The Risky Planner

Untangling Schedules: The Future of SMRs and the Energy Revolution

Nate Habermeyer Season 1 Episode 2

In this episode, Albert and Nate dive into the world of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)—what they are, why they matter, and how they could reshape the nuclear energy landscape. They unpack the latest headlines, from Trump's energy policy and SaskNuclear’s ambitious plans to the delays and hurdles facing SMR projects worldwide.

Listeners will learn:
✅ What makes SMRs a game-changer in energy production
✅ Why no SMRs are in commercial use yet and the roadblocks they face
✅ How regulations, costs, and politics impact nuclear power adoption
✅ A hypothetical roadmap for Saskatchewan to meet its 2029 SMR deployment goal

Plus, Albert shares key advice for navigating the challenges of nuclear energy adoption. Don’t miss this insightful, entertaining, and slightly irreverent take on one of the most debated topics in energy today!

Presented by Dokainish & Company www.dokainish.com

The Risky Planner podcast delivers expert insights on project controls, capital project management, and strategic planning for today's complex business environment. Subscribe for regular episodes featuring industry leaders and practical advice.

Hello, listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Albert. So the topic today, it makes me think about my dad, you know, you say nuclear. And then I think about my dad. You know, he was a nuclear sub captain. I was a captain. He was a captain. And I've got a picture of him in my office on the top of the sale of a nuclear like us ballistic missile. It's, there's 24 inter continental ballistic missiles, intercontinental in that sub. In the picture I'm seeing in our show notes, that you drove a sub, it wasn't that I was actually drove that sub. That's the US that I actually problem, yeah, and it, you know, it's so easy, because back in the, I think this, yeah, this is like, mid 80s, the sub. I don't know if the technology has changed, but the if you're piloting, it's like, it's like that, you know, steering wheel and airplane or assessment, right? It's just that you and you push, pull, turn, turn. And the only things that you had to do is, there's, a there's a there's two levels, there's a flat level, and then there's an arc level, sort of 90 degree one man, and you just, yeah, you keep both bubbles in the middle and and you're the sub is not going to hit a rock. That's pretty much, yeah. So it's like a trillion dollar piece of Navy equipment, and 10 year old Nate Habermeyer, with ADHD, is piloting the submarine from from Long Beach to San Diego. I think we can all be very happy that those days are long behind us now, the days of, you know, 10 year olds driving nuclear submarines exactly, and we, and I, actually, I dove in a torpedo tube as well. I don't why, why? Because that seems because it's cool, man, you're under the water. I don't know how 600 feet or whatever, like it you're under the water. The torto torpedo fill a tube when it's not filled with sea water, like, pressurize it before they shoot the torpedo, right and then, but it's, you know, it's cold metal. It's very greasy. You put on a, like, a poopy suit. They called it, like the one piece, I think it was called a poopy suit, and then you dove the tube, and it was like, Oh, I gotta get like, a $10,000 screw out of the front. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. I don't know why they made us do that, but they asked us to. But we were like, All right, cool. And we're the captain's son, so of course, we're like, you know, the first ones that get thrown into it. I also, I also third story. I completed my nuclear missile launch training while I was on that sub, this was still at the age of 10. At the age of 10, I did not how old the keys to launch nuclear missiles, but I think the Lord I knew the process by which, once I got the key, I could insert it, turn it, and then follow the steps. Important question for you, important. I also asked this question of Joe McBrearty, the former CEO of CNL. He and I ran into each other at a cocktail party once, and I found out that he was the captain of the USS Dallas, which famously is the the nuclear, like attack sub. That happened, like, is, like, a big part of the end of the Hunt for Red October, yeah, exactly. There's the CEO and the Dallas. My dad was, like, I was Georgia, yeah, exactly, yeah. So I was, I was trying to, and I was there to talk to him about, you know, new business and talk about our offerings and all that stuff. But all I wanted to talk about was hunt for out October. So of course, quizzed Joe McBrearty about that for a little while. It's so good, but it is so good, and he was really game for it. So like, you know, shout out to you, Joe. I appreciate that. But no that, that reminds me of, of a movie, of course, which is Crimson Tide. So like you learned, the the the process of launching the nukes. How like Crimson Tide is it on a scale of one to Crimson Tide, pretty similar, actually, if I remember the scenes, pretty similar, right there. So they, they get a, yeah, there's a code alpha, Tango, bravo, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and, and you, you have these code books. The Captain has a key. The, I think, the cob of the Yeah, chief of the boat. So, yeah, they all have keys. So they all have to turn the keys. They open up the safe, they get the launch codes. And then there's a there's a redundancy, where they the launch codes are, then, like, I