00:00:00
Frack, frack, frack, and drill. Baby drill.
00:00:05
He's all in on bringing common sense back to energy. More energy is better than less energy.
00:00:11
The US oil industry has become more productive than ever. The long talked about nuclear renaissance is finally going to happen.
00:00:18
Unleash American energy, American entrepreneurship, American innovation.
00:00:23
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the United States Secretary of Energy, Chris
00:00:30
Wright.
00:00:36
There he is. Good to see you. Round two. Let's go.
00:00:41
Awesome. Good to see you. Well, thanks for um putting up with us again. I know that the last time was
00:00:47
such a joy for you. That is a joy. It was a joy. Uh for those of you who missed it, uh Jay Cal decided to turn
00:00:54
our uh very short panel into a debate about batteries. Uh and solar well the
00:01:00
solar he's like just throw some batteries on the solar and then it works great. What do you mean? Like okay but thank you for being here.
00:01:09
Yesterday we were talking about the panel and Chimov said, "Why are we talking about nuclear? It's not even real. We shouldn't be doing this." Which
00:01:14
I think No, no, let me be clear. Nuclear is small. It's interesting, but it's the
00:01:20
pimple on the dog's ass. And so I just want to give you a statistic and and get you to respond to
00:01:26
the future state of nuclear in this country. It's I think about 4,000 bucks
00:01:32
a kilogram for enriched uranium to go into a nuclear power plant. To have a gigawatt nuclear power plant is only
00:01:39
burning 3 to 4 million bucks. Oh, sorry. It's only burning about four uh yeah, 3 to 4 million of electricity per day for
00:01:45
12,000 bucks of fuel of uranium fuel. So the the incredible production capacity
00:01:50
of of nuclear is like unmatched with any other energy source. Why does it take so
00:01:55
long? And why does it then cost billions of dollars? And you know for when when I
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can turn 12,000 bucks of fuel into $4 million of electricity, what's going on in the structural challenges with
00:02:07
scalability of nuclear, particularly in the United States? And um why is it not a real path to kind of scalable energy
00:02:15
production in this country for us right now? I mean it would it will be in the long run for the reason you just said
00:02:20
the greatest energy density. That's the key thing. If you can get a lot out of a
00:02:25
little that's got that's got running room. But nuclear involves something people can't see and they can't
00:02:31
understand and therefore it's easy to scare people about. So nuclear really has been a victim of fear in our world.
00:02:38
It's the safest form of energy production we've ever seen for amount of energy it's produced and the amount of
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negative impacts. But people think it's the scariest and the most dangerous. So if you make it very long, very
00:02:51
bureaucratic to permit things, if you make it so that uh therefore you've got to so overdesign and so overengineer
00:02:59
everything, it's so hard to permit enrichment. So you make everything expensive and you make everything move
00:03:05
slow and then you have other energy sources that turn on and off and you pay people a lot to build those things. That
00:03:11
also erodess the economics of nuclear of something that's reliable. So we meaning
00:03:16
the government has killed nuclear over the last four generations and the goal of the Trump administration is to
00:03:22
reverse that strangulation of nuclear and let it fly again but you're right it'll take some time but sorry let me
00:03:29
just make one what is China doing differently there I hate to say it but just more
00:03:35
rational you know China is they're worried about if nuclear accident happens and it injures people makes them
00:03:42
sick then they're going to look bad that's going to kill them, but their their their design criterion are just
00:03:48
for human safety, not for getting the environmental groups off them or or doubling down cuz someone else will be
00:03:55
mad at them. So, they're just pragmatic. They're building reactors faster and therefore cheaper. And they got 20 plus
00:04:01
under construction right now. Chris, let's break down the the challenge as the world needs an infinite
00:04:08
amount of electrons and an infinite amount of heat. Fair. Yes. uh why don't you just ground people
00:04:14
on where we get those things today and you know like what percentage comes from
00:04:20
coal what percentage comes from that gas what percentage comes from nuclear globally just so that we can maybe figure out where we need to go and how
00:04:26
do we get this more of this stuff now yeah so so in 1973 and I use that year
00:04:32
because that's the yam kapour war that's when oil prices tripled later in the decade they doubled again in the Iranian
00:04:38
revolution so we said we got to get off oil and gas. So in 1973, oil, gas, and
00:04:44
coal provided 85% of global energy. And last year, 2024, 85% of global energy.
