clean, but energy is 10 times or eventually maybe even 100 times cheaper than it is today. And that's energy abundance. That's not just clean energy and reduction of air pollution. That's the end of poverty as we know it for the entire globe. Like what could be cooler than that?
Eric Jorgenson: I want to write a post about this eventually. But I'm still kind of like collecting ideas, like what happens when energy is too cheap to meter? When it's a hundred or a thousand times cheaper, what are all of the things that change in the world? I think that's such an insane, fun, beautiful question.
Bret Kugelmass: It is so cool. And yeah, I highly encourage you to do that so I can start including those examples in my speech. Because I try to think about it, and I've got like these ideas in my head, but it's like going to be a little bit of like art to make sure that you're communicating the idea in a way that is both visionary but seems achievable. So yeah, send me that list when you get it. Jason Crawford, who hosted that conference that we were talking about that we met at, he's also like into that question as well. So he's another good person to ask.
Eric Jorgenson: I would love to talk to Jason. I had Josh Storrs Hall on the podcast also, who wrote Where's My Flying Car? And he goes through a handful of them in there, examples in that book, but desalinization is one, basically freshwater is abundant if energy is sufficiently cheap.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah. So roll with me on that one for a second. Like, can we take that one step deeper? So let's say that we have unlimited clean water everywhere. What are some of the other things that we can do with it? Other than just like providing clean drinking water, can we change the weather by like spraying it into the air in key times and key places? Maybe.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, it's a big input to abundance of food is fresh water.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, maybe that means the end of war because how much of war is based off of like being able to grow your crops where you need them when you need?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, war, the scarcity, the main modes of scarcity, energy, water, food, like the things that drive people to kill generally.
Bret Kugelmass: And like trees are like food for buildings. So that means like structural materials become cheaper too.
Eric Jorgenson: Yep, structural materials. Actually, Alex Bridgeman sent me a post this morning, a little clip of something, and I'm not going to be able to articulate the science in between. But there's basically a startup that's changing, has a new method of producing steel where energy is the main input. And they're excited about that because as energy costs come down, steel becomes massively cheap, another like super critical sort of building input.
Bret Kugelmass: So I'd actually take that one step further. Like I would start with that and I would say what is better than steel that doesn't exist as a structural material because the energy input is even a higher percentage of its total cost. And the thing that would come to me are like specialty plastics, like there's a plastic that's in like fireman's helmets that I know just from research at one point, that is like stronger than steel and 10 times lighter. And obviously, so it’s like a plastic, so it's sequesters carbon. So, imagine if you just built all buildings out of that plastic, you’d sequester carbon, everything would be lighter, cheaper, better, easier. And energy would enable that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, electric cars are prolific. Transportation gets way cheaper.
Bret Kugelmass: Let's go beyond cars. Like maybe if energy is so much cheaper- Yeah, like these little personal quadcopter things could really take off.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I know somebody working on farming robots that's very driven by entirely electric components. And manufacturing, increasingly, like electricity is the main input to- Yeah, so all that to say, we should definitely, definitely, definitely really, really worry about energy getting cheaper.
Bret Kugelmass: Focus on it. Not worry about it. Focus on it.
Eric Jorgenson: Focus on it. Yes. Thank you. Good reframe. So Last Energy sells whole ass power plants. Who do you sell those to?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, so we actually don't sell the power plants. We design, build, own, and operate the power plants, and we sell long term electricity contracts for customers. And those customers are heavy industrial energy users such as glass, aluminum, cement, pulp and paper, steel, chemicals like ammonia, automotive manufacturing, battery manufacturing. That's a list of some of our early customers right there.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So these are like big companies who own factories who want their own power source directly?
Bret Kugelmass: Yep.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. It's not even necessarily that governments are buying them or that utilities are adding them to the grid or anything like that. How many of your plants are actually connected to the grid?
Bret Kugelmass: Oh, our first one will come online in 2025. But we've sold a couple dozen already.
