All right, welcome back, everyone. Next, we have ASP Isotopes Inc. It trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ASPI and is a pre-commercial stage advanced materials company dedicated to the development of technology and processes to produce isotopes for use in multiple industries. Happy to welcome back its CEO, Paul Mann. Welcome, Paul.
Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for the invite, so we'll do the usual lineup today. We'll do a presentation for about 20 minutes, and we'll take some Q&A at the end. So we're an ASP-listed company, so if you could review all our risk disclaimers and our statements we put in our 10-K and 10-Qs and on our SEC filings, that'd be fantastic. You can read this disclaimer. So we set the company up about three and a half years ago, and the goal was to focus on producing stable isotopes for industries that need isotopes in the future. We'll talk about what isotopes are in a moment, and the main end markets for isotopes are medical, semiconductors, and nuclear energy. And we kind of have three verticals in the company now. We have ASP Isotopes in the middle, which is focused on producing stable isotopes.
And in that kind of division or vertical, we've actually built three manufacturing plants in Pretoria, South Africa. And then to the left, you see PET Labs. And PET Labs is Sub-Saharan Africa's leading supplier of Fluorine-18 and PET isotopes for the PET imaging market, which is a form of nuclear medicine. And we have two cyclotrons in South Africa, and we're adding a third. And that business is already doing good revenues, and it's very profitable today as it stands. And to the right, you see Quantum Leap Energy. And this business is going to focus on producing the nuclear fuels of the future, specifically HALEU and lithium-6 and lithium-7. And our intention is to spin that out as a separate entity in the next sort of period of time.
Our view has always been that nuclear fuels and nuclear medicines are very different, different in terms of capital needs, different in terms of licensing requirements, and so the goal is to spin that out as a separate entity at some point, so here are our goals for the year, and the goal for the year has been to generate additional plants. Basically, we've built three additional plants in South Africa and start commercial productions, and we've started commissioning those plants right now. So what is an isotope? So when you think about hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, they're different elements. They have different numbers of protons in the nucleus, and so they're physically and chemically very different. You can separate them by chemical means in that carbon is a solid, oxygen and hydrogen are gases. Oxygen and hydrogen react very differently.
And so it's very easy to separate those elements out using chemical methods. But same elements also have different isotopes. And an isotope is determined by the number of neutrons in its nucleus. So taking silicon as an example, silicon has three isotopes. One has a mass of 28, one has a mass of 29, the other has a mass of 30. And they've got different numbers of neutrons that drive that difference in masses. And chemically, they're pretty much identical. So you can't separate them chemically. But we have to discover other ways to separate them. And these isotopes have different attributes, different characteristics. So for example, the 29 isotope is a very poor conductor, while the 28 and 30 isotopes are good conductors. So when you think about a semiconductor, we put normal silicon into a semiconductor, and it's satisfactory.
But to make semiconductors for quantum computing and advanced semiconductors and semiconductors in the future, if we can remove that 29 isotope, it's believed the conductivity increases thousands of fold, and the heat transfer capability increases dramatically as well. And the belief is that if we can produce silicon-28, then we'll be able to make really advanced next-generation semiconductors. So we've actually signed two contracts for silicon-28, one with a large U.S. semiconductor company and the other with a large global industrial gas company. And they're very interested in trying to get this new silicon into next-generation semiconductors. Now, I've only become interested in this industry sort of four years ago, mainly because during my 20-year career investing in healthcare and chemicals companies, I recognized how challenged the supply chain was for many of these isotopes.
And this chart here kind of shows why the supply chain has always been compromised, but it's even more compromised today. And there aren't many producers of stable isotopes. And the main producers of stable isotopes are in countries that may not be particularly friendly with the United States and other countries right now. And so there's an urgent need to diversify the supply chains. And we actually got involved in this business well before the current Russia-Ukraine event kind of kicked off in February 2023. And that's obviously escalated or catalyzed a lot more interest, a lot more demand in what we're doing. So we have two processes that we use to enrich isotopes. The first is the ASP Process, and the second is Quantum Enrichment. So the ASP Process is basically a stationary wall centrifuge.
When you think about a traditional centrifuge used to enrich uranium, it's a very tall, very large vertical cylinder that spins on its vertical axis. These plants cost billions of dollars to build. They're extremely large, and they take a long time to build as well. Our plants are much smaller in size. They're modular, and they're not many moving parts other than the compressor. And so that allows us to build these plants much more cheaply, much more efficiently, much more quickly. The other advantage of the ASP Process is that we're able to enrich light isotopes as well as heavy isotopes. A centrifuge, you have to have a mass over 100. When you think about a bowl or a spoon, if I stir a bowl of soup around, it has mass.