00:04:52
So they and they've continued to grow. O over that uh 50 years, natural gas has
00:04:58
grown 3% compound annual growth rate. Coal 2%, oil 1%. Oil is the most
00:05:03
expensive and most flexible. Coal is cheapest if you don't have infrastructure. Natural gas can be the
00:05:10
cheapest if you have infrastructure. So it's growing the fastest. Natural gas is the fastest growing energy source. So
00:05:16
that's 85% from hydrocarbons, 4% from nuclear. Used to be six in the year 2000
00:05:22
and today 3% a little less than 3% of total energy comes from uh wind, solar
00:05:29
and batteries. Hydro's in there, geothermal in there. The the biggest component I didn't mention is
00:05:36
traditional biomass burning wood. That is twice the total global energy of
00:05:43
wind, solar, and batteries combined. 2 billion people still cook their daily
00:05:48
meals and heat their homes burning wood indoors. 2 to three million easily
00:05:54
preventable deaths a year to switch out that wood burning and liberation of women with just a simple propane stove.
00:06:01
There was a chart that um got a lot of distribution on X over the weekend which was just the
00:06:09
rise in electricity prices in the United States and um can you sort of explain
00:06:16
you know why that's happening and how we get around it so that it doesn't sort of
00:06:22
trigger inflation and other kind of like pernicious things that we don't want to see. It is a huge challenge. It's a
00:06:29
meaningful part of the reason why President Trump got elected. Energy is just the it's the sector of the economy
00:06:35
that enables everything else. If you get energy wrong, everything hurts. And particularly for lowincome people. So
00:06:42
look, the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal and hydro. Those are
00:06:48
the two electricity sources we started with. Then oil got added. We used to get a lot of electricity from oil. very
00:06:54
little today except in Puerto Rico or Hawaii because oil's flexible and you can transport it more easily. Uh today,
00:07:02
so today the back I mean the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal, hydro,
00:07:07
natural gas, um and nuclear. Today natural gas is 43% of our electricity.
00:07:14
Nuclear is about 20%. Coal was over 50, but now it's only about 15 or 16%.
00:07:20
Together they're 80% of US. Actually, when you put in hydro, they're about 83%
00:07:26
of US electricity. And for a 100 years, we had a declining inflationadjusted
00:07:32
price of electricity. It's just an infrastructure for our country. It boomed in this 60s and 70s as people got
00:07:38
air conditioning for the first time. Drove up electricity demand a lot. Uh
00:07:44
then about Obama administration really launched it. But this sort of overroought and I think irrational
00:07:51
fear of climate change did it wasn't a a rational let's look at the math on the trade-offs. It was just sort of a a
00:07:57
reason politicians could do things. So we started to spend a huge amount of
00:08:03
money to subsidize the building of what are called zerocarbon. Of course they're nothing of the sort, but they are lower
00:08:10
carbon electricity sources, wind and solar. They're all made out of hydrocarbons, made with hydrocarbons,
00:08:17
maintained and installed with hydrocarbons, but that I call them derivative energy production sources
00:08:23
that than them. But think about that. If you add on to the electricity grid a
00:08:28
bunch of sources that sometimes provide electricity and sometimes don't, what's
00:08:34
the value of that? Like, are there any customers for electricity? You turn on
00:08:39
your light switch and it'll turn on when the wind starts blowing or the sun comes from out of the cloud and then and then
00:08:45
in the middle of the football game, you know, the sun went behind a cloud and the football game will turn off. You know, you're in the middle of a surgery
00:08:51
and those things go off. So, of course, there's no customers for that. But if you put them on a grid that has these
00:08:58
sort of reliable dispatchable resources, what do they have to do now? They have to turn up and down as the wind uh blows
00:09:06
or the sun shines. So all you you peak demand for electricity is what a grid is
00:09:12
designed for. Right? When it's really cold in a winter evening when everyone comes home to work, if electricity goes