Eric Jorgenson: Talk to me about- you said something in there about mitigating- there's a long list of risks you were avoiding taking on. And one of them you listed in there was a supply chain.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, so a lot of those factor in the supply chain. So yeah, anytime you make a change to chemistry, material science, fuel, or physics, the cascading effect that it has on de-standardizing your supply chain, forcing each of those components to become, I mean, even simple components such as like valves, or tanks, or regulators, or compressors, or turbans, each one of those now becomes a billion dollar R&D project just to integrate into a system that has a fundamentally different chemistry. And so yeah, I always say, I believe that your reactor physics will work, I believe your system will work, no problem, but like your supply chain now is going to be 10 times as hard to procure and more expensive, have a higher failure rate a decade out, like it'll take a decade for you to realize that your corrosion rates are just slightly off than what you thought they were. That means your capacity factor 10 years out will go down and your impact on your energy prices is driven up now because of that. So it's like, yeah, those are not challenges I would want to take on.
Eric Jorgenson: So you're using entirely existing parts?
Bret Kugelmass: Yep. So essentially, we have a rule, every single component that goes in our power plant has to be operating at 100 power plants around the world.
Eric Jorgenson: And you haven't found any components that haven't been able to meet that yet?
Bret Kugelmass: I mean, a nuclear plant, standard light water reactor nuclear plant is like the simplest possible thing you can imagine. You've got a thermal power plant, and there's tens of thousands of those and all the components that goes in those. And then your hot rock is essentially a pressure vessel, and nuclear fuel bundles, which are also produced by the tens of thousands. I mean, most people don't realize those same fuel bundles provide 10% of world electricity today. 10% of world electricity. So those are fairly common too. So yeah, everything is pretty simple. That's the whole point. Make it simple and don't run away with too many good ideas.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. How long does it take? So you said the first one's going online in 2025.
Bret Kugelmass: That’s the target. It might take longer, but that's what we're targeting.
Eric Jorgenson: When did that process start then?
Bret Kugelmass: In many ways, it started four years ago. I mean, a big part of this is getting through the regulations. I started meeting with regulators four years ago to really understand which regulators are capable of conducting a good licensing process and spending time with them, helping them get up to speed on the concept. And a lot of it’s credibility building. A lot of what a nuclear regulator does isn't just assess your design, it assesses your company. So yeah, I started four years ago, and we'll take a few more years before the first one comes online.
Eric Jorgenson: Where's that one going to be?
Bret Kugelmass: Could be in Poland or Romania or the United Kingdom. Those are the three markets that we're pursuing as early markets.
Eric Jorgenson: So you haven't been able to start construction yet?
Bret Kugelmass: We actually build them in Texas. But then we ship them in pieces to the target markets and do final assembly on site. So we don't actually have to know where the first plant is going to go to already start working on them.
Eric Jorgenson: That's super cool. I mean, are these kind of like prefab construction? Is that a reasonable analogy?
Bret Kugelmass: That's exactly right. We go to shops on the outside, say prefab construction, and we say, here the schematics, go build us this. Yeah, it's exactly right.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, another way to sort of de-risk. And they are all like standard parts, just walls and doors.
Bret Kugelmass: Everything that is built for our plant has been built in hundreds of plants already. It's just our specific configuration. I mean, in many ways, like okay, I'm downplaying like the technical input to this. You could say the same thing about almost any product that exists, like a smartphone is a collection of hundreds of components that are off the shelf components used- the chips are used in other things and were already. And then the job of Apple or Samsung, it's still a lot of technical work, but to like design a configuration of how it comes together and into a product that they can then sell. And we, in many ways, just do the same thing. We are the systems integrators of components in a unique form factor that we productize and market and sell around the world.
Eric Jorgenson: And then continue to service. So it is Last Energy staff that's managing these plants, securing these plants, operating.
Bret Kugelmass: And for that, we typically partner with local power plant operations companies that obviously speak the language and already have the staff ready to go and then they just plug into our facility just like they would a modern natural gas facility that would be built.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, interesting. So you're kind of the- you're the general contractor, like the accountable party, your hiring a local contractor to-
Bret Kugelmass: We are like a step above the general contractor, more like the engineer, owners engineer, and then the labor is usually done by subcontracted companies.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I mean, I guess that makes sense if the requirements and stuff are different in each implementation because you have plants kind of all around the world.
