085 Nick Smith, Raven-Flint

Nick Smith (00:00)
the shortage is not in like reactor designs and in unique permutations of fuels and coolants and neutron spectrums. Like right now we need to repatriate the ability to chemically convert uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride.

And that's the thesis

turns out you can get a Geiger counter though that will detect alphas, and you can go, I don't know, hypothetically like forty-five minutes from your house into the mountains and find radioactive rocks and then

Thank you, Ace Hardware, for supporting Garage Chemistry.

Mark Hinaman (01:43)
Alright, welcome to another episode the Fire to Fission Podcast, where we talk about energy-dense fuels and how they can better human lives. My guest today is Nick Smith, co-founder and CEO of Raven Flint Nuclear, Uranium Conversion Company. Nick, man, how you doing, dude? It's good to see ya. Yeah.

Nick Smith (02:03)
Doing doing pretty good. Yeah.

Exciting time to be in nuclear. Tell you what.

Mark Hinaman (02:09)
It is an exciting time to be in twenty twenty six. The past two to five years have been very exciting. Much more exciting than the past twenty combined, right? Nick, we've got a lot to talk about. we'll keep this pretty informal. So you've got for those watching online,

Nick Smith (02:21)
Absolutely.

Mark Hinaman (02:33)
A mask sitting behind your desk of a a raven. What's why?

Nick Smith (02:39)
It's the yeah, Raven

mask. It's when you know, when we gotta get the team going, I put the Raven mask on, get a bullhorn and just squawk into it really and get the experiments rolling, you know.

Mark Hinaman (02:54)
so yeah, Raven Flint where where did the naming of the how'd you name the company? I wanna know right off the bat.

Nick Smith (03:00)
So,

you know, there's not a lot of open names out there. I think we tried every permutation of color and animal and gemstone. And yeah, Ravenflint comes from Old Norse for Obsidian. And it also is a name for someone who's a a penny pincher in the UK. So get your cheap UF6 from Ravenflint. and it's also got a really cool mascot that sort of comes with it by default.

Mark Hinaman (03:31)
Nice. Nice. Love it. well we'll talk a quite a bit about Raven Flint, I think. what you guys are doing, uranium conversion, which is a topic that I've been pounding the table about for several years now. And just annoyed that a lot of the industry isn't aware of this problem. it's like too far upstream for people to be worried about it. But it absolutely is a problem.

Nick Smith (03:31)
Really leaned into that.

Mark Hinaman (03:59)
It it it reminds me of like in the big short when he's like, How are the bonds not failing, but the underlying mortgages in the bonds are failing? and then she's like, They're different markets, they're different product, they're disconnected and he's like, No, they're not. No, they're not like they are absolutely connected, right? So

Nick Smith (04:15)
Uh-huh.

Yeah, it's one of those things

where I even I didn't really think a lot about uranium conversion working in advanced reactors for more than a decade. You know, you you think about the criticality and the miracle of splitting atoms and just like all the energy and heat and the different power cycle, but you sort of take for granted that like somewhere in between the mine and the centrifuge, this

kinda boring chemical process happens that involves some pretty heavy chemicals. and it just it gets to enrichment, right? People know mine, they know enrichment. They don't know process chemistry in between. It's just magic.

Mark Hinaman (05:01)
Yeah. Well we'll we'll we'll dive into a bunch of it.

let's start with you, Nick. your your timeline. Walk us through let's just walk through kind of your time from school to to the present. So

Nick Smith (05:16)
Yeah,

so came out of school in electrical engineering working for a southern company doing electric power quality. So basically calling on large industrial customers that were having service issues. think like Mercedes Automotive Plant and Swedish Steel International, Southwire, where they make the jacketed transmission cable. and

You know, sometimes it would be something that the utility had done wrong, Alabama Power, Georgia Power, or sometimes it would be something the customer had done to cause them to lose service. But throughout that job, I just became more and more convinced we're not gonna run the entire US electric grid with wind and solar alone. And you start digging in on like, okay, how are we gonna make our electricity? There's only a couple options. we can dam up rivers, probably not doing many more of those in the near future.

Trying to stop setting things on fire to make our electricity, and then there's these magic rocks that have uranium in them, and if you push them into a pile, they start splitting in half and releasing 50 million times as much energy as setting carbon atoms on fire. Gosh, that seems important, and I quickly became obsessed. Right? It's like

Mark Hinaman (06:35)
Why are people talking about this?

Nick Smith (06:41)
We're only in the infancy of this, probably don't have it totally figured out yet. We've only known about it for like 80, 90 years now. And went back to school, did a master's in nuclear engineering at NC State, and somehow managed to convince Southern Company to stand up an advanced nuclear RD program. And this was in the midst of sort of the Vogel cost overrun. So you know, at first it was like I brought up I brought up molten salt reactors to my manager at the time.

She was like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't talk about nuclear. It's a bad, it's a bad thing right now. We're losing losing money on these vocal plants. I was like, well, I'm not gonna talk to you about it, but I'm gonna find somebody who'll listen. Fo found my my friend Nick Urban there, and the two of us sort of went on a I'd say a roadship. We met with every advanced reactor vendor that would meet with us to talk about their technology and ended up standing up a project with Terapower at the time.

Mark Hinaman (07:21)
Hurry it.

Nick Smith (07:39)
One thing led to another. I found myself at INL in 2019 with Ashley Fynan starting the National Reactor Innovation Center. So INRIC. and that was a really cool job. Gave me a chance to work with a lot of different companies as well. So lots of startups, lots of new reactor types, everything from you know, Terapower, X Energy, BWXT, Oaklo.

you know, Radiant, lots of different companies. And we eventually yeah, once the awards for the advanced reactor demonstration program were made, I was fortunate enough to be selected as the director for the molten chloride reactor experiment. So that was a collaboration between Southern Company and Terra Power. learned a lot about making fuel there. So the McCree project needed

1.3 metric tons of highly enriched sodium chloride, uranium trichloride fuel salt. And so we started at sort of gram scale batches and worked our way up to where we could produce about 20 kilograms in one shot. That was as much as they would let us do for crit safety reasons. learned a lot of halide chemistry along the way and a lot about

handling fuel under an MCNA program. did a brief stint at a startup down in El Segundo, Radiant, it's a micro reactor company, before sort of branching out on my own and forming Raven Flam. yeah, so saw a need and here we are trying to fill it.