00:09:19
out and stays out that night, thousands of people will die. Texas had 200 plus
00:09:25
deaths just a few years ago with it with with an electricity outage. So you have to design the grid to heat at peak
00:09:32
demand. So at peak demand in the wintertime is in the evening and it's cold and it's cold because a high
00:09:38
pressure system an air mass has come down from the north and sits there. So there's no wind during a high pressure
00:09:44
system and it's it's in the evening so there's no sun. So you're not getting any electricity for wind or solar at
00:09:51
inauguration day back east at peak demand. We get 2 to 3% from wind, solar
00:09:57
and batteries. The traditional grid has to supply everything and that's at peak
00:10:02
demand. So if you have traditional sources that can supply at peak demand, of course they can supply at every other
00:10:08
time as well. Is that is that why the utilities keep raising the prices? It's just the complexity of servicing all of this and
00:10:14
building all of this because you you're adding new sources on and you have to build new transmission
00:10:19
lines and you've got to operate the traditional sources in a more complicated fashion. And when the wind
00:10:26
blows, what happens when the wind blows? Nuclear power plants operate relatively steady. Coal plants you can turn up and
00:10:32
down but slowly. So when the wind starts to blow, natural gas turns down a little bit. You generate a little less
00:10:39
electricity to balance out the increased wind power. The government pays that wind power producer 4 cents a kilowatt
00:10:46
hour in a subsidy to pay it. That's straight from the federal government to the provider of that wind power. the
00:10:52
utility pays something for that wind power. The the avoided cost is when you
00:10:58
burn a little bit less natural gas. If you're in Texas, that's 2 cents for 1 kilowatt hours worth of gas. If you're
00:11:05
in New England, that could be 3 or 4 cents of avoided cost. That's less than
00:11:11
the government subsidy to produce that, let alone the utility or in my former home state of Colorado where they they
00:11:18
they have additional subsidies and mandates that we must get our electricity or some percent of our electricity from these other sources.
00:11:25
But if you're not dispatchable, you're not adding to the peak capacity of a grid, you're just a parasite. Parasites
00:11:31
are expensive. Let me um ask you a little bit about China. 2024 they've installed two to
00:11:37
three times the amount of solar than America did per capita. They also have
00:11:42
33 nuclear power plants under construction, 200 planned. Your administration, David included, you keep
00:11:50
talking about clean, beautiful coal. You keep dissing solar and batteries and wind and deriding it like you just did.
00:11:57
What does chi and you keep talking about nack gas and clean beautiful coal. What does China understand that you don't?
00:12:04
Okay, that so great. And tell me how beautiful and
00:12:10
clean the coal is and how terrible and ugly these windmills are. Please explain to us what we're missing. Well, of
00:12:16
course, coal has been the biggest source of global electricity for 125 years. That's as long as we have good data. And
00:12:21
it will be for decades more. So, I know you don't like it, but it's not going away. It's by far and away the biggest
00:12:27
source of electricity in China. And they built a hundred coal plants last year. They built capacity more than almost
00:12:34
every country in the world has new capacity. So they do build a lot of wind and solar. It's still a very small
00:12:39
percent of their energy just like it is here. But they have an awesome industry of exporting those products around the
00:12:46
world. They're over they're over 80% of the solar. No, they don't export much
00:12:51
coal at all. Actually, they export solar. All of they're 80% of the solar supply chain. And think about this. Is
00:12:58
that why you guys are down on it? That we would have to buy the solar panels from them because it seems like you're
00:13:03
looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming for me.
00:13:08
But but there's no there there's no there solar and batteries. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong.
