081 Bruce and Imran, Rev1 Energy

Imran (0:00)

The buyer now, if you forward project over the next, say,decade, your single largest demand on electricity or on the grid is going to bebig data. For anybody that doesn't see that is foolish. It ain't going to beretail. It's not going to be commercial. It's certainly not going to beindustrial. It's going to be these boys.

And their buying power is, and also not just their buyingpower, but also their ability to influence regulation for it to get simplifiedis high, which is what you're seeing now. So that's also sort of why you'reseeing the utilities on the outside looking in suddenly, other than a couple,maybe like a TVA, know, constellation to some extent. A lot of the others havebeen slow to react.

And these guys, there's now all signals are pointing to thefact that there will be a certain amount of simplification on the regulatoryside. And this behind the meter thing is starting to become a reality.

[Note from editor: Add 1:55 to every time stamp from here on if referencing video.]

Mark Hinaman (00:02)

All right, welcome to another episode of the Fire to Fissionpodcast where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they better human lives.Today I'm joined by Bruce Nicholson and Imran Safiulla with Rev1 Energy. ‚Bruceis Director of Business Development for Power Generation and Imran is a boardmember. So Bruce, Imran, excited to have you guys. Yeah, thanks for taking thetime.

IMRAN (00:24)

Thank you for having us Mark. Pleasure.

Mark Hinaman (00:29)

‚(?)Um everyone, let's start with you. Board member, how didyou get involved with, ‚Um with Rev1?

Imran (00:35)

‚Um Yeah, I'll try and keep that as a short story, but itstarted off as a family venture, which the original founder of the company wasalso actually good friends with Bruce. One of the back stories is that he wasalso in the initial founding club. And so I've had a fairly close relationshipwith the founding family and they...

and asked for me to come and sort of help and guide and nowwe're in the second generation. So I'm sort of helping steward the nextgeneration of the family to growth and the subsequent next phase of thecompany's trajectory, if you will. yeah, started off as a relationship andyeah, and has grown from there. So it's been almost a decade and a half plusnow. So yeah.

Mark Hinaman (01:21)

Thanks.

I grew up

in a family around business man, so I had it.

Imran (01:33)

Yeah, exactly.

You know how that goes. I definitely had more hair and itwas definitely darker as well when I started. Definitely when it existed. ‚Um

Mark Hinaman (01:37)

Yeah.

Your hair was darker. You've had brighter days since then.

Okay, Bruce, what about you? And for the benefit of theaudience, do you want to it kind of an overview of Rev One and what they do?

BRUCE (01:59)

Yes, I'll start before Rev1. My background, I'm ex-Navy nukefrom the 70s. Got out in the of the peak of the commissioning of ‚commercial powerplants in the 80s, commercial nuclear plants. So I spent more or less the 80sdoing nuclear plant startups, commissioning. And as that wound down, I had thebug for commissioning. So rather than going to operations or going to outagework, I liked the daily challenges of commissioning performing initialcheckouts of equipment and systems, finding why it doesn't work and helping bea part of the solution to making it work right. And so ‚Um I branched out intonon-nuclear space in the 90s because that's what was available. ‚Um well, sureenough, Rick Ehrgott, which ‚Um Imran mentioned, I'd worked with him atcommercial nuclear plants in the 80s and we got back together on a project anddecided we can do this for ourselves. Why work through other folks?

And so a couple of us got together and formed what you cannow sort of say is Rev Zero. And that was a successful venture. We ended up ‚Umselling that off to GE. GE was one of our big customers. And after a coupleyears of key man agreements, non-disclosure periods, I mean non-competeagreements. There you go. Got back together and Rev1 was being founded  and has been in businessfor 25 years.

Mark Hinaman (03:23)

Was

the original version called rev zero?

BRUCE (03:26)

No, no, no, just an inside joke.

Mark Hinaman (03:30)

That's fun. I like that.

BRUCE (03:56)

But again, just more ofa staff augmentation company. After about 10 years, we had the capabilitiesthat we started to look at bidding on projects. So developing the program andthen managing and executing commissioning programs, whether it was powergeneration or oil and gas, we did CEMS installation for a while, continuous emmissionsmonitoring systems, purchasing the hardware, spec and everything, and thengoing on to somebody's site and putting the system in and getting it up andrunning.

Also in the commissioning space taking again more of aproject oriented ‚Um way of business than just staff augmentation. in additionto staff augmentation that still exists as a business unit. Also during thattime, along that transition, or a little earlier, Rick was a little visionaryand so in the 2008 kind of timeframe, he need figured we needed to develop ourown software to support our field services.

And so we developed a commissioning management softwareplatform that grew for more than a decade, 15 years, I think, before itventured outside the company as a product or a service that was marketedoutside the company. And that's now branched off in this ownthe same owners asRev1, but a separate company called Tracker Technologies. we've recently, latelast year, became a partner with Oracle. So now we're a native platform we can,platform they call unified, we can natively speak with ‚Um P6 as an example. Ifyou update commissioning records, it'll update the schedule. If you update theschedule, it'll update the commissioning schedule. It all just is fluid work atall from the single source of truth, the database that comes out of theengineering front end development of the project. And ‚Um everybody dovetailsoff that engineering database and records and ‚Um

documents that are generated in engineering and procurementand construction. And ‚Um with the Renaissance, if you will, as people call it,of nuclear coming back, we're getting more active into taking, rather thanstaff augmentation, our project scope type services and ‚Um trying to get atthe leading edge of that curve with SMR developers and site developers.

to ‚Um help be a part of the solution for developingprograms and then managing and executing programs.

Long story, but that's Rev1.