Bret Kugelmass: And it's more scalable. I mean, these power plant operations businesses, their business is to hire power plant operators. Our business is to design a scalable energy revolution.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a good tagline. Let's talk about the waste a little bit because does that- it normally stays on site for plants. And that's something that I feel like even people who are relatively curious and open minded about still view this as like a big problem or blocker to like nuclear adoption.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, it is their perception problem. It is not a safety or technical issue. And quite frankly, for most people who have a problem with it, like it's not their problem because they're not living in a community where anyone is proposing to build this. They're just talking about it. But no, I mean, listen, nuclear waste has never hurt a single person, place, or thing in all of human history. So the idea that nuclear waste is dangerous is insane. But once again, if your five closest friends and everyone you know always said nuclear waste is the most hazardous thing on planet Earth, I can't fault you for believing that. But yeah, it's just not true.
Eric Jorgenson: But please change your mind and vote nuclear.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah. I mean, I don't know, I think like as cultural shifts happen and different cultural divisions throughout society are more pro nuclear, less pro nuclear, whatever it is, people will naturally change their opinions to like move with the mass, to move with the herd. And so nothing I can do from a marketing perspective is going to change the public's opinion. But the public's opinion will change eventually as these other social forces come into play.
Eric Jorgenson: Have you felt, I mean, you're kind of in the crow's nest to see the winds of some of this change. Have you felt a change in the sort of ambient like opinion and interest in nuclear over the last decade or so?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, about two years ago, there was a huge change. I don't know where it came from. But it's like all of a sudden, it went from I was like telling people at cocktail parties first I'm an energy person and then like later in the event, I’d say nuclear, and then that's all changed. Like, people are super- Yeah, I mean, I don't know what it is, but the zeitgeist has shifted. I don't know what caused it. Like, everyone I know is like- and that's always like, oh, all along, I liked nuclear. People are always saying like, oh, since I was a kid, I liked nuclear. I’m like, okay, sure, you should maybe should have said it a few years ago, but whatever.
Eric Jorgenson: Show me the tweet, put it in the blockchain. Let me see it. Prove it. So what has been going on? Has that change been reflected in the regulatory at all? I mean, I'm optimistic now that now that sort of the NRC has approved something.
Bret Kugelmass: Nothing. They haven't approved anything. It's crazy. I mean, yeah, there's announcements, but it's not true.
Eric Jorgenson: They approved New Scale, right?
Bret Kugelmass: Nope. They got a certificate. I remember the days that I used to get a certificate in elementary school for doing a good job on my homework, but that has no legal weight. No, no, what you need is a license, and they have not issued them a license. And that is still five years and $500 million away. And even they would admit the certificate is paper that they wouldn't wipe their ass with.
Eric Jorgenson: Is that for the new design that they're proposing? Do you also need that license?
Bret Kugelmass: We're not going through the NRC for licensing. So I don't know what the certificate nonsense is. But it has zero legal weight.
Eric Jorgenson: So you don't have to go through it because you're not building in the US.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, exactly. The NRC governs domestic facilities, and our facilities are international.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So you're going to have to at some point?
Bret Kugelmass: Not the NRC, the local regulator. And yeah, we're going through that process right now. But not any of this certificate bullshit. Getting a license, like you get a license, you want a license to operate, get a license. A certificate is just like fun to hang on your wall, I guess. I don't know.
Eric Jorgenson: I hope that this- I don't know. I want to believe regulators have their heart in the right place.
Bret Kugelmass: Well, listen, the Breakthrough Institute published this incredible article the other day about what happened, like Congress mandated- and once again, I'm going to preface this with like I'm sure like the people at the NRC, smart, intelligent, like talking to them, hard working, well intentioned. It's there's an institutional problem. And so what happened is Congress mandated that they streamline their process for small reactors. And instead of streamlining it, they took all of the existing rules, added 1200 pages of additional rules, not replacement rules, additional rules you have to follow. And that's where we are today. So how optimistic can you be? But why should you be optimistic? Why do you care if new nuclear gets built in the US first? Like, I don't know why anyone cares. Like, eventually things might change, but like build it somewhere else first. Like, why does it have to be the US?