00:13:14
He he has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. Um and I'd if we could make a bet 50 years
00:13:22
out, I'll I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10% of global energy. Solar has
00:13:27
a future and and so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as a as an energy source. It has
00:13:34
roles. There's remote power that in in the United Arab Emirates, they're building a firmed 1 gawatt solar, 8
00:13:41
gawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They've got great sun resources. They have lowcost labor. They
00:13:46
can build things there. Solar has a role, but we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run
00:13:52
on solar panels. There's no math that shows that'll ever happen. And China doesn't believe it for a moment. But
00:13:58
think of why are they installing three times as many as us per capita then? And why do they why are they so effective at
00:14:04
installing nuclear power plants? Like this is what I I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. Like
00:14:10
and this is just like a Trump magazine where we have to diss natural sources, but do you really want to dig coal out
00:14:17
and burn it and pollute the the environment that we're giving to our kids? I want energy to better human
00:14:23
lives. Um, and the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources. The
00:14:28
the other thing we should say, electricity delivers 20% of global energy. Wrap the panel in a wrap the
00:14:34
whole planet in a solar panel. You got 20% of energy delivered. Where's the other 80% going to come from? It's
00:14:40
processed heat. It's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships. That's not going to come from solar ever.
00:14:47
Let me ask like the maybe we can just get and and I'll I'll follow up on Jason's question. One of the challenges
00:14:53
with natural gas which is actually methane is that as a greenhouse gas methane is roughly call it 80 times more
00:15:00
heat capacitive than CO2. So one of the push backs on that gas historically has been if there's even 1% leakage in the
00:15:07
supply lines. It's worse than coal or oil or some other sort of hydrocarbon based fuel source. Even though if you
00:15:14
have no leakage it's better. It has probably what half or something of the footprint. But but importantly, what's
00:15:20
the administration's view on putting carbon into the atmosphere as a cost to
00:15:26
society? And I and I I don't ask that in an antagonistic way. just just like cuz I met with a foreign minister from a
00:15:32
European nation the other day a couple weeks ago and the whole delegation this was a big topic like what is the
00:15:39
difference between our point of view which they have no carbon in the atmosphere spend all the money to keep that from happening and our point of
00:15:45
view and I just asked for like a like help level set a little bit on what's the point of view on where carbon goes
00:15:51
in the atmosphere over time and how important it is to to mitigate that. So,
00:15:56
like everything else, it's about looking at the facts and the numbers and the data. It's we don't want to be cute like
00:16:02
China. We And of course, I I think you misunderstand China's plan for wind and solar, but we want to look at the facts.
00:16:09
How big of a deal is climate change today? It is a real physical phenomenon. We've raised atmospheric CO2
00:16:16
concentration by 50%. Um, from it from burning hydrocarbons, from developing a modern world. It's a real thing. It
00:16:23
absorbs infrared radiation. It's contributed to some warming. But if you look at the math and the economics of
00:16:29
it, it's just not even close to top 10 problem in the world today. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on
00:16:35
Climate Change economics projections to the end of this century, they nobody
00:16:41
knows what the world's going to look like in the end of the century. But think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These are the people
00:16:46
that are dedicating their lives to work on climate change. Their estimates range from 0.2 2 to maybe 34%
00:16:55
reduction in per capita income at the end of this century. So that's in 75
00:17:01
years we might lose a couple months, we might lose a year of economic growth in
00:17:06
75 years. That's a bummer. It's not nothing. But compared to 2 to 3 million
00:17:12
people dying simply because they don't have a clean cooking stove and and of course the the the political movement
00:17:19
that's too focused on climate change has been against lending or bringing any capital to the developing world so that
00:17:27
they can live longer healthier lives. They can get clean cooking stoves. They can get industry. So the administration
00:17:33
is humans first. The the previous administration climate change was first.
00:17:39
Energy was a subset of climate change. Human lives were a subset of energy. For
00:17:44
for this administration, it's the opposite. Humans first. Energy is the
00:17:49
great enabler of human quality of life. And climate change should play the appropriate role if it does.