Mark Hinaman (06:33)

nice yeah yeah

i like it did did you guys rebrand as Rev1 Energy rightweren't you something else but

BRUCE (06:42)

Yeah, the original and it's still there. ‚Um The parentcompany is Rev1 Power Services. And like I said, that was really our primaryfocus at the time of the foundation. But with one thing I did kind of glanceover about a decade ago, we moved into the energy space, oil and gas space. Andwe've got quite a lot of success with that. So commissioning, and nowsince lastyear, so we have O&M contracts in the oil and gas industries. And so itwas, we rebranded as Rev1 Energy to be a little more encompassing than justpower generation or power services. So yeah, it's good question.

Mark Hinaman (07:23)

Gotcha. Man, a decade ago, what? It's 2016. Like, there wasa bottoming of the market, right? Like, it's a rough time to get into the oiland gas business, but a good time if you can be helpful. okay, so staffaugmentation, that was kind of the bread and butter. That's still a big focusof the business then? Like, what kind of staff and what kind of positions areyou guys supplying?

BRUCE (07:30)

Yeah, specifically and

Yeah.

Well, anything from commissioning managers or the I&Ctechs, the electrical techs, primarily commissioning some O &M, someoperations if folks need temporary operations support and say combined cycles,separate from the oil and gas. The oil and gas we tend to do more on theproject scope basis. We're a big supplier for Shell. We have kind of exclusiveagreements with Shell on a lot of platform work with Shell.

Mark Hinaman (08:20)

I

bet that MSA was super easy to negotiate.

Imran (08:21)

for the.

Yeah, as you can imagine.

But staff augmentation is still a big part. And then I'm onthe project side. And we look to the staff augment folks as our recruiting arm.So they're still definitely in the loop if we say, we need a team put togetherto execute what we've developed as a program. We've sort of evolved it moreinto sort of also the managed services side. So now it's not just about us, youknow, sort of sending folks in for a project that purely is being managed by anexternal service provider. But we've sort of tried to get into that value chainourselves as well. And so whether it is with the toolboxes, he mentioned withtracker technologies, which is a homegrown, you know, software system that wedeveloped internally, but also as we've diversified, we also have increasedsome of our capabilities even in the electrical testing side.

It was not homegrown, but we did that through acquisition.So we have bought a company that now allows us to do everything from arc flashto native testing to that whole electrical engineering competency as well we'venow brought in-house. So that now when we are customer facing, are not alsodon't just have one linear perception of saying, from a legacy standpoint ofyou, you guys were.

were primarily staff augmented. So we've sort of tried toevolve away from that and sort of grow ‚Um additional value lines from acapability standpoint of view, which is where sort of the rebrand also came inwas sort of trying to all of our sort of acquired competencies now as we'veprogressed. And to expand on the...

Mark Hinaman (10:09)

Yeah.

Imran (10:10)

the electrical services, that's electrical design,electrical build, then the commissioning and NETA type testing, substations,transformers, switching gears, side of it. So that sort of came as a functionof us recognizing the gaps that we saw in a lot of the ways that the projectswere being managed. So when we had specific smaller teams that were being sentunder the guise of

of staff augmentation, you saw some of the challenges thatsite managers and project managers were having and where those gaps were. Sothe electrical testing, the electrical engineering side of it, felt, you know,it was, is definitely, it still remains a gap because there's also a, there's aworkforce issue as well, in addition to competency. ‚Um But ‚Um that'ssomething we recognize. we,

We did sort of try and fill that hole through acquisition,which we did about two and a half years ago, and now that business division isstarting to sort of get its own voice in the marketplace as well.

Mark Hinaman (11:17)

Yeah. Do you think a lot of that growth or diversificationwas driven by a need for the business to diversify or opportunistic? It'seither like, oh man, we got to do it survive, or we got to like, hey, thehere's this opportunity and we should really take advantage of it.

Imran (11:27)

Yes, no.

I think

it's a combination of those things, right? Because in ourspace, as history has always shown, if you're a one trick pony, you either growand diversify or you die. And with the advent of technology that came in withrespect to social recruiting, your ability also to recruit personnel that wereprimarily existing from field services standpoint of view.

Relationships was what drove initially your equity point,right? Because you had a relationship with these bodies. And now as you gotsort of at the advent of social media and networking technologies that werecoming into the recruitment sphere, we knew that we were going to start losingour differentiator because the ability to reach said personnel wasn't going tobe a unique value proposition anymore. It wasn't going to be a USP.

there's going to be six other voices that could get to thatsame person in a much shorter life cycle. And then now you're competing againstdollars and cents. you know, there's only so much, it's a race to the bottom.the margins, yeah. I mean, so, so we knew that. And so from a strategicperspective on the leadership side, we knew that diversification was, wasrequired for both for not just survival, not just for growth, but also forsurvival.

Mark Hinaman (12:40)

It's raised to the bottom, right, or an F.

Imran (12:59)

And also, you know, power generation business is cyclic.You'll have some years. good years. good years and then not as many projectscoming out the next year. that was a little bit in the thoughts behind going tothe oil and gas side too, because you know, could find... Well, it is too, buthopefully the two cycles are, you know, offsetting each other. And then we'vedone... ‚Um

Mark Hinaman (13:15)

You don't think oil and gas is cyclical?

Alright. Borrow wasn't volatile enough, so let's go gas.

Imran (13:29)

And then also, which we didn't really quite mention, we'vegrown into the renewable space too. we've done wind generation, ‚Um solar,hydrogen, solar fields and battery energy storage and hydrogen as well. withNikola, we were one of the early service providers for them as they weretripping over themselves and some of the fuel station infrastructure that isactually as a board we

Mark Hinaman (13:54)

Yeah.

Imran (13:59)

we decided to de-risk ourselves from a couple of those.don't know if it's politically correct for me to say it. Yeah, exactly. So, Ithink we, yeah, we might be unpopular to say, but I think we definitely firedNicola. ‚Um

Mark Hinaman (14:05)

Sometimes you gotta fire customers, right?