Eric Jorgenson: Because I live in the US and I want cheap electricity.
Bret Kugelmass: We have cheap electricity. Yeah, it's not going to get that cheap because of like there's other things that you have to worry about, like transmission costs. Like when PG&E charges, I don't know, 13 cents a kilowatt hour, like the production of electricity was only 5 cents a kilowatt hour. Like it's not going to get that cheap due to the way that like the market incentives are set up in the US. That's another problem that has nothing to do with the production of power.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the energy markets are an insane thing. Like it's a whole convoluted wild process unto itself. Like these short term auctions, long term auctions, price floors, rebates for different generations. Like it's so complex.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah. No, the US is the absolute worst when it comes to- like being able to understand the electricity markets in the US, no human is capable of this. I don't think AI- like ChatGPT is amazing, better than I ever thought it would get. I even think it would crash under the weight of trying to understand the US markets.
Eric Jorgenson: Even GPT 3 could not get a license from the NRC.
Bret Kugelmass: I’ll hold my breath for GPT 7 to figure this out.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so how do you see the next 50 years playing out in the energy industry and nuclear in particular?
Bret Kugelmass: No matter what, not just 100%, but 10x today's energy, 1,000%, will someday be entirely driven by nuclear. Yeah, you might make chemical fuels out of nuclear and then ship those chemical fuels around the world. But it is an inevitability at some point. We might have to have civilization collapse and rebuild itself. But when some future alien civilization comes here and sees what we're driving our energy off of as a resource, it will be nuclear, no doubt. And so I don't know, I think it could happen much faster. I think could happen in 20 years, 30 years, have a total energy revolution, maybe it takes 150 years, but eventually it will be 100% nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: It does seem like something approaching the logical end state, like Steve Jurvetson talks about this stuff all the time. He's like, what do you consider inevitable over a very long arc?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, that's a great way to think about things.
Eric Jorgenson: And I've heard him say, there's three that I have high conviction about, which is all cars will be electric, all cars will be autonomous, and his third is we will no longer raise and kill animals for meat.
Bret Kugelmass: I don't know about a few of those.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a good question. But I think your frame on like almost all- something approaching no fossil fuels or entirely nuclear power is a reasonable thing to think about in that frame.
Bret Kugelmass: I definitely feel that way. And I think all cars will be autonomous eventually. But electric and the meat thing, I'm just not so sure. I think that- and that's one of the problems of Silicon Valley, and one of the reasons I like had to leave in 2017 was it was just like too much bubble thinking. And I think like how people feel about their relationships with animals, like you would believe the whole world feels that it is totally inhumane to kill an animal if you live in Silicon Valley. But there're like fundamental cultural differences in other places that would not lead you to that same inevitability. Because there's really a moral question in addition to a technical one, and people have a very different moral lens on that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's a big broad world out there. And lots of different people live in a lot of different ways. I noticed you did not say a mix of renewables and nuclear, and that felt deliberate.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I just don't- I mean, listen, I emotionally love renewables. My first job was at a solar frontier tech solar company, thin film solar panels, nano solar. I love it. I love the way the wind turbines look, and I love the machinery in them. And I think it's just so cool. And especially like the ocean based platforms are so cool. But from a practical perspective, it doesn't really make sense. The energy is so dilute. The distribution of that energy is intermittent. These are fundamental principles. And then there's the carbon footprint too. If you are using a thousand times as much material to produce the same amount of energy, all material has a carbon footprint no matter what way you cut it. And so, I mean, there's a lot of fishy accounting right now in carbon footprints. But even strong advocates of renewables will still admit that they have a carbon footprint. They'll just erase that in the marketing literature, but they won't dispute the fact. And so you're adding more carbon to the air, maybe not at the same rate as fossil fuels. But if what you like about renewables is that they don't produce carbon, you are wrong, and you should requestion that assumption. And if we add, keep adding more carbon, then we're not removing carbon. And this whole goal of net zero is just totally ridiculous as well. We will have increasing climate impacts, not just going to net zero, but unless we go drastically net negative. And if your carbon footprint for renewables is too high to achieve that negative rate, boy oh boy, it almost doesn't matter what you do. It's just a matter of maybe slowing down climate change by a couple of years. But you should really look at yourself in the mirror if you think that's your goal.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that was another thing that I wrote down when I was listening to some of your talks, and you were thumping the podium with this amazing line. If climate change is going to be solved, it will be entirely through nuclear. And I think that's kind of the- you want rationale before takeaway, but I think that was your argument for that statement.
