Nuclear startup Oklo starts trading on NYSE: Here's what you need to know

Nuclear energy startup Oklow backed by open AICEO Sam Altman making its NYSE debut this morning after investors voted to approve a deal to merge with a blank check company. Alt C Acquisition Corp, of which Altman is also the CEO and director. The deal delivering more than $300 million of proceeds to Oklow with us now. Oklow CEO and Co founder Jacob DeWitt. Jake, great to have you with us. Thank you. Great to be here. So this is all about powering AI. One piece of it, I think it looks at two factors, powering AI and powering an energy transition that’s looking at, you know, reliable, affordable power that nuclear is really well positioned to deliver and that massive scale. Yeah. How long until you’re online. Yeah, we’re we’re aiming to bring our first plan online by about 2027. We’re we spent a lot, I mean the company’s about 11 years old. A couple years ago we got a site use permit from the Department of Energy to build our first plant in Idaho. We rewarded fuel for that plant, which is great. It’s actually recycled fuel, which is a big part of what our story can be. And we’ve got three other plans that we’ve announced and excited about the backlog that seems to be growing here. How do you think about public opinion and how much it’s changed over the years and what needs to be done to make it a a more accepting backdrop? Yeah, being a native New Mexican born and raised around nuclear technology, I fell in love with it when I was a young kid. So I was always really excited about it. And it’s been really neat to see the public at large become more and more accepting and not just accepting, excited about nuclear. I think one of the big changes that’s happened, it sounds silly, but what the Internet has enabled for information age for people to learn about the technology when they dig into it and they hear that it’s clean, that it’s one of the safest, if not the safest source of energy we have, and that it can produce large amounts of power on a decarbonization basis as well as do it 24/7. People get excited about it, and I think it’s growing considerably. Do, do, what’s the half life of the memory of a Chernobyl or a Fukushima, right? Yeah, I think it’s shortening radically because people go learn the facts about what actually happened and realize look at Fukushima is a horrible earthquake and disaster there, but the actual nuclear event while bad was not nearly as catastrophic from a human life perspective. And now we’re learning like hey a lot of these next generation systems have all these mitigating features where you put the physics of the design in the system to make it self stabilizing self cooling. So it’s kind of a physics based safety approach. You don’t need external things to do it and it’s great because it’s not just talk, this has been done before. So the technology we’re specifically building off of some of these other advanced reactor technologies build off of has actually been demonstrated and demonstrated the safety characteristics in the real world, which is phenomenal. Is your focus mostly in the United States or Europe as well? I mean, what we learned from Russia, Ukraine is that there is a need for power, that there’s a need for diversity of power and they’re actually trying to unmothball plants over there and turn them back on. Yeah, I think that’s one of the great things about nuclear is you loaded up with fuel and most of these plants are going to run for a year. Plus in our case, we aim for 10 years before you have to refuel, Talk about a lot of energy security. Once you load that asset with fuel, you don’t have to have a constant supply of it. But we’re starting in the US We see that as unlocking the rest of the world given that the US is you know, kind of the flagship entity, especially on the regulatory front. But we’re very excited about what bringing this broadly can look like, not just from US sort of export perspectives, but also geopolitical stability and security on a global basis. I wonder too what the the Europeans offer in the way of cautionary tales. A lot of discussion couple years ago when the Ukraine war started was what if they hadn’t turned their back so forcefully on some technologies, right? Absolutely. I mean, look what Germany’s done. I think there’s this example case study of kind of what not to do. I think you see California following that, not facing the same geopolitical threats, but realizing for climate goals nuclear is critically important. Keeping that plan open, I think we’re just at the beginning of a really exciting era where you’re going to see a lot more of what nuclear has to bring to bear. Remember, this technology, while kind of old, is not. I mean it’s only really eighty years old since we’ve known how to kind of manage it. It’s very early in technology development. So I feel very optimistic that we’re just at the beginning of a really exciting era here. How do you think about demand coming from areas X AI? Is that also as as dire as it appears to be when we talk about the grid? Yeah, I mean it is and this is what’s interesting. And so we focus on a different business model where we’re not trying to design the reactors and push them off on the people to do all the work to design, build and operate themselves. That’s kind of the typical model of nuclear’s done. We instead do an all in one solution where we design, build and operate and sell power through a long term power purchase agreement. We see the market really likes this, right. AWS is deal as a data center example, signing a PPA with talent, a good example of this, but we see others. In fact we announced the partnership with Diamondback Energy driving electrification of their operations in the Permian and that’s just the beginning of a huge amount of opportunity for broad electrification and the energy transition. We’re really focused on making nuclear pretty well. Let me phrase that a lot easier to buy, if that makes sense.