Nice. ‚Um But let's talk a little bit about that volatilityand cyclic nature of the power industry. Like you guys been in this game for areally long time. ‚Um What?

What kind of things have you seen change? mean, how has,yeah, past two to five years, everyone's said, wow, power's growing, power'sgrowing, data centers, data centers, data centers, like, we need to electrifyeverything. But like, it was a really sleepy industry for a long time. Andgiven how long you guys been in it, like, what's ebbed and flowed? Do you havelessons that you can reflect on over that time period? Yeah.

BRUCE (14:57)

Well, ‚Um one of the takeaways, I guess, would be similar towhat ‚Um Imran touched on is, luckily, we had some pretty deep relationships. ‚UmWe had done many contracts with some big customers. And so that helps youweather those storms a little bit because they know your capabilities and youhave personal contacts, really. ‚Um

Some where in here Imran picked up the conversation

do some more upfront development of projects work in themeantime before it's boots in the field type work. ‚Um But it is... I think thething that you're trying to touch on more is sort of the general attitude,right? Like part of this, let's call it the lethargy. There's been a certainamount of lethargy that has existed specifically on...

from an infrastructure standpoint of view, and you can sortof lay this at the feet of the utilities to a large extent. We've had an agingtransmission and distribution infrastructure. You've got an aging generationinfrastructure as well, but with no slowdown on the demand side. I mean, we'vegone through an entire electrification in the mobility space with nobody payingattention to the infrastructure side. So I think.

All of that does sort of tie back a little bit to, I don'tknow. mean, I don't know if I call it cultural lethargy from, the key legacyplayers that exist within the overall generation framework. Because they've alljust been comfortably sitting on, on legacy power purchase agreements anddon't, you know, are sort of resistant to change. Right. And you're seeing thateven now with,

Mark Hinaman (16:49)

Yeah, there's been no

need to take risks or build.

Imran (16:52)

No need

to take risks, no need, not just risks, no need to evolve.Why do, why should I evolve? Why do, why do I need to move? You move or youtake it the way I'm used to doing it. And I think, which is why now you'restarting to see that slight standoff that exists between the hyperscalers andthe utilities, because some of them are coming in now with very deep pocketsand, and clear quantified captive consumption of saying, if you don't want tobe in the value chain, we'll go behind the meter. Right.

We'll just go generate the power and consume it all. So Ithink that's sort of part of the issue. Wouldn't you agree that there's beenlike a little bit of this, this thought. It's not like, you know, the IOT ofthings has been around now for 15 years, so nobody should have predicted thatpower demand was going to go down. We were just going on becoming more and moreconnected as we go. mean, everything, including your fridge wants to tell youhow to buy the eggs. Right. So from a

from a electricity overhead perspective, the demand on thegrid is constantly growing. And in fact, we'll talk about this when we touch abit on the campaign. But on the electric transformation and mobility, it's alsoone of those things I was shouting about about 20 years ago, saying, guys,don't focus on building the car. That's not the issue. The issue isn't going tobe the car. It's going to be the dispensing of the electricity, right?

and your ability to quell range anxiety to the consumeryou're trying to convince to say, change a fuel source. But that didn't, itagain tracks back to the fact that the utilities really are diverse to risk.They, you know, massively diverse to risk and also change, unfortunately. I'mgoing to get unpopular emails after saying all this. I have lot of friends inthe utility, so I'm going to get some.

Mark Hinaman (18:41)

You're welcome to man, yeah. Spicy. That's a bunch of lazyguy.

No, not lazy, but yeah.

BRUCE (18:50)

And

another thing that changed earlier than that too was theindependent power producers. Exactly. In the unregulated space. And that for awhile was one of the things you could do if you adapted to that, which we did,there's another source of projects to support.

Mark Hinaman (18:57)

Yeah, like, invenergy, right? When did invenergy show up inthe Google Trends, right?

Imran (19:18)

Now it's more of the hyper, know, it's not for to be powerproducers, but behind the meter power producers. But because the buyer haschanged now, right? The buyer now, if you forward project over the next, say,decade, your single largest demand on electricity or on the grid is going to bebig data. For anybody that doesn't see that is foolish. It ain't going to beretail. It's not going to be commercial. It's certainly not going to beindustrial. It's going to be these boys.

And their buying power is, and also not just their buyingpower, but also their ability to influence regulation for it to get simplifiedis high, which is what you're seeing now. So that's also sort of why you'reseeing the utilities on the outside looking in suddenly, other than a couple,maybe like a TVA, know, constellation to some extent. A lot of the others havebeen slow to react.

And these guys, there's now all signals are pointing to thefact that there will be a certain amount of simplification on the regulatoryside. And this behind the meter thing is starting to become a reality. Nowsuddenly people are working up going.

Mark Hinaman (20:28)

Well, let's

double click on that. mean, what are you guys aware ofbehind the meter projects that are happening and like how many of the datacenter hyperscaler guys are actually building these things?

Imran (20:42)

There's a

lot of them that are serious. I mean, all you have to do isjust follow the money, right? Like look at the strategic investments and thevalues that are being put behind some of these new age technologies. And whatis the rationale behind it? So not to oversimplify it, part of that wholemovement and that momentum is behind the meter because they're not waitingaround saying,

We're going to worry about TND bureaucracy and we're goingto worry about utility bureaucracy. We're going to go get these things built. Iguess one clear example, and you're right, a lot of it is planned projects, butXAI in Memphis, they couldn't get what they needed from the utilities. Well,exactly. They probably could have improved on their execution, but they'vebrought in for what they need, the generation they need for now. And I'm surethey need more, as they grow.