Mark Hinaman (09:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Did you know surely you know Sam Rice or Reese? I I I don't know how to pronounce his last name. His his LinkedIn profile makes him like a teenager, but he's super smart guy.

Nick Smith (09:36)
yeah. S Sam Sam Reese and I go way back.

So he was

at 3M when we first met, and he had independently gotten excited about nuclear, also excited about molten salt, turns out, and he had gotten this like internal award to work on new projects at 3M. And that's actually how we met. Was I was at Southern Company and he was at 3M. and we kept in touch. You know, when I was at NRIC, you know, he was looking for the next thing, looking to grow, and like, hey, why don't you come to INL?

Pretty cool here. Think you'll like it. And yeah, he ended up at at INL in the NREC group. So

Mark Hinaman (10:22)
I love it. How did you decide that like Enric needed to be a thing and how how did that program get kicked off?

Nick Smith (10:31)
So I I didn't found NRIC or anything like that. It had already been created in law under the Nika and Nila legislation. but it, you know, the timing worked out to where I was looking at you know what how do I grow my career? What's the next thing for me? And there was a posting on the INL website for a director of a reactor innovation group. It didn't say NRIC exactly, but I saw the posting, it said

needed fifteen years experience to apply and I had ten years experience and I had gotten to know John Wagner just through like NEI meetings and ANS meetings. I texted him, I was like, Hey, who you trying to hire for this director job? And he said, I don't know, who should I hire? And I was like, Well you should hire me. but it needs fifteen years experience. I've only got ten. And like an hour or two went by and he was like, check again. And the requirements have changed.

Mark Hinaman (11:15)
Ha ha ha.

Okay.

Ha ha ha.

Nick Smith (11:30)
So yeah, ended up working out there. So

Mark Hinaman (11:35)
That's that's a great life lesson. I do hate the years of experience for job postings 'cause I looked early in my career at like how many years do I need to be to be like at the position that I want be? And like if you do the math and you map it out, you need like a hundred and fifty years of industry experience to get to like the top roles. And you're like, that's no sense. Right? So Yeah.

Nick Smith (11:55)
There you go.

We want a meritocracy, right? Not a

I don't know, years of experience across the yeah, seniority hierarchy.

Mark Hinaman (12:04)
Seniority hierarchy. Yeah. Yeah.

so how I mean, you you did this roadshow in Southern. I wanna know more about that. How how did you convince folks in Southern Company, I mean, to say, yeah, we should go explore more nuclear reactors? And this was like what, twenty nineteen then? Or set seventeen to nineteen or

Nick Smith (12:26)
no, this is like this is like

twenty twelve, twenty eleven. Yeah. This is before it was cool. This is when it was still like this is before gain. This is before like any of the DOE support for advanced reactors.

Mark Hinaman (12:30)
Wow, okay. Yeah, OG time. Like

Before Schellenberger came out and br like the all the pro nuclear advocacy, like

Nick Smith (12:47)
Yeah.

This

is way the only nuclear companies at that time I'm remembering were like Terrapower, General Atomics, Flyb Energy was in their like heyday at this point. This was like right when they had first gotten some money. and there was a book that had come out called Superfuel. yeah, so there was this off-site meeting for the RD group at Southern Company.

Mark Hinaman (13:05)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (13:19)
And the director at the time, Mark Berry, had invited all the managers and then a few engineer, younger engineers. We sort of had this like, I don't know, workshop where we broke down into small teams and talked about what we thought the future of energy looked like. And I had just read like a Wired magazine article about thorium molten salt reactors and red super fuel. And I was hot on some molten salt.

And so we went around the table and it was like, you know, I think we'll be one third wind and solar, one third coal, one natural gas. And it got to me and I was like, molten salt, thorium. We're 100%. It's all everything's gonna be running on nuclear reactors. and everyone laughed. And then we had our like presentation at the end of the workshop where each team has sent somebody up to the front of the room, and they sent me, and I was like, Well, I'm just gonna take my shot.

And I'm like, okay, guys, hear me out. But molten salt thorium. It's gonna be awesome. Everyone like cackled, and Mark Barry, being the director of the group, stopped and he was like, I want you to pursue this. I want you to work with Nick Irvin. Nick had just finished building the twenty-five megawatt post-combustion carbon capture demo down in Mobile, Alabama at Plant Barry.

Mark Hinaman (14:22)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Smith (14:43)
He was like looking for the next project to really sink his teeth into. Incredible chemical engineer. Probably the smartest chemical engineer I've ever worked with. and you know, at first he he's he was a little bristly. I think he he's hard to get to know, but once I got to know him, he's to this day still one of my best friends. we went into a conference room with a whiteboard and he's like, all right, heat and material balance. I'm gonna show you why this doesn't work.

We start working it out. And it's like every fission event, 180 186 MeV per fission or whatever. And it's this many atoms per mole. And like from first principles, worked it all out on the board. And he's like, huh, that's a lot of energy. and sort of, you know, became more and more convinced that there was a there there, that there's a lot of power and nuclear, and that there's really only been this one design.

Mark Hinaman (15:13)
Okay.