don't know, radioed from, you know, wherever you know. So it sounds like it's about a point eight. Crimson Tide, yeah. So it's pretty similar. And then they crack the code. They open it up, they read the code. They read the cracking that little plastic code, like in the movie, man, that just looks so satisfying. Like I want to have little pieces of plastic with paper, yeah, before you, before you destroy, like, 10 million people, yes, yep, no, I want to do it, because I want to find out what I'm having for dinner. I'm going to end the world. But before I'm going to crack this, this plastic tablet, I know, and that's gonna feel so good, it's very ASMR, but I think it's kind of similar. They read the codes, they read the codes, and then they confirm. The cob confirms it, and says confirmed. The captain confirms it confirmed, and the XO confirms. My dad was also an Exo before, and then he confirms it. So there's, like, this whole confirmation process. And then they, I think, the XO, the CEO and the COVID, I don't know, they all put in like, their second keys that they get out of the safe. Oh, and then, by the way, the captain, when they're getting all of this stuff out of the safe, he also gets a, like, a, I don't know, nine millimeter, or he gets a gun, he holsters a gun and puts it on because he's supposed to, in case of a mutiny, if he is supposed to shoot that sailor dead to stop them from stopping the launch of that missile. So, you know, that makes sense when you start racking it up against that whole, like, 10 million people guaranteed to die, type of thing, like, that's, you definitely don't want that to happen, sort of by accident, because, but there's so many redundancies in the process. There's no there would never be an accident. There's so many redundancies. And then they turn the keys, and they all have to turn the keys at the same time. And then the launch, then they have to push buttons at like several points, like several places in the sub. So you couldn't actually do it yourself. You physically cannot do it yourself. So it's a little bit like the end of severance season one, which, you know I'm not going to spoil, because I'm sure people are still catching up on severance season Yes, exactly. I don't. I haven't even, nope. So there you go. That's my claim. That's how you claim to fame. All right, so let's move along Albert and start in the topic we already introduced nuclear. What we're going to talk about today is nuclear is innovation in nuclear power generation. Yeah, that sounds really boring, but it's actually pretty exciting. And we're talking about small modular reactors or SMRs. Yeah, we're talking about the future of clean energy generation in North America. Around the world, it was really hot, and then it wasn't so hot. And then, like, we've seen some recent announcements, people talking about SMR, like, what, what is like, what is an SMR? And why? Why is it the future? Why is it innovative? Well, I mean, it's interesting that you'd frame it up that way, because, like, in a depending on how you you see the world, we're a couple years late to talking about SMRs, right? Because they very much had a moment in the sun a couple years back. It was, it was every, every nuclear news article you were going to read, every announcement coming out of every conference. You know, SNC Lavalin was talking about it a lot. I guess they're at Israelis now. But like, you know, their their can do division was building a smaller version of that. And like, there's, there's just a whole bunch of different, like, really wild reactor designs, often based on old concepts from the Cold War. So like, that really tickles my funny bone. Whenever somebody's like, I want to build a Cold War thing. I'm like, please do. But like, there were all kinds of crazy reactor designs that were, that were in contention, and all them had the same two things in common. Okay, I guess you call it three things, but let's call it two. So one is that they're, they're small and modular, like the whole SMR thing, like the small meaning that they're gonna top out in, like that the half a gigawatt range, like the 500 megawatt whereas, like, a full size reactor could be 850 megawatts, a gigawatt, you know, or more per reactor. Okay, so small modular reactors, though, the biggest one I'm aware of, that that has cleared any kind of regulatory bar is a 300 megawatt. Well, why would you, why would you build a small that's, I mean, so that brings larger, right? It's, it's smaller because, okay, so I'll get into why they can trump is talking about SMRs, so he is kind of weird, but, but you also know that it's like late, like, if Trump is talking about, it's probably late, but who knows? So I work on this. I'll tell you why he was talking about, why it's on his mind. Yeah. But the, the reason why I either way, that's just brings me to thing too, okay, thing too is that, in principle, by making the modulars, or by making the reactors smaller and modular, you're also reducing the cost of them, like on individual basis and the time to market. And like, the big sticking point of like traditional, large scale nuclear reactors in the past has always been that if you want to spin one up in order to achieve economies of. Scale, you need to build multiple reactor units, all of which are generating 850 kilowatts, a gigawatt more, really huge, huge numbers of of like electrical power. Okay, huge numbers of electrical power. Doesn't make sense, but you get the idea. Yep. So and that would cost you $20 