Mark Hinaman (21:21)

Yeah, who needs an air apartment man, that's

Imran (21:37)

So, you know, that's essentially behind the meter. Becausecouldn't get what they wanted from the utility. Correct. Or what they neededfrom the And so you will, I mean, you're seeing that, right? I mean, you'realso seeing that as a function of that demand, you're also going to see a lotof harebrained ideas that are getting financing. I mean, that's a telltale signitself when you see, you know, unconventional wisdom being applied to powergeneration, which we are seeing a lot of them. There's a lot of two men in atruck.

Mark Hinaman (22:05)

Solar

panels in space, bro. It's be awesome.

Imran (22:08)

It right exactly. It's

going to be great. So, but in all of that, there willeventually be a method to this madness. You're going to have a few that, youknow, are going to win this race because there's, there's various pain points,including from a department of energy standpoint of view, a department ofdefense, which is department of war, right? So there's things like the Janusproject that are driving

the pre-selection of certain technologies that may be ableto achieve criticality. But again, that has the ability to further simplifyregulatory standards because there's a different pain point that is beingaddressed. There's things that have been getting learned in this Russia-Ukrainething on ‚Um drone warfare, for example, right? Deployment of high densityenergy in short bursts, the data security side of it.

So there's so many other things that are also involved andjust on the hyperscalers itself, I mean, where is all this data gonna sit? Wedon't have the power. So where is it gonna sit? So we're gonna stick now, wewent and taught China how to produce everything in the world. So you're nowgonna go and put all your data there as well because they're the ones that havethe power. We're not careful, that's sort of where we're headed, right?

Mark Hinaman (23:26)

Yeah, that was some dark turns, everyone. You just covered abroad range, full gambit. ‚Um In this power boom, a lot of people are focusedon generation, but you guys had mentioned several key components. ‚UmTransformers, switch gear, distribution. Where are the picks and shovels inthis gold rush that you see?

Imran (23:29)

Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (23:56)

big opportunity in.

BRUCE (24:00)

Hey, boy, if you had gas turbines right now, could sure sellfor a fortune. ‚Um That's that's produce those fast enough. can't produce gasturbines fast.

Mark Hinaman (24:11)

Do you think there's opportunity for new entrants to themarket for gas turbines?

BRUCE (24:15)

Oh,

yes, I think so. mean, the you know, the for the establishedOEMs, they're three, four years out. And I mean, people are dragging machinesthat are 20 years old and been idle for 10 years and refurbishing them andputting them in the kind of like the story of buying a Corvette out of an oldman's garage, know, or his barn, you know, that's they're going to find inthose barn finds gas turbines, TM 2500s.

and refurbishing them to put them out in mean, the costmetrics itself have gone through the roof, right? And there are a couple, yeah.Oh, yeah. And then, yeah, the average cost right now of a gas turbine has goneup 195%, along with the three and four year delay time for new turbines. Andthere are a couple new...

Mark Hinaman (25:00)

And so, I mean, what is that?

One and half dollars per watt, two dollars per watt, two anda half dollars per watt.

BRUCE (25:05)

I'm

not sure. I just saw the overall percentage. And there are acouple new players looking to get into the gas turbine market. And I'minterested to see what their technology is. I suppose it's a differenttechnology. Yeah, on the switch gear and the power engineering side of it,that's obviously the big boys. The big boys have capacity there, right? So theSchneiders, the Siemens, the ABBs, they're

there's no issues there from a supply chain standpoint ofview for them to meet the hour on that, on the power engineering hardware sideof it, at least as it pertains to switch gear and relays and what have you. ButI think the larger issues are going to be, as Bruce pointed out, on things liketurbines itself, but also energy source, energy security, which is why thisso-called nuclear renaissance, that's also sort of why

We're suddenly talking about that, right? For the first timein a long.

Mark Hinaman (26:05)

Resurgence,

right? Nuclear resurgence. What do you guys think of morenuclear coming to the table?

BRUCE (26:08)

Resurgence, yeah. But I think...

I'm not sure I follow you. More nuclear coming to the tablenow. In what way? mean the new OEMs? ‚Um

Mark Hinaman (26:24)

Yep, new

OEMs, restarting of existing plants. I mean, it's been allof the above, right? It feels like there's more momentum now than there's beenin decades.

Imran(26:28)

‚Um yeah, okay. It's,

it's all going to happen, right? It's unfortunately, notunfortunately, fortunately, the only unfortunate part is in this rush, therewill be a lot of harebrained ideas. They already are, because they are alsogetting financed. You won't believe some of these projects that are gettingfinanced. But I think

Again, Darwinism will take care of itself and the fittestwill prevail. But it is, it's a reality that we find ourselves in. If you hadasked, you know, utility leadership or let us say even energy leadership when,because I was involved ‚Um when the decisions were made on the decommissioningof palisades, whether palisades would ever be turned back on again. Nobodywould have vaged.

Yes, like nobody would have put their money saying, yeah,Palisades will get turned back on again. But here we are, right? So the stateof Michigan is one of the primary financiers. ‚Um And you've got a smallmodular reactor technology company that, yes, okay, their competency was onfuel storage, whole tech, that's primarily what their core competency was, butnow they're gonna be the operator of that startup again, so.

I think it's going to be all of the above, I think we'regoing to go from everything, including seeing more AP1000s being built, notjust in Canada. I think the Kenyans now have also decided they're talking aboutin a global sense. But domestically, yes, I think small modular reactors willget commissioned. And the Fermi stock and AP1000s, so larger scale, Yeah, andthe large scale stuff as well.

You know, we were talking to somebody involved withhyperscale ‚Um projects just yesterday. ‚Um the conversation came up, it wasrepeated to us, ‚Um about that's an inefficient way we should take the time sowe don't waste money there. And they said, look, we're looking to spendbillions to make trillions. And so when it comes to repowering Palisades, know,that paradigm has shifted a little bit. It's not a public utility looking tosell to utility customers.