Nick Smith (15:41)
We've fully explored, and there's all these other coolant choices and fuel types and ways to configure the machine that like could make a meaningful difference in how it's designed. and so after that, it was like, all right, who else is working on this problem? Where are they? What's the like, what are the different players? And so we went.

and visited GE in North Carolina and we went to San Diego and saw General Atomics and met with fusion companies, met with Trialpha and X Energy and Kairos and fly energy guys. Just anybody who'd take the meeting that was even nuclear adjacent, we were talking to and in parallel, Steve Kacinski, who's the CEO at Southern at the time,

Sort of took a flyer on us and went to NEI and said, I want to establish something called the Advanced Reactor Working Group. And so he took the initiative, stood that up with NEI. EPRI soon followed suit. you know, they they had an advanced reactor group shortly after that, and then it grew into the technical working group. So there was a molten salt technical working group that was attended by DO DOE and a

high temperature gas and a sodium fast reactor. and that was like at least from my vantage point, the first time there was like real I don't know, DC level interest. there was a ARC twenty fifteen FOA that came out shortly after that. So this was the yeah, it was the one the one that X Energy and Southern with Terapower were awarded.

and that's we applied to that. we had a plan to do an integrated effects test. So basically build the flow sheet for TerraPower's molten salt reactor and shake it down, see you know what what does heat exchangers and pumps and valves look like in this system. and one thing led to another, and I think it wasn't long after that that people started really getting excited about nuclear.

Ha i it had been for a long time, like everyone knew nuclear had to be an answer. Had to be the answer eventually, but nobody really believed it could happen. And I think we've turned this corner now where you see four reactors that have gone critical. You see all the interest from the VC community, even from like the traditional banking community and like advanced nuclear. And I think for the first time since

I don't know, the inception of this whole atomic age, people believe it's going to happen. It's not just something that should, but it it is happening right now.

Mark Hinaman (18:42)
Yeah, yeah. It is. It's very exciting. I didn't realize you're so so engaged in such an OG in in the industry. That's pretty awesome. How did you go from I'm gun ho on molten salt and thorium's the future to

actually there's a huge shortage in in uranium conversion and I'm gonna start a company to solve the uranium fuel problem. Like walk me through the mental steps that you you know took you for me to be

Nick Smith (19:08)
What are the

Yeah, so I think my time at Radiant really influenced that a lot. it was something, you know, that I brought up while I was there. Like I saw Radiant looking at how to get fuel, and you realize like when you're on the private side, like nobody's coming to help you. There is no like backup plan, there's no like I don't know, other group that's gonna come rescue you. Like you have to source your own fuel, and that's from the mine.

To the conversion to the enricher to the fuel producer to the reactor. and I saw the writing on the wall with the enrichment 'cause it's like you start digging in, it's like okay, who can who can spin these atoms around for me? Well, today it's Eurenco in Unis, New Mexico and in the US, that's it. And who can make that UF six for me? But it's Converdine. Nobody else is doing that. and if you want one.

Mark Hinaman (20:08)
Yep. One one company in the United States.

Yeah.

Nick Smith (20:13)
Singular, yeah.

and you know the

Mark Hinaman (20:17)
Not not to be said

like it can be done elsewhere, internationally, but like domestically, the domestic market.

Nick Smith (20:23)
ha on on one

hand, the number of other places you can do this. In the world.

Mark Hinaman (20:26)
In in the world, right? And this is a critical

processing step to get the uranium into a form that is valuable and useful for yu nuclear reactors.

Nick Smith (20:39)
Unless you're running

a can do reactor. I mean if you're running a can do, you're good. You just enrich some water instead. You know you got a different set of challenges ahead of you. But if you want any like enriched uranium, you need UF six.

Mark Hinaman (20:54)
So So why not the

one route? Why not the thorium route? How did you come back around to uranium?

Nick Smith (21:05)
I I will always have a love for molten salt reactors. I will I'm always gonna be a fan. the money is not in the reactor historically. and maybe the market dynamics will change over time, but historically people make money in nuclear on fuel and on reactor services. and so the practical, you know, economics focused.

Mark Hinaman (21:09)
You're like it's still there. I still wanna build one.

Nick Smith (21:34)
side of me prevailed in that regard and where conversion is less glamorous and you don't have to solve Boltzmann transport equations to make it work, it is the technical bottleneck and it happens to overlap in a large way with my experience base in halide chemistry of uranium. I mean chlorine and chlorine fluorine are right next to each other, right?

They do a lot the same things, in a chemical reaction it turns out. So

Mark Hinaman (22:09)
So there's

there's an economic when you started doing all this research with Southern and looking at like learning more about the industry, am I hearing that I I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you realized if you look at the value stack of the nuclear industry, the reactor is only one piece and there are other parts of the supply chain that add value to the world but that fewer people were focusing on.

Nick Smith (22:39)
Yeah. and I would say I wasn't seriously start considering starting my own company until into the you know twenty twenty time frame. I think I've probably always had that on the radar, but was looking for the right what's the right target? How do I do this in a way that's as low risk and high reward as possible? and I mean there's a lot of advanced reactor companies out there right now.

Mark Hinaman (23:09)
Why

Nick Smith (23:09)
Hard to

Mark Hinaman (23:11)
Why?

Like why why are so many why did so many people like, man, you know what problem I need to solve? I'm gonna start a nuclear company, so I'm gonna build a new reactor. Like

Nick Smith (23:19)
The coolest

thing ever. Splitting the atom, like tearing a hole in the space time continuum and converting mass into energy is freaking cool. I mean it's it is E equals C squared. Like

Mark Hinaman (23:29)
It's just it's the sexiest thing to do.

Like, yeah. Why why do people start car companies and nobody wants to run a the trash collection business? Like right?

Nick Smith (23:40)
There you go.

but the the shortage is not in like reactor designs and in unique permutations of fuels and coolants and neutron spectrums. Like right now we need to repatriate the ability to chemically convert uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride.

And that's the thesis is do that with a modern chemical process. the plant that exists today was built in nineteen fifty eight. You put yourself in nineteen fifty eight, that's like that's before we land on the moon. That's asbestos building materials. Doctors thought that smoking cigarettes didn't give you cancer.