And so I can create a vortex inside or create a whirlpool inside that bowl of soup. But if I just spin, if I use my spoon in a bowl of air, nothing much really happens, but it's too light to create this kind of vortex. So for a centrifuge, you have to have a heavy isotope or heavy molecule. For ASP, we actually prefer lighter molecules. And so that allows us to enrich things like silicon-28 and carbon-14, which would be challenging to do in the form of silane and methane in a traditional centrifuge. So Quantum Enrichment is our second enrichment method. And there we use a number of lasers. We combine them into a beam, and we ionize one of the isotopes. The beam is specifically shaped and the correct frequencies or correct wavelengths in order to be specific for a particular isotope.
Then we can collect those isotopes on a positive charge collector plate. We've built one of these plants so far in South Africa for ytterbium-176, and that's being commissioned right now as well. I'll just add, in the ASP Process, we built two plants in South Africa. The first is designed for carbon-14, and the second is a multi-isotope plant, but we'll focus initially on silicon-28. Here's a picture of our first plant, just our carbon-14 plant. You'll see the left hand there, you'll see the separators. Then on the right hand side there, you'll see the light element recovery and the heavy element recovery. Think about a cascade as being essentially a distillation column with a reboiler and a condenser at the top and the bottom. That's how we kind of separate elements.
Then here's a picture of our first quantum plant. You'll see a number of lasers there with beams being formed. They go into a vessel where we ionize a particular isotope. To summarize, our technology is cost-effective. We think we've got the lowest levelized cost of production of isotopes, modular and scalable. It's very environmentally friendly. There's no nasty radioactive waste that comes out of our plant. Let's now talk about the three industries we're interested in entering. Nuclear medicine is one of the largest ones. The global isotope market is huge. It's a multi-billion-dollar market today, and it's growing very rapidly as new forms of isotopes are discovered to treat different types of oncology and different diagnostic measures. This chart here kind of shows the symbiotic relationship between ASP Isotopes and PET Labs.
PET Labs is a consumer of stable isotopes. You take a stable isotope, you bombard it with either a neutron, an electron, or a proton, and you convert it into a radioisotope. You can use that radioisotope to treat people with various diseases. On the left, you see some of the isotopes we're hoping to enrich in the next sort of several years. On the right hand there, you'll see what PET Labs will hopefully produce in terms of radioisotopes over the next several years. Molybdenum-100 is, we think, a large opportunity, but it's one that will take a long time to kind of evolve. Right now, there's a huge shortage of molybdenum-99 because a nuclear reactor is out in Europe, and there's not enough supply product.
That's one of the things I remember from the last sort of 10, 20 years is how often these companies struggle to get isotopes to patients. The molybdenum-99, the technetium-99 market is one of the largest markets. It's the workhorse of nuclear medicine. It's used for SPECT scanning. What you do is you take a U-235 target, you bombard it with neutrons, and you form a reaction or a radioactive decay, and it converts into molybdenum-99. That has a 66-hour half-life. You're racing to get that radioisotope around the world to patients while it's undergoing radioactive decay. It's a very challenging supply chain. This is a market we're probably most excited about in the short term. The medium term is ytterbium-176. There's a new category of drugs emerging called beta radio pharmaceuticals or beta radio therapeutics.
And the largest drug in this category today is an advanced drug called Pluvicto. And they launched that a couple of years ago, and it's grown very nicely. And here, you have to use lutetium-177. It's the active ingredient inside this radiotherapeutic. And to make lutetium-177, the best way to make it is from ytterbium-176. And there really is a huge supply side shortage of ytterbium-176. If you look at the clinical trial where this drug got approved, 5% of patients actually died because they couldn't make the drug on time or couldn't make the drug for the patient. So very challenging supply chain in Ytterbium. I showed you a picture of our Ytterbium plant a few minutes ago. We're in the process of commissioning that at the moment. And so far, the commissioning is going well.
We hope to have commercial quantities available during the first half of next year. Zinc-68 is another isotope that is of interest. As more radioisotopes are used to treat medicine, specifically lutetium-177, most patients are diagnosed using a gallium-68 diagnostic marker. The best way we think to make gallium-68 is using zinc-68. The demand for this is growing rapidly. We hope to build a Zinc-68 plant next year. That could be our first plant in Iceland. Finally, carbon-14. carbon-14 is used in the development of new drugs and new agrochemicals. An FDA requirement is you actually run a test with a carbon-14 tracer attached to it. We've signed a multi-year take-or-pay agreement with a Canadian customer for carbon-14. That has a minimum value of $2.5 million a year. It could be larger.