It's not. It's the people that are backing that ultimatelyanyways, the customer for that is looking to spend billions if it's not quitethe most efficient. Correct. There's a lot of refurbishment to make thathappen. We can absorb that because we're looking at the demand is thattrillions.

Mark Hinaman (29:12)

Fascinating.

Imran (29:14)

Yeah, so I think it's

going to be a, yeah, it's going to be a combination. I thinkit's wild. Some of these two men in a truck will fall off, but some of themwill also succeed because as I said, some of the pressure points, includingwith, with some of the demand that, you know, folks at the DOE and departmentof war have and how some of those gaps are going to get filled. And includingeven in the space connotation, right? There's discussions being had about

You know, what we're going to do there from a reactorstandpoint of view, there's energy on the moon being discussed. So, but yeah,first let's fix the issues down here first. But yeah, and I think to meet thoseissues, I think the portfolio is going to consist of a combination of theseissues, everything from large to medium to small to micro. I think there's, Ithink over the next two decades, I think we'll see all of it.

in some combination.

Mark Hinaman (30:13)

Which roles do you guys think are going to be most indemand? mean, know electricians and electrical engineers are...

BRUCE (30:23)

Well, subject

close to my heart is commissioning people.

Mark Hinaman (30:27)

So

literally people that go out and turn stuff on, right? Huge.

BRUCE (30:31)

Correct.

It's its own skill set. Yeah, but even before you turn iton. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it starts way before. ‚Um so I think, you know, I heara lot going to conventions, you know, about the electricians. And that's true.And specialty welders. And that's absolutely true.

Mark Hinaman (30:41)

Yeah, walk down, make sure that it was built as designed andthat the design was good and works, right? Yeah.

BRUCE (31:01)

And then kind of leaps frog to, ‚Um we need the plantengineers, and so the nuclear engineers that work at the plants, and also theoperations forces. You know, if all this boom takes place, where are you goingto get, you know, competent operators in the nuclear space? But very little talkabout how do you get from that construction activity to the operating ‚Umentity where you need the, where you're going to fully utilize that operatinglicense.

And so commissioning is something that we're hard at, oftrying to help develop that. And so what we've opted to do is there's aDepartment of Defense created now Department of War program called SkillBridge.where active service people in their last six months of their commitment to thegovernment can be paid by the government to go do an internship program withcommercial entities.

Mark Hinaman (31:57)

Yeah, we've got one of our engineers that did that, internedwith us.

BRUCE (32:00)

Okay,

so we're now an authorized service provider for ‚UmSkillBridge. And we're going to start ‚Um working on our internship programs,which is really a great program. mean, everybody wins, the government wins, theservice people win, and then the industry wins. And it's flexible enough. We dolot of to name names, you know, we do a lot of work with Kiewit. And so we can,that is can be they don't have to necessarily be a

authorized provider, but if our internship program on how tocommission and at the time we train say 10 people, we don't can't activelyemploy immediately the 10 people. If it's somebody that we're working with,that still rings the bell for the government. You well, we don't have a placefor Joe in the next month when he's getting out, but our, you know, workingpartner Kiewit does.

and we can broker that hire and then that still satisfiesSkillBridge as far as they're concerned. Our internship program led to thatemployment, which makes it more comfortable for us that we don't have toobligate from the get-go that we're going to hire that many people, even thoughthat is the end.

Mark Hinaman (33:12)

Rent to own.

Imran (33:14)

Rent to

own, exactly. But it's a significant gap, right? And thoseare just some of the areas that you can mention, but across the board, from aworkforce development standpoint of view, there's going to be a major gap. Sothat's sort of also why we are making the investments ‚Um from an advocacy andoutreach perspective to sort of highlight this issue, because there is going tobe everything including

curriculum influence that you're gonna have to bring inbecause the technologies are also evolving and changing, right? Because none ofthat is staying static either. So that's also something we are quite heavilyfocused on is spending time with some of the key academic institutions, some ofthe key training, engineering training schools, secondary certificationprograms, trying to see where we can add value of competency to

not just give us a little bit of a stakeholder, but alsosort of be in the value chain a bit. And I think that's kind of a lead into thecampaign. you want to talk about that. So that's sort of, you know, the entirepremise of it when when we first originated the campaign way back in 2005, six,the focus or the pain point was specifically on workforce development.

Mark Hinaman (34:18)

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it.

Imran  (34:38)

because this was, it was a industry-wide issue that theutilities were facing specifically on the nuclear portfolio side of theirgeneration businesses, where they were predicting that they were gonna loseabout 90,000 engineers to retirement over the 10 years that they were embarkingon. And ‚Um they were struggling to figure out how they were going to addressthat issue. ‚Um

And so the initial, that was the initial pain point. So theone of the leading advocacy or mouthpieces for the industry, specifically onthe nuclear side, is the Nuclear Energy Institute that I'm sure you're familiarwith. And so they, on the behest of the industry collective, the ones trying tolead that initiative. And so I had gotten dragged into that room with

with leadership and trying to solve that problem. So for me,the problem was symptomatic of a very, not to oversimplify it, but in fact itwas simple. Because the perception of energy generation with respect to itslargest consumer.