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I have a bunch of YouTube- I used to do like these university circuits. And so I've got a ton of YouTube videos that walk through that line of reasoning very carefully. It usually takes me about like 20 minutes to like build up to the point where that is indisputable. But yeah, that's the takeaway.
Eric Jorgenson: I know that this is a frustratingly summarizing question to ask somebody who has given hours and hours of talks about nuclear. But what are some of the things that you wish everyone knew?
Bret Kugelmass: I want people to think of nuclear as beautiful. I'm not like a woo-woo person, but I do mean like beautiful architecturally, but also beautiful spiritually, beautiful in terms of like its impact on human prospects, human flourishing. And so I want to create that world where people think nuclear is beautiful.
Eric Jorgenson: It is fucking magic. It is a staggering thing that something smaller, almost smaller than we can conceive, has bonded together in a way that we can separate those bonds and unleash millions of times the energy that comes from this like inert little thing that’s smaller than we can conceive. It's a miracle. The fact that we have not all of our lives been radically transformed over the last 100 years by that realization is like-
Bret Kugelmass: I know. We’ll eventually get there. It is so awesome. I mean, it's like what's more powerful than the sun? Or stars? What’s more powerful than a star? An exploding star. And nuclear, like uranium that we break apart is literally like the bonded battery remnants of an exploded star. I mean, it's just so cool.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's incredible. Can people without domain specific backgrounds get jobs in and be productive in nuclear companies and the nuclear industry?
Bret Kugelmass: Totally. We almost have a rule of not hiring, other than for the nuclear systems themselves, we don't hire anyone from the nuclear industry almost as a rule at our company.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. You have a ton of open roles. I was going through the careers page today. There's a lot of stuff.
Bret Kugelmass: We are growing fast. We got like $5 billion worth of electricity contracts to fulfill so.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, my God. What's like the stage and status of Last Energy right now?
Bret Kugelmass: Yeah, I mean, we're early stage venture backed company. But this last year, we just had so much commercial traction, that now it's just a matter of like grow, grow, grow.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. What an exciting time. I'm so glad that you picked up the sword and shield, that you walked around yelling at people to- it's so funny. Like, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. This is how you move the your industry forward, and nobody did it. And you just eventually sighed, and you're like, fuck it, here we go again. Well, thank you for saving the world. I appreciate you being willing to go fight the battles and bring us into a more beautiful nuclear future.
Bret Kugelmass: Thank you. Thank you for your time as well.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, you will absolutely love two previous episodes that are related, adjacent, and similar to this, episode number 34 with Josh Storrs Hall, the author of Where's My Flying Car? is all about the next industrial revolution that could happen in our lifetimes through the combination of AI, nuclear energy, and nanotechnology. It's a mind blowing book and a great interview. I also did a solo cast about that book. I think that's episode 32. Another great one is Mark Nelson, who actually Bret mentioned in our interview. It's all about the history of the nuclear energy industry. We talk about the energy markets that complicate the delivery of cheaper energy that's generated and a lot more. Mark is also a great interview, highly recommend it, episode number 45. Please go check out athenago.com or invest alongside me and my partners in Rolling Fun. Links to both are in the show notes. One more reminder, please leave a quick review for the show or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. It doesn't seem like much, but it's so massively important. And I read every review, and it's how the show grows. Thank you very much. I love you. Goodbye.