We kind of estimate the global market's near $10 million per year. And so we'll see how that market develops over the next several years. And I say the feedstock for this plant has been delayed by a little bit. It's currently in the United States. And the supply chain here is actually somewhat more complex relative to most of our other isotopes in that radioactive carbon dioxide is produced in the United States. It's shipped to Canada, then shipped to South Africa. We convert it to methane, radiocarbon methane. We enrich the methane, and then we convert it back to a barium carbonate salt, and then we send it back to the customer and charge them for that process. The feedstock currently is sitting in the United States. The plant is operational. It's currently enriching carbon-12 and carbon-13. We're just waiting for our feedstock.
That should become a very valuable commercial plant for us. This slide here just summarizes what I've just said a moment ago about various interesting isotopes in nuclear medicine. The semiconductor is the next opportunity which we're very excited about. We've built a multi-isotope plant for silicon-28. That's in the process of being commissioned right now. That should start producing commercial product in the first quarter, first half next year. We have two customers signed up for that plant: a large U.S. semiconductor company and a large global industrial gas company. We're talking to three or four more customers who require silicon-28. The same is actually true for germanium-73. If you deplete germanium-73, just leave that 70 and 72 or 74, then the conductivity and thermal properties improve dramatically as well.
And so our goal is to produce germanium-73 also out of the multi-isotope plant at some point next year. We've got one customer who is very excited about the depleted germanium-73. And finally, our plants today are in South Africa. We have three facilities in South Africa. And in the ASP process, we use quite a lot of energy. That's one of the main input costs. And so our plan next year is to start building plants in Iceland. And their energy is extremely cheap. And we signed an MoU for a long-term supply agreement for energy at a very low price. And then we've found a building. And we should start building that plant very soon. The team right now is just finishing off the silicon plant, and we'll move on to building probably a zinc-68 plant.
Probably between now and the end of the year, we'll start building that plant in South Africa. And then we'll ship it to Iceland during next year. So let's move on now to nuclear energy. There's a lot of interest in nuclear energy from investors right now. And the problem should be fairly well known in that the world needs to double its electricity production over the next sort of 25 years or so. But doing that by keeping carbon emissions flat. And that's a very challenging thing to do. And I think it's widely believed that nuclear is probably a significant answer to that problem. And so during COP28 last year in the Middle East, 24 countries actually backed a declaration to triple the amount of nuclear energy by 2050. That's a hell of a challenge given how long it takes to build these plants.
I'm personally not sure they're going to manage to do that, but good luck. We'll see. And it's widely believed that the future of nuclear energy is the SMR, the small modular reactors. When you think about a traditional nuclear power station, these power stations are huge. They produce gigawatts of energy. You have to put them. You typically place them in the middle of nowhere, and you've got to try and get that energy to a population. So huge transmission grid to get the energy into where it's needed. They typically take multiple years to build, 10 plus years to build, cost multiple billions of dollars. And historically, it's traditionally been a significant overrun, a significant overrun of time and cost. So small modular reactors basically take nuclear energy to what is essentially a production line manufacturing. So what made cars really cheap was the Ford Model T.
That's where you took a bespoke piece of engineering, and you basically put it on a production line one after another. Suddenly, the cost came really cheap. This is the same goal for nuclear energy. These SMRs are much smaller. They're typically megawatts in size. The exclusion zone around them is just a few hundred meters rather than miles. You can place them near the populations, which means you have less of a transmission problem. One of the problems for these SMRs is they all require, or most of them require, a new type of fuel called HALEU, high-assay low-enriched uranium. The only real supplier of that, commercial supplier of that, is Russia. They basically banned exports of uranium to the United States and certain countries in Europe. There's a huge problem in getting this HALEU supply.
TerraPower recently delayed the startup of its SMR from 2028 to later because of a lack of availability of HALEU. There's all kinds of problems in trying to build HALEU plants and what have you. Our goal is to take quantum enrichment and use that to produce HALEU. We obviously have two methods we can use to produce HALEU, ASP and quantum enrichment. We think quantum enrichment will be the better method of the two. This chart here kind of compares different ways of enriching isotopes. The important line to look at here is the selectivity line. When you think about gaseous diffusion 70, 80 years ago, the selectivity there is 1.003, a very, very low level of enrichment per stage.