billion $30 billion you know, so most nuclear projects in the past 30 years have gotten as far as the initial feasibility study phase and then died because they're just too they're too expensive, right? So SMRs are an attempt to to fix that problem by bringing the scale down and making it easier for like, more accessible to mid size, dollar store, Dollar General, of nuclear reactors. Yeah, exactly. What is it for? Only $12 billion yeah. Okay, so that's so, yeah, that's a drought in the bucket. It's like there's something that's easy to forget about any kind of nuclear reactors. I mentioned this earlier, but like, it's particularly true of small modular reactors, and this is where the modular part comes in. So if you're dealing with a small amount of generation, you need many of them in order to make the like a power station that that is worth anyone's time. Okay? So like, if you're trying to rebuild a traditional power station, where your other options would have been, like a gas fired or a coal plant or something like that. Like a more traditional technology, even a more traditional like large scale nuclear technology, you only need a couple of units, or even just one, like the point laprew generation station in New Brunswick has one can do reactor. And that's their entire business is they would just run that one reactor unit, okay? So for if you're doing that, then, you know, multiple SMRs would be required to make up that same amount of generation capacity. So you have to build, instead of building one reactor core, like in point laprew, you'd be building three or four to make that's all you need. Okay, so it's not like, it's not like I'm building, you know, 300 of them? Well, this actually gets me to part of the reason why there's something that Trump has on his mind when he's campaigning, because when he was president, his department of energy actually approved the installation of a small modular reactor complex at the Idaho National Laboratory. This happened back in 2019 so that was going to be 12 new scale SMR modules, 12. Okay, wow. So like, how big are we talking? Like, what? What's the footprint of one of those? So the smallest ones. And bear in mind, precisely zero of these things have been actually built yet outside of any because I've been thinking about getting one of those battery, you know, those home battery like, units and like, if I get completely off grid, and you could, you, you and and several 1000, I got $12 billion $12 million sitting around. Yeah, it's true. I mean, if you have $12 billion sitting around that we're having a conversation after we record, because, you know, we've got some things to do. Oh, that's too bad. Too bad for me, mostly. But no, like, two things about that, about that project, like, how big are they? You asked me, you know, the answer is, the answer is pretty big, okay, like, the very smallest ones, the very smallest ones, would fit on the back of a truck. Okay, so, and that's just be the core itself and, but when I say a truck, I'm not talking about, like, you know, your buddy's f1, 50, I'm talking about a 40 foot, you know, 18 wheeler. Okay, so, like, a pretty and those are the small ones, okay, okay, okay. So like to give you an idea of the scale, the smallest nuclear SMR technologies I'm aware of were kind of like, colloquially referred to at the time is nuclear batteries. Okay, you've probably heard this used for like, so nuclear batteries usually it means that it's some kind of, like waste burner, or it just uses, like, the the radiation from a decaying nuclear particle to produce, like a it's often known as, what is an RT, RTG, a radiothermal generator. Like, that's one form of a new nuclear battery. But like, those were pitched at the, you know, back in the couple years ago, heyday of SMR conversations, those were pitched as, like, potential replacements for sea going cargo vessels, like they could use that instead of their steam plant, or their boiler plants, yes, to drive screws and that sort of thing. So that's the size we're talking about. Okay? They'd be the size of, like the diesel plant on a cargo vessel, on, like a Panamax cargo vessel. So that's still pretty big. Okay? And then they go up from there, like the the GE Hitachi BWR x3 100, which is one of the designs that gets an awful lot of attention. Sounds like, like a really cool motorcycle. Yeah, exactly the it does 250, horsepower, zero, 60 in three seconds. But no, it's, it's like two stories tall, yeah. So, you know, these things are not small, actually, they're only small compared to their larger counterparts. But they're small and money, they're, they're a lot cheaper, cheaper. Are, quote, unquote, I'm using blinders. Yes, air quotes are important here, because, you know, to get back to what, what Trump said, you know, you mentioned that he'd been talking about them. He didn't actually use SMRs by name, to my knowledge, but he did say he was very clearly hinting at them. What he said was, and I quote, starting on day one, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape. We will get the job done. Close quotes. So he said that in Potterville, Michigan last year. Now may not be last week, by the time this comes out, but it doesn't matter. The point is that he's clearly referring back to this, this new scale plant. But here's the problem with the new scale plant and the one, it's not really new scales plant, it's Idaho National Labor laboratory. Okay, that plant got canceled. Okay. Reason cited was low subscription numbers, so basically, they