Mark Hinaman (24:25)
That's for my father's entire

career. Right? Like I'd I've spent the past two weeks back home scanning a bunch of documents from my dad's career. He's got like fifty years of geolo geology files and maps and I'm going through like stuff from the seventies and eighties and nineties and looking and like reading his master's thesis and like

my god, this is archaic. Like and and then to put that in comparison, the the only c chemical plant that we have in the United States that does this step, which is critical, for every nuclear power plant in the United States and not just every nuclear plant, but generally every advanced reactor plant, right? Like every vendor, except like you said a can-do vendor that uses uranium-235 and needs enrichment has to have the conversion process.

Nick Smith (25:18)
Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (25:18)
Okay.

Then we have a bottleneck.

Nick Smith (25:23)
And the price is finally, I think, starting to reflect that. You know, the prices in in 2018 were very low. There was sort of the I don't know, the hangover from the nuclear renaissance is coming, and then Fukushima happened, and you know, everybody the bottom just fell out of the price. Convertime shut down their plant for about five years. and so now it's like okay.

Whatever reserves there were, whatever like secondary supplies of UF six that were out there, would burn through those. There is no like, I got a secret stash, you know, tucked away for a rainy day. That's gone. We're now hand to mouth on the existing conversion supply chain. and and it's rolled out.

Mark Hinaman (26:10)
And it's sold out, right? Like it is sold

out through what?

Nick Smith (26:15)
Twenty

thirty is what I'm hearing. Twenty thirty one in some cases.

Mark Hinaman (26:19)
Yeah, so if

some advanced reactor companies that are building new reactors and are coming to market want fuel and they want fuel on a reasonable time horizon, they have to procure this refinement step first.

Nick Smith (26:36)
And I mean to be clear, like the Converdine plant at full capacity, making their 10 million kilograms a year, that's like 40% of the US existing fleet demand. Like you could double the capacity of that plant and still come up short just to serve our existing reactors. That doesn't have any any of the new reactors coming online baked into it. We want to triple. I mean the the amount of UF6 that's needed is staggering.

Mark Hinaman (27:00)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (27:05)
And it is not an easy thing to make, I'll just say.

Mark Hinaman (27:11)
Yeah. I guess some of you that's actively trying to make it.

it's it's it's kinda hard. well I wanna dive into some of the technical stuff, but

Nick Smith (27:16)
It's a little difficult.

Mark Hinaman (27:21)
And and I should say I'm I'm I'm long your guys' business, right? I'm I'm an investor in where we've linked. This isn't investment advice, you know, don't go out and give Nick money. I don't know if I can or can't say that, but like just disclosing. But like we've I mean, as soon as I found you guys, I was like, my god, finally, finally somebody's doing this and is going to solve this problem because I like, This would be a great business. Somebody should go and solve this. And as soon as you guys showed up, I was like, Yes, thank God, here, take my money.

Nick Smith (27:25)
No

Yes.

Mark Hinaman (27:52)
wonderful. Go s go forth and solve this. and I I don't know, I'm I'm very I'm bullish on you know your position, but it's it's yeah, it's it's a big problem. So Talk talk me through Well, so you you still love thorium and molten salt, but why

Or a lot of advanced reactor companies using uranium and not thorium or molten salt. Sorry, I I feel like I didn't get that.

Nick Smith (28:20)
I would more.

You know, yeah,

and thorium's interesting. Thorium was really interesting to me because it showed there's more than one way to do this. Like you I grew up thinking like, there's one nuclear reactor. It's like a solved problem. And then you learn about thorium and it's like, whoa, there's like a whole a a different element pathway you could use and it could be a liquid fuel. And what does that mean? How could that be I don't know, change things. I think low pressure is a big deal.

And you look at some of these companies that are using liquid sodium, it's like, mm, that's a good idea, I think. you gotta solve you gotta solve the oxygen problem, but that's a tractable problem, and then you get this huge benefit of low pressure and a high thermal conductivity. Love that. but also, you know, high temperature is another really good benefit. enables a lot of different things that wouldn't otherwise be like you can't do thermochemical hydrogen production.

Mark Hinaman (28:56)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (29:25)
For example, with a light water reactor. I mean, the pressures and you know the thickness of the walls and things like that just they aren't compatible. But you start looking at some of these coolants that these modern coolants and it opens up the game tremendously. look, you know, I I want to sell UF6 to everybody, every flavor of reactor, I want them all to be successful or want them all to build like crazy. I want to be a hundred percent nuclear.

and have a forty eight Y cylinder fill in for each one every week.

Yeah, it's definitely there's a lot of benefits to the different types of reactors. I think molten salt probably has the highest skill cap just because, you know, and this is coming from a molten salt zealots, so take it with a grain of salt, but you think about baking a cake, you mix up your cake mix, put it in the tray, you put it in the oven, you can't touch it. You either got the mix right, you got the temperature right, and you get a delicious cake on the other side. Molten salt's more like making a stew. Like you can check it.

In the middle and be like, Mm, too much salt, add some potatoes, or not enough pepper, add a little seasoning in there. that's I guess the promise or the interesting piece to me is like you could be grabbing very short lived fission products that are useful for you know medical treatments, for imaging things underground. Like there's a lot of applications for

Mark Hinaman (30:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

majority of reactors still are focused on like solid fuel using uranium. Right? That's what we know.

Nick Smith (31:03)
It's what we know and it's it's the shortest path

to go right now, which

Mark Hinaman (31:09)
So there's a there's

a there's a knowledge certainty and time element to it, I guess, that is motivating that decision making. Okay.

Nick Smith (31:19)
Think so.