You need lots and lots of stages and lots and lots of energy and a huge amount of capital cost to build these plants. Sort of 40, 50, 60 years ago came the centrifuges. The selectivity there is much greater, 1.15. Again, you cascade those centrifuges in a line, and you enrich by 1.15 kind of each stage. You compound that over the cascade, and that gives you your overall enrichment. AVLIS is an approach tried by the United States back in sort of the 1990s. The selectivity there is much greater, between 10 and 50. Then separation of isotopes by laser excitation is going back to 2 to 20. Again, that's been published in research papers. They're both significantly better than a centrifuge. We're excited about Quantum Leap Energy or Quantum Enrichment.
And the selectivity there is greater than 50. And we've done it on a couple of isotopes. Some of it's been published. And when I say greater than 50, I actually mean a lot greater than 50. So if you look at this, this is the only published data on Quantum Enrichment. And it's for lithium-6 and lithium-7. And here, the separation factor is 112. And so we're excited about using this method to try and enrich uranium with. So here's what's gone on in the nuclear fuel markets over the last sort of 20 years or so. And you'll see there's extreme supply-side pressure right now. The price of the ore, the price of conversion, the price of enrichment, all trading at 10-year-plus highs. We haven't really seen much of a supply response yet.
It's unusual not to see a supply response when you see these prices go up by fivefold. That's just the nature of the market. Barriers to entry here are really huge, so what does that mean for HALEU? Well, the cost of HALEU will have gone up dramatically over the last several years. Back in the late past, like that end of last decade, we're looking at HALEU prices below sort of $10,000 a kilo, maybe even below $5,000 a kilo. Now, if you put together the component parts of producing nuclear fuel, it should cost in excess of $20,000 a kilo, and of that, about half of it is the ore. About one-sixth of it is the conversion. About one-third of it is the enrichment.
Because of our high enrichment factor, we're hoping we can take depleted tails, so depleted nuclear waste, and convert that more efficiently into HALEU. That would remove the cost of us having to get the ore and just focus more on the enrichment and the chemical conversions. We think that's a really, really good way of making HALEU. We think it'll be the cheapest way of making HALEU. In terms of where we are with nuclear energy and HALEU, we've signed two MoUs with large U.S.-based SMR companies to explore producing nuclear fuel for them. We've signed a term sheet with a large U.S. SMR company. That involves some research and development, which we're doing right now. We look forward to signing definitive agreements for that term sheet over the next sort of several months or so.
Then very recently, about two weeks ago, we signed an MoU with Necsa, which is the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation. And the goal here is to create a joint venture in South Africa and build a HALEU plant there in South Africa at Pelindaba. And Pelindaba is one of the main nuclear sites of Necsa. It has a nuclear reactor on its site. It has 24/7 power, has very good security. It's well known by the IAEA. It comes under comprehensive safeguards agreements, as do most of our plants. And so we think that's an ideal location. We look forward to developing that relationship with Necsa over the next several months and starting to go through the process of designing and building a plant there. So to summarize, we have two proven proprietary technologies. We're building three plants in South Africa.
There's multiple secular and geopolitical tailwinds driving demand growth for in this industry, and I say we've built three plants in three years. We're pretty proud of that achievement, and we plan to build a lot more over the next several years, so I'll stop there and I'm going to take any questions you may have.
Great, Paul. Yes, take a drink. That's a hefty presentation, as always. Such important work here. All right, so John asks, how close is ASP to providing information on additional deals in the pipeline, as well as some potential customer names?
Yes, we've announced a number of customer agreements to date. We're probably talking at any one time to 10+ different customers. I think for ytterbium-176, we have a lot of interest in that. There's a real supply side problem in ytterbium-176. I think the next step there is to fully commission the plant, start producing product, and then send samples to each customer. And then they can test those samples and check that they work in their setup, in their facility, and in how they convert it into lutetium-177. And having done that, I'd expect to sign some supply agreements shortly after that. And then for silicon-28, we've signed two supply agreements already. We're talking to three more customers right now. And we recently actually increased the size of that plant.
So when we started building that plant, we assumed it would do 10 kg per year. During the construction, we actually decided that there was so much interest in it, we deployed some additional dollars, about $4 million of CapEx. And we increased the size of the plant. And actually, when you increase the size of a cascade, it's exponential. And so we're able to actually increase the size of the plant. We think about fivefold. So now we said the plant could probably produce greater than 50 kg of silane per year.
Is there an update on carbon-14, the feedstock, and also the final Icelandic permits? Curious about an update and when you expect those.