weren't confident they could make their money back. Okay, so there is absolutely a low cost to entry compared to a traditional nuclear reactor, but it's not that low, and people are just now starting to do the math and figure out how expensive they're going to be. And the answer is pretty darned expensive. Yeah, so, well, so, but so it's, it's pretty darn exp, so he, I mean, yeah, he mentioned, you are people scared. You know, there's the whole, like, you remember, this is like going back 1015, years. So the the whole meltdown, you know, yeah, the whole meltdown, the tsunami, like, the Germany, right? Didn't they get rid of all their nuclear power plants, yeah? Or France, right? They just cleaned house, right? And so now all of a sudden, are we having, like, this nuclear renaissance or something like that. Like, there are people afraid. Are these SMRs safer? Or am I just like, being crazy? You're not being crazy. There is definitely a nuclear renaissance of sorts. And by the way, you were correct about Germany. In fact, they've already completed phasing out their nuclear program, like they closed last ones last year. So, but there are new demands for nuclear type energy in order to meet green energy targets, like in Canada, we have very aggressive 2030 targets that actually start to kick in next year in 2025, so back a few years ago, when people were really hot to trot about SMRs, they were talking about having things stood up in like proving plants and prototype plants by next year, and then having full scale power production facilities ready by 2030 and that is the absolute earliest it could possibly happen, based on the way things have trended in the last couple of years, is 2030 and speaking of speaking of 2030 or 2029 and just Canada in general. So recent news was our friends out in Saskatchewan, SAS power just announced that they have created a new corporate entity called SAS nuclear to really like to see this through, and potentially they would be online in 2029 is the potentially, but I don't like that's the so it's really exciting for Saskatchewan, who is joining the whole like Canadian Nuclear landscape, SaaS power to have launched this new corporate entity, because OPG Ontario Power Generation was talking about SMRs. They're getting close right there. They've already broken ground in some of their SMR stuff. They have, yeah, and there's, I think that was, yeah, but the most recent one is SaaS nuclear, and that's pretty exciting. And they've been talking about nuclearizing Their power grid for a little while. I don't sure if nuclearizing is a word, but, you know, Sure sounds it is now either you hear that nuclear eyes, Webster, Merriam, Webster, nuclear word of the year. So nuclearizing their grid is has been a priority of theirs since at least that first, you know, kind of bump of SMR popularity a couple years ago. I've been talking to people at SAS power off and on, kind of casually about this for a couple years now. And Sask, Saskatchewan and Alberta, if we're talking about provinces in Canada, they have something in common. It's not necessarily a feather in their cap. They have very low percentage of power generation from renewables. So they actually have the largest hill to climb when it comes to meeting those 2030, targets. You know, Alberta benefits from from having a lot of oil money in the province, which which gives them some some ways to nuclearize that are a little bit more lower hanging fruit, because a lot of the power that's consumed in northern Alberta in particular, is done so like at the oil patch, like on the oil sands, so a lot of that is cogen, right? Or it's what is cogen, cogen. So cogen is CO generation. It's where, in addition to whatever business you're doing at your your remote job site, you're also generating electricity. Generally, to do off takes. Meaning you can take things off the grid so you could just put some of that power into production right in your very home plant, or it serves as backup power, or something like that. This is like oil sands. Type of oil sands have. There's some cogen up there. I don't know how much to be honest, but it's pretty common at larger oil and gas facilities, especially the more remote ones, are the ones that are in flea spec towns that don't have some giant Yeah, they're not connecting to the grid in any way. They're, they're, oh, they absolutely are connected. They have more in common with somebody who sticks solar panels on their roof than they do with somebody who's trying to truly live off the grid, you know. But the the anyway, the point is that the the cogen itself may or may not be on the grid, but the facilities generally are. But the point is that, like, if, right now, first of all, do you know how to make power like, if you and I wanted to start a power plant tomorrow? Do you know how we would do that? Like, what's I'm sure that there's a plan on the dark web some where. But why don't you tell me? I do not know. Okay, so the stationary bike that I you know, could connect to something a million I went to the Science Center, I don't know, yeah, what? How do you create it? So if you're not going to go with the million hamsters route, then generally speaking, the way humans have chosen to generate electrical power for themselves is by generating steam and then using that steam to push turbines. Okay, now there are variations on this theme, you know, like hydropower is a good example of this, where they're just using water directly, you know, usually from a natural water