Mark Hinaman (31:21)
so okay, you you recognize this gap. Like I said, all right, we need conversion but even upstream of sorry, not we need enrichment, but even upstream of enrichment. literally getting the ore from the mine and

to this molecule that we can actually put in centrifuges. I mean like UF6 is magical, right? Like uranium hexafluoride that's triple point being near room temperature and being able to be very easily turned solid liquid gas and I I mean I think it's it's super neat but the chemistry and the chemical process is complex. So but

There's a a process process procedure that they invented in the fifties. are are you guys emulating that process or t t talk to me little bit about your tech?

Nick Smith (32:08)
Yeah.

So

it's tech that's typically my my strategy is when I'm doing something new, I first watch how are other people doing it, then I try and copy them. Once I've figured out how they're doing it, then I try to innovate a little bit. the difficult thing with with conversion, right, is like how do you get started? You can you can look up the recipe that every plant around the world is following. They're doing hydrogen reduction, then hydrofluorination, they're using.

Mark Hinaman (32:26)
Good strategy. I like that part.

Nick Smith (32:42)
Elemental fluorine gas to push that uranium from the plus four valence to the plus six valence. That's known chemistry. and then how do you get started? Well, turns out that not many people want to ship uranium to a garage startup in a residential neighborhood. so most people think

Mark Hinaman (33:03)
Okay.

had scientists in your garage running experiments.

That'd be helpful.

Nick Smith (33:13)
Most people say no to that question. turns out you can get a Geiger counter though that will detect alphas, and you can go, I don't know, hypothetically like forty-five minutes from your house into the mountains and find radioactive rocks and then collect them in a five-gallon bucket, ball mill them, and then pull uranium into solution as a carbonate with baking soda and arm and

Mark Hinaman (33:15)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (33:43)
Armandhammer soda wash and maybe like some hydrogen peroxide, hypothetically. And then you can like precipitate that out with a combination of s sulfuric acid, maybe, and some ammonia both available at Ace Hardware. Thank you, Ace Hardware, for supporting Garage Chemistry. yeah, and then you have some feedstock to start with. Not not that you wanna do that. That's yeah, totally a messy, like tedious thing to do. But once you had some uranium, then

it turns out they nobody will ship you, and this is a fact, no one will ship you anhydrous, hydrogen fluoride to your house. That is a really, really big no-no, turns out. so how do you get that step going? Well, maybe you can use like glass etching compound, which is ammonia bifluoride, and some combination of I don't know, sulfuric acid or heat to get it to release, and then you can make some UF4 that way. But

that's really how we got started. you want to go any further than that? This is really yeah, this is where we realized, okay, gosh, the elemental flooring stuff. Like HF is manageable. It's, you know, you can see it. You gotta have ventilation, you gotta have like all the right safety precautions in place. But HF looks like cigarette smoke if you saw it in a room. It's thick and dense. elemental fluorine gas is invisible.

And to make it, you gotta run electricity through HF a potassium bath and separate it into hydrogen and fluorine. It's pretty hardcore and it will eat through everything. And so,

Mark Hinaman (35:26)
extremely

corrosive, right? Like I mean that's one of the challenges of creating a new chemical plant to do this process is like

Nick Smith (35:29)
I mean

It's the top right quarter

of the periodic table. And you stick two of them together, two fluorines, and like they are not happy. They are looking for literally anything else to grab hold of. It affects

Mark Hinaman (35:38)
It reacts with everything.

And you're trying to affix

six of them to uranium atoms, right? Like that's

Nick Smith (35:51)
That's why it works. That's

why you can push the oxidation state up simultaneously and donate two fluorines when you use fluorine gas. But it will also catch concrete on fire and dissolve whatever you put it in over time. and so that was like the first step for us was like, how do we get out of this? Because this seems awful. and you do the math on it too, and it's like more than a third of the cost of the plant is a is fluorine generators. You gotta have

Like if your nameplate is 500 tons a year of uranium, you need one and a half times that many fluorine generators because about a third of them are offline for maintenance to either be replaced or have the carbon electrodes changed out or they're like being passivated for a week or two initially. Like so that was the initial thesis, like how do we get out of this? And we found some clever ways to do it.

Mark Hinaman (36:49)
Nice.

It's your guys' proprietary chemical processes.

Nick Smith (36:50)
And I would love to sell more.

This is our yeah, this is our trade secret pathways. yeah. I think when people realize what we're doing and how we're doing it, they're gonna look at the existing industry and think, my gosh, they've been climbing in and out of the sunroof of their car, and these guys just showed how to open up the driver's side door.

Mark Hinaman (37:13)
So I you guys have a proprietary process, trade trade secret now, which is wonderful. I are you trying to patent this IP and protect protect it, I presume? And or do you

Nick Smith (37:25)
So we're treating

the chemistry itself as trade secret, just not telling people. I think the hardware that we are designing to implement this chemistry, we will patent. because it's, you know, one thing to show like a chemical reaction on paper and be like, this plus this yields this. And it's a very different thing to be like, okay, here's how we get the chemicals to see each other and flow in and out in a way that's

Mark Hinaman (37:33)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (37:54)
controllable and all the safety layers to ensure that if something goes wrong, you've got backups for backups on this stuff 'cause yeah, HF alone, even even just the H F is a very real hazard that's gotta be treated very seriously. And so

Mark Hinaman (38:11)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (38:11)
We are we are working with HF now. We've got HF on site at our lab. We've got a full acid gas radiological chemistry lab set up. That was a hard thing to build. you're talking heap of filters, you're talking large blowers that exchange the air in the lab like six times an hour. You're talking a 30-foot-tall stack release that's yeah, welded and anchored with 16

two and a half foot long bolts into concrete. yeah, it's pretty cool. Not not many people can do what we're doing right now. It's a little it's a unique s setup.