Yeah, so the feedstock, the feedstock has been frustrating. It's currently sitting in the United States. It has to get shipped to Canada. It has to get shipped from Canada to South Africa. My understanding is it's coming very soon. They've been saying that for the last couple of months, but we're hoping they're saying around the end of this year or beginning of next year is most likely when it gets shipped, and once we have it in our facility, we'll quickly start converting it into enriched carbon-14. I'm told they have a lot of demand from customers, and so that's encouraging. In terms of the Icelandic plant, I think we're pretty much ready to go there. We've had a lot of discussions with the government. The government seems very keen. We had to get an export permit from South Africa in order to satisfy the Icelandic government.
I believe that's happened now, and so I think we're pretty much ready to sign that order to get that final permit issued. Quite frankly, our team has been too busy building the plants in South Africa to actually have built the plant in Iceland anyway, and so they'll move very quickly on to the Icelandic plant as soon as we've commissioned this silicon plant in South Africa.
When can ASP Isotopes start putting spades in the ground at Necsa? What's the likely time frame inclusive of final sign-off from the regulatory body?
Did you say again? At where?
Yeah. From when can you start putting spades in the ground?
At where? What location?
Sorry. I just came in and out on my screen. Sorry. At Necsa?
Necsa. Necsa. Right. Okay. Fine. Yeah. Okay. So yep. Okay. Fantastic. Okay. Necsa is a South African nuclear energy corporation. They have a location called Pelindaba. We have to go through a regulatory and licensing process first, which is kind of underway, and I mean, there may have been some spades in the ground already, actually, in terms of building a test bench and getting a test bench ready to go, so we'll have to wait and see, but as soon as possible is the answer. Our scientists are desperate to get in there and get going. We've had a number of conversations with the management team at Necsa. We're quickly going to form a joint venture with boards of each company on it, and then that will do the work that we need to do.
But as I say, as soon as possible, maybe some spades have been in the ground already. We'll leave it at that.
Wonderful. And what's the competition like for ASP and QE? Is there much competition out there?
Yeah. Our biggest competition is Rosatom, which is in Russia, and they're the largest producer of stable isotopes. They also produce most of the world's enriched uranium, but other enrichers include Urenco in Europe and CNNC, the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation. There's no domestic enrichment capabilities in the United States right now for kind of the isotopes we produce, and so one of our goals longer term is to bring our plants to the United States and start helping build up a domestic supply chain, but that may take some time. It's just building anything in the United States takes a long time versus other countries sometimes.
Hunter wants you to elaborate a little bit on the maximum kilogram capacity for each ytterbium plant. I always mispronounce that word.
Yeah. So we're hoping ytterbium could do about a kilogram per year. That's what our current estimates suggest. We likely have two kilograms of demand, actually, having spoken to customers. So we may have to, I think, once this plant's commissioned, we're going to move straight on and start trying to build a second one, as well as other laser plants, things like Nickel-64 and Gadolinium-160. Our return on capital on a laser plant is magnificent. So we'll focus very much on those isotopes in the next several years.
Can you talk a little bit about the ytterbium samples? When will they be manufactured so you can send to customers?
Yeah. So it's a multi-step process, the turbine process. And so it's difficult to go from 12% to 99.75% in a single step. And so we're currently enriching at lower levels right now. And then that lower-level product will go back in for a second stage, maybe a third stage of enrichment. And so it can take time. But we're hoping during the first quarter of next year, customers get their samples. The customers are desperate for them as soon as possible. We've actually had two customers of Ytterbium come and visit our plant here in South Africa in the last sort of eight weeks or so. And I think they're pretty excited about finding a new supplier.
Xavier says there's been a lot of chatter about your enriched carbon-14 and the increased value it brings. Could we expect a similar enhanced value on a percentage basis for all the enriched elements?
Yeah. Each isotope is a different end market, different use, and brings different value to its customers. And so carbon-14 is used in minuscule quantities. It's not even measured in grams. It's measured by becquerels or curies. And so we charge sort of $24,000 a gram for carbon-14. Whereas other isotopes, there's also a difficult isotope to produce going from 0.5%- 85%. There's a lot of enrichment. Other isotopes bring less value, or there's more value. Customers are more price-sensitive. So for example, silicon-28. For us to see that get widely used in many applications, we have to bring that price down quite a lot over the next several years. That's one of the reasons for going to Iceland is to bring that price down. But all the isotopes bring value, we think.
We wouldn't build a plant if we didn't think it had commercial value and good ROI for the company.
Absolutely. Well, Paul, do you have any closing remarks for our viewers today?
No. Thank you for your interest. I look forward to seeing you next time.
Absolutely. Well, safe travels. I know you're off to Singapore. And happy New Year. We'll see you in 2025.
Thank you. Same to you. Bye-bye.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.