Is This The Future Of Nuclear Energy? | Matt Lozak, Aalo Atomics

**Matt Lozak** (0:00)
It really is energy without limits. I mean, look at the alternatives. You know, renewables use 100 times more land.
Geothermal and hydro require magma pockets or fast moving water. Natural gas does require, you know, a big lap length of underground pipeline. With this solution, with an AaloPod, you can just put it down anywhere. Doesn't matter if it's sunny or windy or whatever, and it just works for years without refueling.

**Adam Taggart** (0:29)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. After decades of stifling government regulation and vilification by environmentalists, nuclear energy is now suddenly experiencing a renaissance.
In a world now all too conscious of its over-reliance on foreign fossil fuels and realizing that renewable energy sources won't come anywhere near to meeting the gargantuan electrical production demands of the future, nuclear's promise of delivering plentiful, safe, cheap, small-footprint, carbon-free baseload energy is becoming a national priority in more and more countries around the world. To help us understand the benefits that nuclear energy is unlocking, catalyzed by a flood of innovative next-generation technologies, we've got the great good fortune today to be joined by both friend of the show David Hay, as well as Matt Lozak, CEO of Aalo Atomics, a bleeding-edge engineering company manufacturing nuclear micro-reactors. David and Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.

**David Hay** (1:30)
Thank you, Adam. Always a pleasure.

**Matt Lozak** (1:32)
Thank you. Yeah, good to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (1:34)
All right. Well, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. So just a quick bit of context for this. So I've done a couple of interviews over the past couple of years about what's going on in nuclear energy.
I talk with David Hay in a number of his appearances here on the show at times about nuclear. David is a much more knowledgeable investor in the space than I am. He has been looking for great companies to invest in here. It's not an easy chore.
He came across a company that he was very excited about, Aalo Atomics, brought it to my attention and very kindly was able to loop in the CEO here, Matt, to come on this channel for a full discussion about what's going on in nuclear energy during this renaissance in general, but specifically to talk about some of the technologies that are being developed at Aalo, because they're super fascinating. Anyways, David, first I wanted to thank you for making this happen.

**David Hay** (2:29)
It's the other way around, Adam. I really appreciate you making the time for this. I know it's a little bit off the beaten path for what you typically do, but I just think that this whole area is so important for the future of our country, and you look at what's happening in China, you realize how far behind we're getting, and that we better get some successful companies in this space day after tomorrow.

**Adam Taggart** (2:49)
Yeah, I'm sure we'll get into this, but I've seen the chart that shows all the different countries that are basically deploying new nuclear energy facilities, and China is leading the list by far. It's somewhere in the 30s, not number 30s, 39, I believe is the last count.

**David Hay** (3:06)
They're actually under physical construction. This isn't just design and planning.

**Adam Taggart** (3:10)
Right, they're actually in the process of being built, and I think the US had zero on that list.

**David Hay** (3:15)
It's just unbelievable. They've got some in the planning stage, but none actually under construction right now.

**Adam Taggart** (3:22)
Folks, I am largely going to fade into the background in this interview. I'll chime in from time to time to ask clarifying question, but I'm going to pretty much let David lead the show here. Real quick though, Matt, if we could just start with a question that I've got for you, just to set the general context here for folks.
For those that haven't kept up with the advances in nuclear technology over the past couple of decades, how did today's new nuclear energy solutions differ from, say, our father's nuclear reactor?

**Matt Lozak** (3:53)
I think it's a great question. First of all, thanks again for having me here. Great to be here.
I think if you look at the past 75 years of nuclear, there were first of all a lot of learnings that happened in the first couple of decades.
There's some pretty obvious things like the earliest reactors, some like Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome. That's like a car not having a seatbelt. There's very obvious things like that that have been approved upon. I think it's important to mention that nuclear as it stands today, is as safe as solar and wind already statistically. That's just the numerical reality. But then the big question becomes, if we're trying to mass manufacture nuclear, there's kind of two main ways to make something cheap. You either make it bigger or you make it more numerous. In the past, nuclear made it bigger, but we've never really made nuclear cheaper by making it more numerous. I think that's what you're seeing a lot more of now, is companies trying to mass manufacture slightly smaller nuclear products. In doing so, you really want to make sure that when nuclear is ubiquitous, it's still not only as safe as solar and wind, but you want to avoid any relocation risks or things like that. There's lots of cool stuff we can dive into on this call around inherent safety, walk away passive safety, things that reduce the emergency planning zone down to the fence boundary of the plant. A lot of cool innovation has been done in the past couple of decades around this. But I think you're right, the bottom line is that modern nuclear is quite different from nuclear from the 1950s and 60s.