Mark Hinaman (38:50)
Did you like

find a patch of land to go and build this lab on, or you had some extra space in your backyard? Like

Nick Smith (38:56)
What do you

mean? There's landlords all over the place that are ready to lease to radiological lab. They love it. No. we are fortunate to have landlords that understand what we're trying to do. We've got a standalone building that's in the outside of the Idaho Falls City limit. and we're working with very small quantities, which I think helps a lot also. But having

Mark Hinaman (39:01)
Well,

Nick Smith (39:22)
you know, the experience base that we got working with stuff like this from the lab, and sort of like being very intentional about everything from what epoxy coating is on the concrete through like what we're building our ducting and ventilation out of to like safety measures that are in place for like doing chemistry, scrubbing gases, really we're doing it right.

is what I'll say. And that's helped us a lot with the county and with Fire Marshall and our OSHA rep and everybody in between.

Mark Hinaman (39:59)
Awesome. Yeah, I agree with you that chemistry is easy, chemical engineering is substantially more complex. yeah, it's kinda like d design is easy but manufacturing is hard. and like scaling up and being able have in appreciable quantities, like how do you run these chemical processes in large batches? It's kinda like being a homebrew versus being an in industrial beer brewer, right? Like it just gets more complex.

Nick Smith (40:27)
Scale up matters.

Mark Hinaman (40:29)
Yeah. so what's your vision for scale up? Have you thought about how big you wanna go? Like you know, you said Conradine can only feed forty percent of the market, you're gonna swallow up sixty percent or the rest of the market? The whole world.

Nick Smith (40:45)
whole world every

every molecule of UF6 produced by Raven Flint facilities in the future by I don't know 2040. so you know we're working on we have sort of a three-stage scale of approach. We have match which is what we're calling our RD lab and our bench scale integrated demonstration. Match will happen here at our Idaho Falls location.

Mark Hinaman (40:56)
Nice. Yeah.

Nick Smith (41:15)
Then we have Torch, which is you know the match lights the torch. Torch is our pilot plant that will handle 500 tons of uranium throughput per year. It's roughly 740 tons of UF6 a year. Think three to four 55-gallon drums a day get converted into UF6 to fill up one 48Y cylinder. It's a 48-inch diameter cylinder per week. Once we have torch online, then

We will move to our commercial facility, which is about 20x that torch build, and that's what we call forge. and so that's where we hit our 10 million kilograms a year scale. and then it's copy paste until the world has all the UF6 it needs. we think we win on capital cost by a dramatic margin in comparison to the traditional hydrofluorination fluorine gas process. and then we

We think we maintain an operational annual like twenty percent cheaper production cost in comparison to the traditional technology. And our plant's not gonna go down for maintenance as bad as something built in the fifties.

It's just there's better ways to do things now.

Mark Hinaman (42:30)
Fantastic. How are you thinking about permitting? when when I think about or when I've thought about, you know, okay, building new chemical plants, most states want to be aware of what you're doing and you know the EPA doesn't want you to throw in pollutants to the atmosphere. yeah, walk me through kind of your permitting strategy.

Nick Smith (42:50)
Yeah, so I think we are working two paths right now. We're working the DOE authorization path through the NRIC DOE launch pad. So we submitted our application to that program a few weeks ago. Hoping to hear back maybe this month. I think August nineteenth was what was telegraphed, but that would be a fantastic win, huge win for us because it would give us a

piece of land on the INL site and allow us to get started under DOE authorization that comes with some added benefits like price Anderson coverage and you know the emergency planning responses that INL's already got in place and you know fire and they've already got power, they've already got water, like it's a really good spot.

There's the smartest scientists in the world there. So if we have any problems, we're you know right there in the backyard, get some help. we are also pursuing NRC licensing. fortunately for conversion, this is another great benefit. We are we're not handling any reactor materials, so it's not like there's a critical reactor or spent nuclear fuel. We're working with natural uranium. the real hazard is

Mark Hinaman (44:08)
Yeah. Risk of a criticality

is very low to improve. Yeah.

Nick Smith (44:11)
It's chemical, right? We gotta keep track of things.

So, yeah, working both in parallel to see what shakes loose faster. the DOE authorization path does appear especially after the four reason criticalities, like it's shocking how fast DOE can move when they need to, when they want to. we're hoping to capitalize on some of that momentum.

It does come with some interesting questions about commercialization and how do we sell material under a DOE authorized facility, right? But we got some creative ideas there.

Mark Hinaman (44:54)
Why help me out, I might be ignorant. Why is that an issue?

Nick Smith (44:59)
when the I guess it was the Atomic Energy Association was originally split into NRC, I think it was called URDA before it was DOE. Basically the the language says that you know the NRC is for commercial nuclear uses and URDA, DOE, it was for you know federal research and development, scale up, pilot plants,

Mark Hinaman (45:09)
Yeah.

Nick Smith (45:27)
And so that has always been interpreted as you can't have a commercial operation that's regulated by DOE. you know, maybe you can recover like half the cost of your plant or something like that, but it's tough to you there's gotta be some dividing line that's like here's where NRC has jurisdiction, here's where DOE has jurisdiction, right?

Mark Hinaman (45:51)
I I feel like I feel like the world's trying to change that, right? Like the DOE's just like, you know what, we'll license it. It's fine. We'll we'll give you permission to do it.

Nick Smith (46:01)
We definitely have seen much more of that recently. I think we have you know Seth Cohen and some of the folks from the Trump administration to thank for the executive orders and really just standing on the gas, Bob Boston for being willing to take these projects on and and understand what these brand new reactors really mean. hoping to yeah, capitalize on that with with conversion as well. But

It does does open up an interesting question about how do we sell to commercial reactors from a pilot plant potentially.

Mark Hinaman (46:39)
What else is new and exciting, Nick? I mean what's what's front of mind for ya? You guys had a game voucher maybe?

Nick Smith (46:43)
Man, the team

the team's growing, the team is getting amazing things done. it's just it's really exciting to see everything come together. while I have the opportunity I want to thank their families for the long late nights. everybody on this team has been putting in extra work and where that really hits is at home where spouses and kids and families are missing out on time.