It doesn't exist. People think power comes from the wall,right? Like they think it comes from the socket and a utility bill shows up andthey pay it at the end of the month. They have no understanding necessarilyabout how it's generated, how it's transmitted, how it's distributed. It's notnecessarily, it hasn't been communicated and that's been by choice. Theutilities did that by choice because they didn't want to say too much. Theyhave operated as a slightly in stealth.

to a certain extent, specifically on the nuclear verticals,because Chernobyl had happened, Three Mile Island had happened, you didn't wantto say too much. You had your regulated power purchase agreements and youwanted to quietly produce power and get on with it. So the issue today thatyou're facing of saying, we have a workforce vacuum is connected to that,because how does your mom at home

tell little Johnny to say, you should be thinking aboutbecoming a nuclear physicist. Like, what would drive that thought process,right? When nuclear energy is not even something that is comprehended orcommunicated. Because the only thing that you associate with the word nuclearis unfortunately B-O-M-B, right? That's the first thing that comes to yourmind. And this was even more so pronounced 20 odd years ago.

without understanding that one out of every five light bulbsin this country depends on that discipline of power generation. Notcommunicated. wasn't in popular culture. There was no comprehension of it. So Ifelt that's what needed to be addressed. And I felt that if you addressed thatin a mechanism where you could do it with sort of

using engineering and sciences and technology and math, andif you're able to sort of create a canvas using something that is more amenablein pop culture. So that's how we resulted in using automotive engineering asthe analogy to it. Because it was my argument that mobility was gonna gothrough an electric transformation. There was nothing more.

American than the automobile, right? Easy for everybody tounderstand. It's why we don't have any public transport worth speaking of inthis country, because it's the strongest car lobby in the history of man. Andso that's how we started, because I felt that the advocacy and the outreach, ifyou were able to roll a race car into a school campus that had nuclear on theside of it,

it would start a discussion. It would start a discussion asto why. And that why would allow you to create the engagement that was requiredto start having a dialogue with an eighth grader. And the institution that theeighth grader is in with respect to their choices as it pertains to STEM. Thatthe curriculum itself also had to evolve. Because it's not that we had to

don't know how to teach nuclear engineering of nuclearphysics or any of the support academic ‚Um competencies that are required. Theinstitutions have all, they're all there. There's very credible institutionsall across this country, but the classrooms were empty. So you needed to bringthem in as a stakeholder as well. what I did was we said, okay, we'll bring.

The academic institutions will bring the utilities, willbring the OEMs, will bring everybody that has a vested interest in this cycle.And we will communicate it at a very simple cartoon level to say, look, if youmake these choices in curriculum as an eighth grader, when you finish your fouryears in high school, there is the university willing to give you an admission.

into one of their programs. And then from those four yearson, there is the utility that will hire you at an average of $109,000 upongraduation. It's a very compelling argument, but it had to be delivered in ‚Uma methodology that was engaging. So that's how the car became, and thetransformation of mobility became the canvas we used. And I was also a racing,

team entrepreneur, so I had my own race teams incollaboration with, in a partnership group with my other partners. So we usedthat as the canvas and we slapped nuclear on the side of a race car and startedrolling it into schools as you see there in the background. And that's how westarted the conversation. So it was advocacy on academic discipline, it wasadvocacy for the industry, it was advocacy for...

Also getting the industry to engage with dialogue to say,hey, this is what we've done well, this is what we didn't do well, this is whatwe've learned from, this is how technology has evolved, this is how operationcompetencies have evolved. All of that, needed a popular culture, sort of aparitist to communicate in. And so that's how we created the campaign in itsprevious rendition. And now it's...

History is repeating itself and hopefully now with lessheadwinds because now we're all talking about a nuclear renaissance, right?Nothing we would have bet on in 2012, that's for sure. So, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (41:51)

That's awesome. So

I may have missed it with this campaign. Are you guysrolling it out to specific campuses or how is this getting?

Imran (41:59)

Yeah.

So that's, so you will see all of it getting deployed. we,you know, we, you'll see a lot. We, had strategic partnerships with a lot ofthe, what you would consider the tier one engineering schools. Like the produceof the world, the Texas A &M's of the world. So you will see that. Yeah. CUBoulder, right? You know, I'm, Hey, I'm a Colorado guy myself, not CU, but Iwent to university of Denver. That's why I got my engineering. Yeah. So I'm aDU guy.

Mark Hinaman (42:15)

Why didn't you make the CU Boulder? Sorry.

‚Um man, alright. I did my transfer to whale

there after my... Yeah, let's go whales.

Imran (42:29)

Are you a buffalo? Yeah,

Yeah, well, you guys play football, we ski and play hockey.So yeah, so I mean, School of Mines, you know, we've done things with them aswell in the past. So nationwide, it's a nationwide initiative. Because indifferent regions, you have different utilities, they have differentobjectives. So the way it would work is the canvas.

Mark Hinaman (42:38)

Yeah, we'll a lacrosse team.

Imran (42:55)

allowed that sort of versatility that it, when it went fromdifferent markets, the local utility would engage, the lawmakers would engage,policymakers would engage. And then the school partnerships, you know, as youknow, there's like channel schools, right? Like CU Boulder has channel schools.So you go there and you influence the kids at that level that you need. Soyeah, so you'll see that all of that's going to come back during the course ofthis year. You'll see the campaign and a lot of those.

those campuses, you'll see it also in a lot of ‚Um sort ofpublic policy environments because even here in the state of Texas, there's ahuge initiative towards trying to promote nuclear, know, nuclear sciences hereas a sustainable industry towards workforce development actually. So Texas hasmade a lot of investments. We're actually in that. We're very active in thosediscussions. ‚Um

There's, I'm sure you know this already, there's somethingcalled the Texas Nuclear Alliance itself, right, that it's promoting itself asa destination for these hyperscalers that if behind the meter is a reality,that this would be a great place to do it, regardless of whether it's behindthe meter or in front of the meter. So they're trying to get their utilities toengage as well. So, yeah, so all of that. So it's a combination of all of thatand then.