source to just, yeah, like a dam or like, water turbines, yeah, exactly, exactly. And title is another example. The title power is coming into its own pretty soon. But generally speaking, if you're doing it onshore, then you're making steam, you're turning a thing. And, you know, that thing makes electricity doing it. So sure you mean, like, meaning like, here, not near on a body of water, got it, okay, or near one. So if you are doing you can make steam however you like, okay. So the easiest way to do it is to burn something and make water hot. So like, that's where coal plants come in, and like natural gas plants, and even, like trash burning plants that generate electricity, they're just light and stuff on fire, okay, which is fun, but not particularly efficient. I think you've really revealed a little bit too much about yourself. Albert, well, look, am I gonna go like garbage? Prodigies, Prodigy was my favorite band. Yeah? Who? Who was, who, who cannot claim to have fire started with ideas. Yeah, that was awesome. Anyway. So on the most extremely technologically advanced end of that, make steam turn a thing, style is like a fusion reactor, okay, which those are coming into their own soon as well. So it's just like, how do you make the water hot? Are you doing it in a sciencey way that's really interesting and fun? Are you doing it in a boring light, something on fire, type of way? Nuclear reactors are obviously doing it in one of the most sciency ways that they can Okay, like their whole job in life is to generate heat in a sustained, controllable manner. That's all they have to do. But at the end of the day, it boils down to making steam and pushing it through some place of pressure. Okay? So there's lots of different ways to do that, and that's part of the reason why there are so many different SMR reactor designs that are all being considered. But you know, this brings me to one of the challenges with implementing SMRs, which is that there's very few of them actually approved for use. Okay? Like reference designs need to be approved by regulars before they can ever be put into production, and that's only happened for a small handful, yeah, and we're not even talking about after the community sort of consultation type of process, yeah, that's right. It's host and you got it, yeah, we're just Saskatchewan has that stuff coming up, and OPG did theirs. And, yeah, that's very time consuming. It is, and the actual approval usually falls with the nuclear proponents or the people who have come up with the technology. So, you know, I mentioned GE Hitachi is bwrx 300 earlier. That's one of the ones that has cleared regulatory bars in the US. And I believe in, well, sorry, definitely in Canada, I think in the US, because it's a miniaturized version of an existing reactor design. So they were able to get that one across pretty fast. New Scale also cleared. This is the reason why it was chosen in 2019 for the Idaho National Laboratory Generation Station, because it has cleared the regulatory bar of having its reference design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Okay? So like, it's, it's, it's ready to rock and roll once they can make the numbers work. And that brings me to the second challenge, which I referenced earlier. They're just not costing as little or taking as little time to produce as people thought they would. Okay, one. And by the way, you might have the very reasonable question of, like, we haven't actually tried to build one. How do we know that they're going to be crazy? Yeah, I was going to say, if they haven't been done, yeah. Okay, so are we confident? Oh, well, look, this is going to be a running theme through all of these shows that we do together. Nate, but no one should ever be confident about their numbers before the shovels hit the dirt. You know, yeah, no one should ever think that they know things that they don't know. I mean, the future is, is a foreign country the same way the past is, you know? So good luck trying to I like the philosophical, yeah, we can. We'll do a whole like. Episode on philosophy, no, but I hear you're gonna love that. Yeah, about time. Good Book indeed. But no, that estimating is hard, okay, like cost estimation is really, really hard. Schedule estimation even harder. So it's it's especially when you're dealing with something that's a first of its kind, which, any SMR that gets built, you know, starting now, is going to be a first of its kind. Okay, so what are the other so that's a huge Okay, so you're going to be the first, it's going to be the first of its kind. Does that mean that, like, every time we build an SMR, I mean, is it? Is it just, uh, are we? Are we just going back to the drawing board? Or is there, like, that's pretty big drawback. It is, and I wouldn't say that we're going back to the drawing board necessarily, because, you know, any, any power plant, like I said, you know, you're basically making steam. You're pushing it through a turbine, so that the steam and the turbine, those are basically common features of any power plant, you know, of any technological complexity that I was describing earlier, they all have that. So there is some certainty around what the what they call the non nuclear Island, like what that's going to cost and how it's going to look like. The scope of that is not difficult to estimate, necessarily, but the nuclear Island stuff is all going to be new and novel. And, you know I referenced earlier that there's the natrium plant, yeah, the TerraPower Bill Gates