I just wanna recognize the sacrifice they're making 'cause it is not lost on me what that takes. So

Mark Hinaman (47:19)
You're a slave driver. You're work you're working your staff to the bone.

Nick Smith (47:22)
Damn, I try to just make it fun here and feed

people and that tends to work pretty good, but

Mark Hinaman (47:28)
Here's some donuts. Keep working.

Nick Smith (47:32)
Chipotle is the go to lately.

Mark Hinaman (47:36)
I like it. I like it. what what was your c can you talk about the game voucher?

Nick Smith (47:43)
Yeah. so Game Batcher is really exciting for us 'cause it turned out to be sort of the first, I don't know, DOE stamp of approval that we weren't selling snake oil or had some crazy sauce. Not many people will volunteer themselves or call themselves chemists. I think I hear that like a couple of times a day. It's like, Well, I'm not a chemist, so I don't know. It's like this is gonna work, I promise.

Mark Hinaman (48:11)
Ha ha.

Nick Smith (48:13)
But having the game voucher I think helped a lot. the biggest piece of managing like source drain material that's flighty, it's powder, it gets stuck to stuff, it yeah, is is keeping track of it. Like how do you know where it is at all times? and so this game voucher is a terrific opportunity for us. We're working with some folks from the NNSA side of INL on this, on

you know, how we're how we're receiving material, how we're managing it, how we're purifying what we're doing with, you know, we have like a it's not obvious, but you've got to have a pretty specialized database, with a hashed ledger and like backups for backups, like it's an unacceptable answer to be like, the power went out, so like we lost all of our material control and accountability ledger. Like that's not that's not gonna fly well within R C.

And so we put a lot of effort into that and we're fortunate to have the the team at INL and experience with dealing with these kinds of things, especially in like powdered form or even liquid form potentially. it it's it's really been a great thing for us. So we're excited about our gain voucher, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (49:31)
How how big is the team now?

Nick Smith (49:34)
We are at ten and if you include sort of like ten ninety nine contract folks, I think it's at twelve now. Just had another guy start when our mechanical engineer, Dan Sluter, started on Monday. We got another big hire to announce coming soon.

Mark Hinaman (49:41)
Yeah. Nice.

Yep.

I'm excited to see you guys grow. I mean d don't don't grow too big, right? It's good to stay lean, especially as a scrappy startup, but like man, it's gonna be it's gonna be an exciting journey. Is it hard when you're talking to investors, like d do people get it? Or do you feel like you have to do lot of education in your pitching?

Nick Smith (50:17)
I so I I find that it's either people who really understand the fuel supply chain well and they're already educated and they already know like what they're looking at and thinking about, or people that are just Yeah. Mark, exactly. Yeah. This guy you come in and you're like, you know, I I don't even have to say anything. You know what we're talking about, what we're trying to do. and then the flip side is like people who are just

Mark Hinaman (50:29)
Yeah. It was like me. He talked to me, I was like, finally.

Nick Smith (50:44)
fresh to the nuclear game, maybe they've invested in a a reactor startup where they see, you know, the the energy and excitement around nuclear and they're wanting to get into it, but they don't have really any like background in it. so there's a lot of education there. you know we we hear a lot about different like reactor companies and like, so you do are you guys do you guys do is General Matter your competitor? Like

Like, no, we don't do that. That's a different one. it's like, so you're uranium mining? It's like, no, that's not it either. We like our in between totally a service because it's a weird supply chain. Like you would think that that would be our customers, but we actually like only contract indirectly with them through people who own reactors. so that takes a little bit of education.

Mark Hinaman (51:20)
That's not it either. Or in between.

Yeah, yeah. And just like educating who your customers are. But it's it's not like this is a new industry, right? Or I mean you've got a new chemical process and some IP that makes your company valuable. but you're solving a known problem with a known demand cycle and like there's there's a ton of existing knowns and people can do their independent research to discover that. So

Nick Smith (52:05)
Totally.

And I think that happens. We just we get the question like, well how vulnerable are you to swings in the cost of uranium? It's like, not at all. That's not us. I mean if it gets too high then our customers won't be able to buy it. But that's a pass through, right?

Mark Hinaman (52:16)
Your your service testing refinement process.

Yeah. So so there is there was this period of oversupply, low demand, in for conversion services, right? T refresh my memory about why that period existed and why it's unlikely to have a similar economic event in the future. And not maybe maybe it could happen, maybe I'm I'm speaking out of turn, but

Nick Smith (52:46)
So

Anything could happen. I think what happened in like the twenty eighteen time frame when the bottom you know, we hit the lowest price in conversion that we've seen in a while. Fukushima happened, right? And a lot of

Mark Hinaman (53:07)
Which shut

down what, like fifty Japanese maybe not fifty, but a bunch of Japanese reactors. I'm gonna look that up while we're talking.

Nick Smith (53:14)
Shut down a bunch of Japanese

reactors. So now you've got like people that aren't buying UF six that normally would have been buying it. And utilities had been ramping up for the nuclear renaissance and AP one thousands and new scale reactors and all this was like

Mark Hinaman (53:30)
It it was

fifty four. Yeah, fifty four of its reactors.

Nick Smith (53:35)
There you go. And so I think the combination of those two things caused you know the supply to drop or I guess the demand signal to drop dramatically. And when that happened, you know, enrichers can do this thing where I think they call it underfeeding, where they'll take their tails, and let's say I'm gonna make these numbers up because I don't know them off top, but you start out with point seven percent you know uranium two.

U5E concentration, you run it through your enrichment cycle, your cascade, and you get your tails back, and they're at like 0.3% U5. and then now you set those casks, those cancers aside, and a rainy day comes. And you don't want to have to buy more conversion, and so you basically feed your tails that are at that like

0.3% enrichment back through your cascade, get another few you know barrels or or cylinders of enriched material out, and now your feet is your your tails are at like 0.2 or 0.15 or something like that. that was happening to a large degree in the like 2019, 2020 time frame when Converdine was shut down.