The physical race is itself because this happens using theIndyCar and the Indianapolis 500 is the backdrop to it. So the physical venue,so when the cars are actually racing, we have the ability to again, create theright consortium of industry leaders under the tent and so that we can talkabout common objectives and common initiatives. It also results in somestrategic partnerships, which is a nice.

which is a nice side outcome. So for us as a company that'salso in growth phase, that's also one of the touch points that was appealing tous is because it allows us to be on the forefront of something like this on anoutreach perspective and it gives us our own clubhouse, so to speak. yeah.

Mark Hinaman (45:08)

Yeah,

that's fantastic. If somebody is listening and they want toreach out, how do they find you guys?

Imran (45:14)

Yeah, easy.

you know, they we have a it's nuclear clean energy.org. ‚UmAnd they can just jump on there and send send an email and we will communicateback with them and tell them more about the program and ‚Um how to how toparticipate or how to get involved. So there's going to be a lot of partnershippossibilities at various levels, because there's going to be, you know,companies of different size and services and scales and competencies that arein this

Mark Hinaman (45:33)

Let's go ahead.

Imran (45:43)

overall value chain. So there's a little bit for everybodybecause some of it is about lifting, you know, everybody's boat, so to speak.So yeah, we're quite excited about it. Including you guys, you guys should belooking to get involved with us. All right. Yeah, because you're also, youknow, in growth phase in that similar context. So it might be strategicpartnerships and alliances that

Mark Hinaman (45:54)

Yeah. Awesome. We should. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah.

Imran (46:12)

that you want to know.

Mark Hinaman (46:12)

Well, I sit

on the board of the Colorado Nuclear Alliance and we'rebeing way outdone by the Texas Nuclear Alliance. Everything bigger in Texas,right?

Imrean (46:15)

The Texas boys, yeah. Everything is

bigger than Texas. This is true. So yeah, we'll have anoffline conversation with you and tell you a bit more and give you a bit moreof the framework. But in a large nutshell, I sort of explained it to you, butwe'll talk offline.

Mark Hinaman (46:36)

love it. Yeah. Do you guys see this as, I mean, a talentpipeline to grow your business in the industry? I'm a huge proponent of, Ithink, more brains put on a problem. I mean, it generates more solutions withChoffton and ends up in a better solution.

Imran (46:54)

Yes, absolutely. So absolutely, yes. Right. Yeah. We're biginto collaboration. And having a tool like this, do feel, again, if it'sfocused under the right premise, And it's got a concentration of, it hasclarity from a workforce development standpoint of view of saying, look, thereis a huge diverse amount of competencies that are going to be required. Soyou're going to have to stimulate

people at different levels, right? Even at a basic tradeslevel, like things that were unpopular or where people looked down on certainfunctions to say, what, you want to grow up and be a welder? No, that's a very,very viable career option today, right? You want to be a fabricator? want tolay, right? Yes, exactly. it's, you know, those, so this is where we, you know,where

Mark Hinaman (47:42)

Dude, welding's artistic. It's really hard.

Imran (47:52)

We're trying to, so when you have something colorful andshine and bright like the campaign, it's able to address all of those things ina way that becomes easier for the onlooker to comprehend or even be influencedbecause it's in an environment of bright lights and the showbiz and the mediaand all of that. But yeah, at a granular level, you're trying to initiate thatthought process and incept that

thought to say, there's a plethora of skills that are goingto be required that just don't lie in very sophisticated academia. There's waysto acquire these skill sets in shorter cycles. And that's why, like Bruce wastalking about on the skill bridge side, people are going to have to berepurposed as well. We're going to have to re-skill. We're going to have tofigure out how to re-skill manpower too.

Because as this technology advent that we are living at themoment, there's going to be a lot of human capital redundancies that's going totake place, right? So what are we going to do with a lot of these people?that's why we want to be on the front end, sort of on the leading edge of that,and then also hopefully reap the benefits of it. We're not just doing it out ofthe goodness of our hearts. There is a vested interest, but the vested interestis quite clear.

And it does come in an environment where everybody does win.All of the stakeholders that we are trying to influence do see growth in value.And so that's sort of why we've invested in it. We're committed to it in thelong term. And yeah, we're going to chip away at it. But it is an issue. It isan issue. There's going to be 40,000, 50,000 truckers that probably won't havejobs in the next three years.

what are we gonna do with these people? Some of them aregonna still be in their 40s and late 30s. So there is gonna be, that's whyBruce is spending quite a bit of time with a lot of these technical programswhere you can bring people in and sort of program them into a new skill inshorter life cycles and then get them into an applied field so that somebodycan earn a living itself.

I think this picks up with Bruce here

In addition to Skillbridge, about once a month we meet witha different educational association. In Texas, there's a community collegesystem that's sort of trade school oriented, if you will. And so there's twocampuses really that do nuclear, they feed the pipeline for people that wantnuclear maintenance, becoming maintenance technicians or operations.

And of course, they still go through the utility couple yearprogram when they get hired as operators. But they feed that pipeline. And sowe're working with them to see how we can collaborate and help promote them.And maybe they promote us too, but we're helping promote them. Give them moreof a We have an ongoing dialogue with Texas A &M. And as far as the craftgoes, they do have a dedicated program. They're working with local industry inHouston to develop welders, specialty welders, and mechanics, and mill rights.

Exactly. Because they see the need for development.

Mark Hinaman (51:16)

That's awesome guys, very commendable. ‚Um You guys arebullish on the power industry and the nuclear industry, sounds like. mean, haveadvocacy work like this. Yeah, it's a blind man, I love it. So, ‚Um and I lovethat you're taking action to help it grow and it feels very actionable.

Imran (51:18)

Thank you.

Hey, basic economics Mark, supply, demand, right?

