There Is a Nuclear Reactor in This Truck

Okay, so explain to everybody who's watching and listening how you're involved right from the place where the uranium is still in the ore in the ground. Like, what has to happen at each step along the way so that the fuel actually gets to one of your reactors? How is your company situated to make that happen, and where are you in that process?

So starting at the very basic uranium mining, you mentioned this scratch from deposit. You mine the uranium, but the ore is effectively not very useful for anything. You subject that ore to a leaching process, and you create a yellow cake, which is essentially more concentrated uranium. That then would be shipped off for a conversion.

Where we sit in that is that we've actually reached out to Central Asia, where almost the majority of the world's uranium is currently being mined. It doesn't have to come from, but say there are big deposits in Wyoming and Saskatchewan that are not producing uranium readily now in enough quantities to meet the demand.

So it is coming from abroad. I believe those domestic deposits will be built up now that the uranium price is rising because, like COP 28 announces, there’s a necessity to triple nuclear energy by 2040, or whatever it is. That is having an effect on the uranium price, which is encouraging mine development.

But the problem with mining is that it can take five years from a greenfield deposit to get to a mine. You always have that lag, and if during that lag the uranium price drops, that may even hinder coming to commercial production. So, there's a lot of risk associated with not having your own domestic facilities in place.

We have reached out to them; we do have an ability at the president's office within certain countries in Central Asia to source uranium directly. We've even talked with the largest uranium materials broker in the world to make sure that we have a supply of that because no business wants to take the risk of building all these facilities and reactors and manufacturing facilities, but the raw material that fuels all this isn't there.

So there's that component to it too.

Well, do you worry that you're dealing with these, like say, Central Asian countries? Again, it brings me back to the same thing: if you could have a resource in Wyoming or Saskatchewan, that seems to me to be a lot more geopolitically stable in any real sense than trying to source something halfway around the world in countries that are definitely not politically stable.

So why were you compelled to seek out suppliers elsewhere?

Well, it's the immediacy of supply. They are able to supply material now, and that is a major advantage. We have a mine that even at the feasibility level, you still need to put the mine works in place. The processing plant for a uranium operation could be a quarter of a billion dollars and take three years to build.

So we want to make sure that it doesn’t have to take three years to build. Things could move a lot faster now than they once did. I also wonder if there are improvements in technology in the pipelines that would make it possible to do it in like a year instead of three years if people actually decided they wanted to.

I mean, Germany built new natural gas importing terminals in months when they needed to, so we can actually move pretty quickly if we decided it was a good idea.

So, you said the immediacy of supply drove you to Central Asia, but it would be better, perhaps, if there were domestic supplies that were at least in the pipelines. Let’s say domestic supply from Saskatchewan would be a lot better.

Of course, there’s less geopolitical uncertainty. Like, for instance, even in Central Asia, they do supply China and Russia with the uranium they need for their own programs too. So you're competing against other countries which are potentially hostile to the States or Canada or places like that.

If they're looking to wage an economic war, they will look for more exclusive contracts. Then you are in a competing position for a material you control, right? It seems like a bad idea, like from a geopolitical perspective; that seems unwise.

I can understand why you guys are doing it commercially because, as you said, you can't afford the delay. Fair enough.

Okay, so now do you have a stable supply fundamentally? Can you get moving with what you're doing?

You can. The good part about what we're doing now is we've ensured that we have built good relations with certain countries, so we can source the material if we want.

We’re not in the business of enrichment, but we could do things like conversion and get it into uranium hexafluoride gas, which can go to a licensed enrichment company like Orano or Centrus, and they could enrich the material for us.

What's the relationship between the gas and the yellow cake?

What you want to do with yellow cake is, once it's been concentrated by that leaching process, it’s easier to enrich gas than it is yellow cake. You could use a centrifugal system, but gas is certainly a lot easier to maneuver.

So if you take the yellow cake, you would expose it to several chemical processes to turn it into uranium hexafluoride. The enrichment companies will enrich uranium hexafluoride to produce whatever level the customer needs. But at that point, it actually needs to be deconverted back to a solid.

So, our company actually wants to build out that infrastructure for the country too, to take that uranium hexafluoride and convert it to dioxide, hydride, and uranium metal, whatever the market will need.

So, that's one element, and then we want to build a fabrication facility to tailor it for the specific reactor. Essentially, fashion it into dimensions, composition, mold it with zirconium, whatever they want, and then sell that.

The final part of what we want to do is build out a transportation company so we can actually transport that around North America too.

How would you transport it?

We've actually been spending about a year doing this, and we've got a patented technology now for a system that can transport the most amount of enriched material, so halo material, up to almost 20%, around North America. We're just in the process of getting that license now with the regulators.

Okay, so you’ve been working on solving the transportation problem, and what are the problems associated with transport that you've had to solve? How did you solve those?

The fundamental problem with transport is that you cannot have uranium critically configured. What I mean by that is if you push uranium all together, it becomes only really radioactive. That’s the basis of a bomb. If you push it together, it triggers itself more and sets off a chain reaction, and the reactivity creates the heat.

For road regulations, you have to store the material in a structured way to make sure it's not a PR. But it doesn’t end there; there are a lot of other regulations surrounding that.

Is it going to be hit by a plane or misfire? Is it going to fall underwater? What are the heat conditions? Can it be cold or can it be warm? You’ve got to account for all these safety scenarios.

So designing a transportation system that fits within a truck and can move a lot of material by road is a bit of an engineering challenge, but I don't think it's that difficult. It’s certainly something that has not been in place previously because for SMRs and micro reactors, uranium is enriched slightly more.

Because it’s enriched slightly more, you need a completely new system. That's where we thought we’ll jump on that and build that out. That way, when the industry does take off, we’ll have the transportation able to move fuel for all of those projects.

So does that mean, I see, your transportation system is not only designed to service your micro reactors but to be expanded to service these slightly larger reactors, the SMRs?

Yeah, that’s the plan. We’re not in the business where we want the other competitors to fail; if they win, we win.

Yes, absolutely. The right number of competitors isn’t zero.

No, exactly. We want them to succeed because they’ll build out the infrastructure, generate more money within the country for this industry, and we’ll be beneficiaries of that too. If they want to move fuel, we’ll help them move fuel. If they want to fabricate fuel, we’ll fabricate it for them, even if they outsell our reactors; it’s fine.

So, you can also be a part of their success in that situation too.

Okay, so that’s cool. You said you've got a supply, at least at the moment in Central Asia, that gets reduced to, by leaching to yellow cake. The yellow cake is transformed into uranium hexafluoride, right?

Yes, uranium hexafluoride can be concentrated and then converted back into, about 20%, you said.

Uh-huh.

So why 20%? What can you do with that, and you can transport it at 20%? You can do that safely by rail, by ship, by car, or by train?

Right.

And so now you have the 20% enriched material. What do you do with that when you get it to where it’s supposed to go?

It depends on where it’s going. If it's the 20% enriched uranium hexafluoride, that'll need to be converted into uranium dioxide or hydride, whatever fuel form you want effectively.

Oh, so are you transporting the gas?

Well, we don’t want to speak preemptively on that.

Okay, well that's fine.

Actually, no, it’s fine. We do want to branch take our system and modify it so it can move gas.

I see.

Okay. Okay, anticipation is that currently, we are building out a deconversion plan to be able to convert that gas into other forms, and then when they’re in other forms, it’s easier to fabricate into the final uranium form that the customers might want. [Music]