00:17:54
Hold on. Let me just bring in for a second here because I I think maybe to level set this. It felt like
00:18:03
obviously, you know, Al Gore and the climate change movement were completely
00:18:09
wrong. We're not sitting in 3 ft of water right now. It It was overblown. But you agree that it exists. I've never
00:18:15
heard we should be concerned about, but I just call Boston strikes. Chimoth,
00:18:21
you you are invested heavily in solar. You
00:18:26
were just talking this weekend about your batteries and batteries and solar. So when is what
00:18:31
we're hearing here just politics and like one group went too far left, this group is going too far and then you
00:18:38
actually believe I believe I I agree with Chris. Let me let me give you my framework. First of all, energy in my opinion is not a climate
00:18:45
change issue. No, energy is a national security issue. So the reason why and everybody cherry
00:18:51
picks a chart. Let me show this little nuclear chart going up and to the right for China. Wake up people. China has no
00:18:58
access to natural resources. The reason they do everything, the real accurate chart, if you want to be on top of this
00:19:04
issue, is what are they investing in? They're investing in every form of energy production. Why? Because if push
00:19:11
comes to shove in the future, China cannot be reliant on anybody for energy.
00:19:17
It is the same in the United States. Okay? So, that's number one. That's why they're investing in everything. So,
00:19:22
it's it's inaccurate to cherrypick the thing that helps you reinforce your bias. This is why I find nuclear such a
00:19:28
kind of a dead-end conversation boring. The real conversation is the strategic gameplay of what's happening on the
00:19:34
field. That's number one. Number two, in the United States, my fundamental belief is that the utilities are broken because
00:19:43
no matter how cheap you make the making of the energy, and I really don't care
00:19:48
how you make it, you have to spend an inordinate amount of money transmitting
00:19:53
it and distributing it. And all of that indirection is what the average consumer
00:19:59
pays. So if you are smart, eventually you will say to yourself, I'll just make
00:20:05
it myself. Yes. And that doesn't have to compete with Chris's vision because what Chris
00:20:10
has to do is enable the broader framework for industry, for manufacturing, for transportation.
00:20:16
We can't do that. My belief is that the largest utility in the United States
00:20:21
will be a distributed utility of homeowners having solar compliment with Chris
00:20:27
and that means solar and batteries at home because you're obviously not putting Yes, because you're not going to put a nuclear reactor in your daughter's bed.
00:20:32
Who's going to do that? So, let's stop having this. Nobody's going to do that. Greenberg is an investment in a small
00:20:39
modular nuclear gen 4 and it's going to go in my daughter's When you put it under your daughter's
00:20:44
bed, call me. Okay. And and JK, let let me let me come back on that. I'm not anti- solar. I
00:20:49
worked You sound that way constantly. I just talked the numbers of it. I worked in solar energy. I bought
00:20:55
thousands of solar energy panels to power instruments remotely. I've supported money to bring them to Africa
00:21:00
to charge cell phones and bring lights. I'm for all energy sources that better human lives. But I'm for I'm for math.