And so that when people talk about secondary supplies, that's sort of the main thing I think of, or just canisters of natural UF six that have been sitting around waiting for someone to use them.

Mark Hinaman (55:12)
The analogy

that I've heard is yeah, juicing oranges, right? Like if you can if you squeeze the orange you get more juice out, but it takes more energy to squeeze the orange harder. and so yeah, there are a bunch of excess and the analogy, excess oranges laying around that hadn't been squeezed hard enough. If the oranges are the UF six or barrels of US F six, and so they just went back and added more energy to squeeze squeeze them harder and captured more thirty-five out of it or more juice.

Nick Smith (55:38)
There you go.

Mark Hinaman (55:42)
Right, out of the oranges. So I like that analogy. I think it it fits well. But but then now, right? Like you all the juice is gone. They've all been squ squeezed beyond diminishing risk at this point, right? Yeah, so we need more oranges to show up and that's where you come in. So Yeah. So what's the future look like for you, Nick? you know, you you said you've got match, you've got torch. Is there what what's the

Nick Smith (55:54)
Those oranges are all dried up.

Sure do.

Mark Hinaman (56:11)
st is torched the pilot plant and then there's a bonfire after that? Like what's Forged, that's right. Yeah. Forge.

Nick Smith (56:17)
The bonfi it's forge. So that the match lights the torch and then torch

lights the forge and now we're yeah. Making lots of UF six.

Mark Hinaman (56:23)
Yeah. I like that. Not bonfire,

not not uncontrolled fire. So yeah, what's your what's your timeline forecast for each of these pieces?

Nick Smith (56:32)
yeah, the the

Hoping hoping to hear good news about launchpad in the next few weeks here. we expect to have some good results, some shareable results on our chemistry in the next few weeks here. our next raise will start in September. So for any investors out there who are looking for the next unicorn to bet on, September's sort of the three two one go for our

I think we're calling it series A. Yeah, and then

Mark Hinaman (57:08)
And how much are you guys going to raise

for that? Have you decided?

Nick Smith (57:12)
We're looking so we think the pilot costs the pilot plant costs between fifty and a hundred million. and so we're looking to do about half of that through venture and then the other half through sort of like equipment financing. we're we've got an account with Erebor and we've been talking to a lot of exciting

lot of a a lot of exciting VC interest and potential for the equipment financing. I know we've been we've benefited a lot from the second hand market on equipment. I mean almost everything that we bought for our R and D lab was from eBay or Used Gloveboxes dot com, believe it or not. stuff works great. We're big fans of used equipment and yeah

It's like we're participating in that half of the economy on the front end and then hoping to do some equipment financing on the back end and if we don't make hit the mark then come repo our stuff and sell it to somebody else. There's a lot of people that wanna buy it, so

Mark Hinaman (58:21)
Nice. Yep, the the secondary refurbished market, absolutely. It's where it's at. So that's awesome, man. But a t pa time to revenue, path to revenue. Yeah, y you guys are making a product twenty twenty eight.

Nick Smith (58:38)
Tony twenty eight.

Yeah. And yes, we've got a an LOI with ALO atomics for up to a hundred percent of the output from our pilot plant. and they are moving and shaking, it sounds like they're gonna need it. you know the five hundred tons of uranium you can roughly think about as like seventy-five ish megawatts of five percent enriched reactor fuel. And so

If we're supplying one of their five packs and then we've got a little bit of excess, maybe that's going to one of our new friends in the reactor startup community or you know we're hoping to get some down payments. I know historically UF6 is like net 30 upon delivery, but would love to get some down payments. Yep, some contracted deals there. I think that could help us a lot.

Mark Hinaman (59:32)
Forward payments are not for

Nick Smith (59:40)
We're also doing, you know, and this is like a we're working our way up, but we have an analytical chemistry lab here that's not many people can do X-ray diffraction and ICPOES on radioactive materials. That's a pretty unique thing that we're capable of doing. And so some of the mines have asked us to provide, you know, I'm gonna call it like third-party umpire data on their material.

it's not our primary business line, but it's something that we're hoping gets our foot in the door with some of our friends in the mining community.

Mark Hinaman (1:00:16)
Secondary revenue strengths,

diversification, using the assets that you have and resources available to generate revenue, margin, and profit. Like it's awesome.

Nick Smith (1:00:26)
There you go.

And if that doesn't work, I don't know, I figured out how to laser cut laser CNC Ninja Stars for my son the other night. So maybe that's it.

Mark Hinaman (1:00:34)
Ha ha

Cool Nick. Well, I'm excited to watch you guys grow match torch forge. This is I'm so thankful that, you know, somebody somebody picked up the torch and is willing to march it forward and solve this problem for America and the world. It's a huge service to the energy industry and to the world.

I'm frankly I'm really proud of you guys. I'm excited to see you grow. I mean the progress you've made already in the short time that you've been in business has been tremendous and keep keep working. So

Nick Smith (1:01:13)
When are you

coming to visit?

Mark Hinaman (1:01:16)
Yeah, I gotta get up there visit. Before the winter. I I don't know what to be in Iowa Falls in December or January. Although there is good skiing, right? You said there's good skiing. I'll come up and we'll go skiing.

Nick Smith (1:01:19)
Okay. Open invitation, my friend.

Great skiing.

January, February, especially the spring too. The spring is phenomenal. Targee, we'll get out there. Yeah, we got some good champagne powder. Run you through. You'll like it.

Mark Hinaman (1:01:35)
Nice.

Awesome. Hello everything. Great to catch up. Well we gotta have you back soon, so

Nick Smith (1:01:46)
Thank you so much for the opportunity, Mark. Always a pleasure chatting, man. And yeah, just appreciate it.

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