is Yeah. So they broke it was back in June or July, maybe, yeah, June, I think, right? They broke down, yeah. They broke ground. They broke Yeah. What they broke ground on was the non nuclear Island, though it was the power generation stuff, because the rest of it hasn't been approved yet. So they're running into, or they're potentially going to run into, the same schedule protraction that some of the other nuclear proponents have, which is the you're throwing a lot of new information at these regulators and expecting them to to get, you know, clearances done, and safety assessments made and that kind of thing. What are the downsides to that? Well, okay, so, I guess the regulators the process of approval, biggest sort of hurdle, what are we? What other kind of hurdles are we talking about? Like, these things designed? Are we like, you know, what are what hurdles are we dealing with to get these things going? Well, there's, there's definitely reference. So this is, this gets to the modular part of small modular reactors. Like, in principle, those reference designs should be mass producible. So you know, new scale or GE Hitachi, or Moltex or arc, or whomever is just going to be able to kind of crank out Kyoto fusion earring. So it is different, yeah, because they're more on the fuel side of things, as I understand it, yep, get like they're using tritium to generate fusion fuel. That's their eventual plan. That's the partnership with CML, not too long ago to do exactly CNL, Canadian Nuclear listeners, yeah, who invented the candy reactor, by the way? So, like all those, a big chunk of the nuclear power generation in, say, India, and all of it in Canada is all done using candy reactors that were invented at the Chalk River laboratories. That's what CNL operates. And so they are working. And candy reactor produce a lot of tritiated water, so it's great for for producing fusion fuel. But that's a bit off, off the SMR topic, because all of the SMRs that I'm aware of are either based on nuclear decay or fission. So, you know, that's a different suite of nuclear chemistry. I used to ask my dad questions about the sub and he'd be like, I can tell you, but I have to kill you, yeah, no, he was probably, how does your reactor work? I can tell you, but I have to kill you. Did you probably have to kill you. It was just, yeah, yeah. How deep did you go? Well, no, this is great. Okay, I want to, I want to end this conversation with, I bet you do a piece of advice. Yeah, I want to talk to, want to talk to SAS nuclear. So let's say So hypothetically speaking. Well, not hypothetically. Is like SaaS power, SAS nuclear said they're going to deploy their SMRs. Maybe 2029, maybe 2030 what are we what? What advice would you give them to sort of set themselves up for success, to meet that deadline. So there's a lot of smart people working on this over there. I know a tiny handful of them, and I'm sure that they're already switched on when it comes to this. But what I would, what I would what advice I would give them is to learn from recent history. Okay, so there is a reason why there are new refurbishments planned at large scale nuclear reactors, because that may actually be more time and cost effective than trying to go down the road of building something new and novel, a first of its kind. Uh, to make energy happen by 2030 leaning on existing technologies might actually be the the best way to go. Okay, now that doesn't mean that they shouldn't try. You know, there are reference designs that are approved, and so I would, if I were them, be looking really carefully at the new scale design that was approved in the US at TerraPower slash Nate triumphs, design that's undergoing approval at ARC Moltex, that are in the late stages of approval due to partnerships with provincial authorities here. And of course, the the G he Hitachi unit that has already been approved. So they're going to be prioritizing things that have a shorter approval cycle, which is good, but their cost to go to market is going to have to be real low too, okay, meaning, like the so they have to recuperate all their costs from, like, sales of electricity to customers, okay? And that's their subscriber numbers. So they need to keep costs nice and low so that those cost to subscribers aren't super duper high. That, by the way, is what killed the Idaho National Laboratory NuScale deployment. So that was canceled. And you know the reason why they said they couldn't build the subscriber base that they would need to to eventually pay back the plant, right? And that's with the small modular system. Okay? So my advice to SaskPower and anyone else who's looking to build new nuclear in in these our modern times, pay attention to recent history. There are lessons to be learned there. So I don't know if that's too cryptic, but it makes sense to me, what are you excellent? No, I love it. All right, thanks. Albert, yeah, thank you. Nate, it's good conversation. Yeah, this is fun. We'll do it again next week, indeed. All right, later. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative and above all else inspires you to excellence in what you do. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to subscribe. Rate, leave us a review. It helps us reach more listeners. I'd also like to thank my friend Thompson Igbo EBO for the music. If you liked the music on all of our episodes, check out Thompson's work at ego music.com that's E, G, B, O music.com talk to you later you.

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