00:21:06
I'm for looking at numbers. And by the way, as a person that's that's in the solar and storage business, I also like the math. The math
00:21:13
before was perturbed. It was uneconomic. You have a lot of people, homeowners,
00:21:19
that are going to suffer because they have all of these solar projects that they put on their homes by the shadiest
00:21:25
of companies that were subsidized by these things. So, as a competitor in the market, the first thing I applauded was,
00:21:31
get these stupid subsidies away. Let the best companies compete. Yes. Let us win. Yeah. Uh, Secretary, let me
00:21:39
Exactly. Uh, let me just change the topic for a minute. The Department of Energy, in addition to being responsible for
00:21:45
progressing energy production in the United States and our infrastructure, is also the facilitator, the administrator
00:21:52
of all of our national labs. And these labs do some of the most important pure
00:21:57
research in the world. We have the world's first cyclron up at Lawrence
00:22:02
Berkeley Lab where I used to work for a few years. I've worked at a DOE lab. Um, we have obviously at Al Lawrence
00:22:09
Liverour, Los Alamos. I mean there there's there's labs all over the country that are doing pure research that create fundamental breakthroughs
00:22:15
that ultimately lead to industrial success for America. This administration's published out of
00:22:21
the OM massive budget cuts to some of this research. How do you address that
00:22:26
topic as the uh secretary of energy? How do you facilitate conversation with the
00:22:32
White House and how do you view the importance of this research in the United States? Yeah. So the 17 national labs we have
00:22:37
across the country, most of them created soon after World War II. Their original use was the Manhattan Project. Win World
00:22:44
War II and develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. The greatest group science
00:22:50
ever done. Simply phenomenal. I love the 17 national labs around our country. I
00:22:56
am passionate about their value for our country, for their value for the human spirit. what it means to try to probe to
00:23:03
understand what's fundamental about nature. What is dark matter? How do nutrinos really behave? We don't have
00:23:10
commercial applications for those in the next 5 or 10 years. I I take that back. We do have a nutrino application, but I
00:23:17
don't believe you have to have immediate commercial applications for the science to be worth doing at our labs. They are
00:23:24
gems. They are places of scientific discovery. Tons of innovations we use today. MRI machines. Those came out of
00:23:32
work done at our national labs. So yes, I came to Washington what we were
00:23:38
collecting a dollar in taxes and spending a $140 for every dollar in taxes. That is a train wreck. I am
00:23:44
passionate about shrinking government expenditures in the in the one big beautiful bill. We cut over $500 billion
00:23:52
of subsidies for energy technologies. I wanted to cut the full 1 trillion. all of them. Um, not successful in that, but
00:24:00
but the much smaller amount of money around $10 billion we spend every year for these 17 national labs, I've been a
00:24:07
passionate defender to to to stop cuts to that and I think I will succeed at
00:24:13
that. I will succeed at that. These are critically important. Chris, and you have members in Congress that support you and in in that
00:24:19
representation. AB: Absolutely. And and of course across the administration, you come in, you want to cut everything. I get it. All I'm doing
00:24:27
is in my little narrow area of science, technology, and nuclear weapons is saying, "Let's be smart and thoughtful
00:24:33
about what we should cut and what we should grow." Chris, very narrow question. Sax, sorry, Sax, go ahead.
00:24:39
So, let's talk about AI data centers for a second. So, we know that there's this huge infrastructure investment happening. I think it's been estimated
00:24:46
that we're going to need, I don't know, at least dozens of of gigawatts of new energy to power these data centers just
00:24:52
over the next several years. How are we going to do that? Where is that going to come from? How do you avoid the increase in residential rates because of that?
00:24:59
A huge challenge. And and David, this problem is going to keep getting worse. We we saw retail electricity rises
00:25:05
prices prices rose 25% during the Biden administration. Wholesale electricity prices rose far more than that, over
00:25:12
50%. So we we we have done great damage to our electricity grid. In the dialogue
00:25:18
we we were just having, not that I don't like those technologies, I don't like expensive electricity. Um it's a
00:25:24
challenge in the the fastest growing energy source in the world and the fastest solution we have to power data
00:25:30
centers is natural gas. Just by far the cheapest uh fastest of course we have supply chain issues with turbines there
00:25:37
but people are ramping up capacity to build those. There's simpler things we can do. There's environmental
00:25:42
regulations that peaker gas turbines. They're only allowed to run a certain number of hour I mean hours in a year.