Mark Hinaman (51:43)

the this campaign. So I commend you guys for that. How Imean, there's forecasts. I like to end these episodes with, you know, kind oflooking forward a night of the future of where things are going. You know, theUS came out a ago and said tripling of nuclear energy by 2030 or 2050. But

BRUCE (51:44)

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Mark Hinaman (52:09)

I just listened to a podcast again just this morning that werun out of conversion capacity if the current fleet doubles ‚Um and there's notenough uranium. So like there's hard limits to, with current infrastructure andexisting, ‚Um the system setup as is, ‚Um is under supplied and under built. Soin your mind.

BRUCE (52:16)

Exactly.

Yes.

Yes.

Mark Hinaman (52:34)

What are the few key pieces? Where are you guys gonna becommissioning new plants, new, and when I say where, mean geographically andtechnology focus and which element in the supply chain and the value chain areyou gonna be commissioning the most over the next two to five, 10 years?

BRUCE (52:57)

Well, one of the concepts I think, and I believe that's whatFire2Fission is all about, and also Blue Energy, I think it makes a lot ofsense. in fact, Fermi America is doing this to a degree, is start off with whatwe can rapidly deploy now. Unfortunately, that made a crunch or helped with thecrunch of gas turbine availability. ‚Um Fermi's not taken exactly this tact,but designed the facility.

to convert to be new. So it's ready to be converted, butbuild it with the gas fired boilers or gas turbine packages with heat recoverysteam generators. Commission your steam plant that is the permanent steam plantthat's already designed for that conversion. And then similar to a repoweringeffort, you come in and you repower that existing facility when the new startto show up, giving you a little more breathing room for fuel supplies.

Mark Hinaman (53:37)

Yeah.

BRUCE (53:54)

or licensing applications to get finalized. And I thinkthat's a very practical approach. And that's where I hope that we get in. Andso for us, there's kind of the phrase, know, two bites from the apple for us,the two bites might be the commissioning of that front end. And then and thenbeing the go to people to, hey, come back and help us commission down theturnover, the conversion.

Mark Hinaman (54:04)

We agree.

Imran (54:19)

No, I don't turn around. Yeah. And also whilst thathappening as we have already touched on, I think one or two of these, you know,micro small slash micro guys that also going to meet criticality, right? It isgoing to happen. So I think your larger question of saying, you know whatmarket projections but but Mark, even if you took those market projections, cutthem in half and divided by four, it's still a massive number. Right?

It's still a massive number. Yeah, so ‚Um it's significant.I think states like Tennessee, Texas, these two for sure on the top of ourheads from what we have been seeing in the rooms that we are in, they aretrying to make it as viable for some of these new bills to potentially come andland here.

Mark Hinaman (54:49)

I think that's just divide by eight, right? ‚Um

Imran(55:14)

And so one of these, one or some combination of these newtechnology guys, I think we'll see light at the end of the tunnel that's not atrain. And I think we're hoping to stay in that value chain pretty close inthat and figure out where we can fill gaps from a commissioning services site,as Bruce pointed out. Because even the Janus thing, mean, it's that pressurepoint.

that the DOE and Department of War have is real. So it isgoing to filter out somebody. And then the other side that we see some growthas well, which doesn't directly pertain to our competency, so to speak, is bigpharma and their entrance into the nuclear side. So medical isotopes is now abig, that's a big subject line. So that's something.

Mark Hinaman (56:07)

It's dopes, baby. Yeah.

I think, I mean, it's a broader discussion, When you havelike seven podcasts just on that topic. But to me, it's a huge selling point tomost of oil and gas executives. mean, you're selling commodities. These guysunderstand how to sell commodities.

BRUCE (56:17)

It is, it is, yeah.

Correct.

Absolutely. And so that's something that we have

Correct. So it is, I mean, the fact that some of thoseisotopes are being produced in the same candle reactors changes the valueproposition significantly. So in this rendition of our campaign, we haveincluded that. We are going to be talking about medical advocacy as well. Thatwe are not just about clean 90 % power factor, clean energy, but also have theability to save lives off of the same technology. So nuclear and saving liveshas this.

Inherent oxymoron in it, which we intend on on leveraging.Yeah. Yeah. So

Mark Hinaman (57:05)

Yeah, it's all that.

Cool, guys. Well, it's been wonderful to chat. Any closingthoughts?

BRUCE (57:18)

Go nuclear.

Imran ?

Yeah, go nuclear the whole way. Not to get toophilosophical, but I do think that I don't know if there is a I don't know ifthere's genuinely another way to address the deficiency of power we are staringdown. Right? How else are you going to do it? Like what else are you? What'sthe fix? Like I don't know.

Mark Hinaman (57:46)

I mean, if we don't use nuclear, we're going to light everyfossil fuel on fire. We named the company Fire to Fission, not Fission to Fire,so we're going to progress nuclear, right?

Imran (57:51)

Yeah. Yeah. And so what does that do to already a planetthat's hurting so

Exactly. There's a reason why. Yeah,

yeah, you guys get it. so which is why so on that front, wedo see some synergies with you guys. And so that's also why we took the timewhen when you guys were graceful enough to reach out to us. That's also why Imade sure I was going to stop in and chat with you a little bit because we dowe do see some touch points of getting you guys involved in in our campaignmessaging and sort of further strengthen the outreach. But

And we'll tell you a bit more on this medical stuff, butyeah, mean, companies like Tata are putting some significant money in theground on the commercialization of it. And when you've got big pharma likeNovartis already now, know, packaging.

treatments, it's real. So I think that it's going to helpour advocacy. It's a nice piece to have. But it's also real. It's not fluff, isit? It's not marketing fluff. It's actually real. It's real.

Mark Hinaman (58:57)

Yeah. Cancer

fighting or cancer cure in medicine. Thank you so much guys.This has been great.

Imran(59:02)

It's real. Yeah, exactly. It's real. So thank you again forhaving us and I

appreciate you. Apologize for any dark turns, you know.Thanks again.

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