00:25:50
Oh that's what they're permitted for. We can get we have a natural gas generator. We can burn more gas and generate more
00:25:55
electricity cheaply and we're not going to do it because because we had some climate rags that limited that. We can
00:26:01
fix problems like that. We There's also a bunch of backup generators not just at data centers but elsewhere around the
00:26:07
world that can't sell electricity into the grid. They don't have air permits to be regular providers. When we don't need
00:26:14
more electrons, that's we need more electrons. We only need more electrons a few hours a year at peak demand. We have
00:26:21
slack capacity 98% of the time. Huge amount in our grid. So what we need is
00:26:26
how from existing assets can you hit that peak capacity. We're going to change some regulations. So all those
00:26:32
backup generators when we hit those peak hours, we're going to turn on those diesel generators and those natural gas
00:26:37
generators. No, the climate isn't going to collapse because we ran diesel generators for a few hours, but it's
00:26:42
going to allow us to have gigawatts more of firm electric generating capacity on
00:26:48
the grid we have today. Chris, can you explain to us how much flexibility can
00:26:53
you have on federal lands for just you and the Trump administration and maybe
00:27:00
subsequent administrations who are in charge to control this without the involvement of state and local actors
00:27:06
and all of these other third party organizations to slow these things down? So, if it is the case that you want to build a nuclear reactor, is it possible
00:27:14
to just do it with federal approval? Is there any way on federal land or some other way where you can find an avenue
00:27:19
to do this without all these other folks gumming up the system and slowing things down? We will have new next generation small
00:27:25
modular reactors critical next year. Our goal is by July 4th and I think we will beat that. But
00:27:31
you'll have an operational uh small modular by July next year.
00:27:36
By July of next year, it will not be selling electricity into the grid. It will be running on federal land other at
00:27:42
the Idaho National Laboratory. It'll be demonstrating it can sell electricity.
00:27:47
It will be permitted by DOE, but we're working handinhand hand with NRC as
00:27:52
well. So, we will see commercial reactors break ground uh actually many before then. But nuclear is going to
00:27:58
move at a faster pace than it has before. But back to David's question, 17 national labs have a ton of land on
00:28:04
them. We sent out an RFP. Who wants to build data centers on our lab on our lab land? We'll permit them quickly. We'll
00:28:11
help you get energy. 300 responses to that. Every large data center developer,
00:28:17
everyone will partner with us to build data centers quickly on land. We have
00:28:23
infrastructure. We have because we must win the AI race. We have the capital. We
00:28:28
have the people. And that means it will not impact consumers electrical costs.
00:28:34
That's the key piece. What an amazing transition from the Manhattan project to operating data centers on the Department of Energy
00:28:40
Labs. examples. But let me let me let me ask one more question cuz this has come up. Every time we go to DC, we hear
00:28:47
Doge. Is Doge dead? There's a conversation that happens. Can you tell us a little bit about Doge and the
00:28:53
Department of Energy? Is it still around? And if so, what are the team members working on and and what are the
00:28:58
what's the impact you're seeing? Oh, we have a fantastic crew of teammates.
00:29:04
Some of them came as part of the original Doge program. So, it's just been rebranded. But this idea of getting
00:29:10
smart technical and financial patriots who are leaving their jobs and leaving their careers to come work with us, that
00:29:17
is as strong and thriving as ever. I I and the country have benefited enormously from the you could call them
00:29:24
Doge alum that are at the DOE today that are that are looking through our labs that are working with us in every
00:29:31
process, everything we're doing. How could it be better? I am I am I'm touched by the patriotism of people that
00:29:38
are walking away mid-career or taking a a a hiatus mid-career like David Sachs.
00:29:44
But David's a perfect example of that. So many people are doing that because they believe in this country. They
00:29:51
believe about bringing common sense back. And again, people think I'm this crazy guy who denies climate change. Of
00:29:56
course, nothing of the sort. I've been I've been writing and talking about climate change for 20 years. I just want
00:30:02
it treated rationally as a trade-off. Everything in life as a trade-off. That is the attitude that pervades doze, that
00:30:09
pervades all these people coming to Washington who had never been in Washington before. I'm an entrepreneur
00:30:14
my whole life. I I never politics. We appreciate you engaging the dialogue
00:30:20
and uh you're a true bestie in the all-in sense of the word. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Chris Wright.
00:30:26
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great. Great job. Great
00:30:32
job. [Music]
