Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry. I guess that gets a little loud. To continue our great conversations and presentations for the afternoon, really excited to introduce Deep Fission. There is a lot of innovation that is happening in the nuclear space now, and I cannot think of another place that is seeing more innovation than Deep Fission. Deep Fission is deploying proven nuclear power technologies utilizing innovative architecture. To hear more about that, it is my pleasure to introduce Liz Muller, CEO of Deep Fission.
Hi, everyone. It has been a busy year. We were just talking about how I was here a year ago. A year ago, we were just kind of hoping to get into the Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program, which would accelerate our ability to build a nuclear reactor. Here we are years later, and not only have we gone public, so we are now on the NASDAQ ticker symbol FISN, but we have been accepted into the Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program together with 11 other. Sorry, nine other companies. We are building. We are targeting having our first nuclear reactor up and running in Parsons, Kansas, generating commercial electricity by the end of 2027. It is an amazing timeframe. It is a lot faster than many of the other companies who you have probably heard about in the nuclear sector.
The reason we are able to move so quickly is because we are leveraging oil and gas technology. That is really our secret sauce. Everyone else is building advanced nuclear reactors above ground. That is the way, historically, people have always thought about nuclear. It is the way it has always been done. If you look at what goes into a nuclear reactor, the core is actually the simple part. It is all of the structures around the core that add cost and complexity and time. Think of things like a containment dome. Building a containment dome, the time it takes to build is measured in years. It is a very expensive structure that has to make sure that nothing that happens inside the nuclear reactor could ever get out and potentially infiltrate the environment, the water table, et cetera. There are other things like that, too.
If you are building above ground, you need a pressurizer so that you can operate at 160 atm of pressure for a pressurized water reactor. That costs about $1 billion to build that pressurizer. You need a reactor vessel that can withstand that pressure. That is another $1 billion right there. You need cooling systems and pumps and valves and systems to make sure that everything has redundancy. You need emergency core cooling systems. If you build like we did at Vogtle, then they actually lift water above the nuclear plant and hold it there in permanence. If you ever lose electricity, the water will come down with the force of gravity and cool off your reactor. All of these things are what adds cost and time to building nuclear power.
Now, what Deep Fission has done, the discovery that we made is if instead of building above ground, you take that same nuclear core, so the core of reactors that we've been working with commercially since the 1950s, but instead of trying to build it above ground where you have all that complexity, you put it in a borehole 1 mi underground, then most of those additional systems you don't need or are dramatically simplified. For example, the containment building. Above ground, again, expensive, hard to build, slow to build. When you're in a borehole 1 mi underground, all surrounding you have billions of tons of rock. You're not going to have a better containment dome than that billions of tons of rock that is surrounding you. In the vertical direction, you've got a column of water that's above you in the borehole that is 1 mi long.
That column of water is doing an excellent job of scrubbing anything that is trying to get out of your nuclear reactor, out of your borehole. We're able to save on the cost of building a containment zone, but that water is also pushing down on our reactor with the force of gravity. Because we're at 1 mi deep, which is about 1,600 m, you get one atmosphere of pressure for every 10 m. That is 160 atm of pressure. We don't need the billion-dollar pressurizer. We just use the force of gravity on the water above us in the borehole to push down on our reactor. That same water is also our heat transfer system. We know how to take something hot from the bottom of a borehole, bring it to the top of the borehole, and use it to generate electricity. That's what geothermal does.
We can leverage geothermal to bring the heat to the top, have our turbines on the surface generating electricity, and that water is also our emergency core cooling system. So a mile's worth of water that really can't go anywhere, and it provides excellent emergency core cooling. Deep Fission, again, very different approach. I think a lot of people, the first time they hear about it, they think it's a little bit crazy. "What, you're building underground?" Yes, we're building underground. But it's the idea that really grows on you the more you think about it. I expect that this is really the reason that we are able to build so quickly. We're building now. As I mentioned, a year ago we were here, and we were just kind of still working on engineering on paper, but now we've actually started building things.
In the picture in the upper right here, you see our reactor canister. What you remark up here is how simple it is. This replaces a conventional reactor vessel, which would cost on the order of $1 billion to build. Ours is in, I'm going to call it single-digit millions to build. It can be manufactured by dozens of suppliers here in the U.S., and it can be done much quickly. We're talking about less than six months in order to manufacture the first of the kind one, and of course, we'll be able to bring that down in time as we get to the second of kind and beyond. You'll also see a lot of drilling equipment because we are drilling wells.
We are drilling wells that are 1 mi deep, not that deep when it compares to some other oil and gas wells. But we are pushing the limits when it comes to the diameter. We are looking at building 38 in diameter wells and getting even wider. We are combining a number of different oil and gas equipment with some shaft drilling equipment, and other types of boring as well. I have touched on this already. We are combining pressurized water reactors, but let me talk about why that is important. Pressurized water reactor technology is the most common type of nuclear technology that is commercially operating today. We have 67 GW of pressurized water reactors operating today in the U.S. That is about 12% of our nation's electricity. The reason that that is so important is this doesn't need to be an experiment.
We are able to leverage technology and systems and safety measures that we already understand really, really well. We are deploying it in a new environment, but that is much simpler than trying to invent new reactor physics that isn't well understood today. Equally important, or maybe even more important, is that this fuel has been standardized. Not only are we able to use low-enriched uranium, which we are, but we are able to use low-enriched uranium that has been put into standard fuel assemblies that have already been approved and licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We don't need to go through any significant hurdles in order to get the fuel that we need. We are able to just start building, which is, again, one of the reasons that we are able to build our first reactor, and it should be operational next year.
We are combining pressurized water reactor technology with drilling technology. I think all of you are very familiar with that. Geothermal is, again, something that we can leverage in terms of how do you get that heat from the bottom of the borehole to the surface and use it to generate electricity. This is a visual of what a reactor looks like, and I think what is so remarkable here is how simple it is. In the bottom, that red zone at the bottom, that is our reactor. The part above it is the heat exchanger, and that is really it. If anyone has seen conventional pictures of pressurized water reactors, there is a lot more complexity because you have the heat transfer systems, and you have the pressurizer, and you have the containment dome, and all of these things that we have been able to remove or simplify.
This is really the mentality that we have gone into building a Deep Fission reactor is what can we simplify? What can we remove? Rather than focusing on mass manufacturing in order to bring the cost down, we are focused on, well, best thing to manufacture is nothing. If we can bring down the number of components so that we don't have to manufacture much at all, then that is the best way to lower the cost of the reactor. Our focus has been commercial deployment from the beginning. We are not focused on science experiments. We are not focused on criticality tests. We are not focused on test reactors. From the start, we have said we want to build a commercial reactor that will generate electricity and start to bring in revenue.
The fact that we are able to do this targeting 2027 is truly remarkable, but we are able to do that because we are leveraging existing technology that is already very well understood. The regulatory path has been accelerated by this Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program that I mentioned. We are participating in that program, but we are participating in it with a design that will be a commercial reactor. Rather than do a test reactor or criticality experiment, we are using this program to accelerate the deployment of our first commercial reactor. Now, we do also, once we get authorized by the Department of Energy, we can build that reactor, but we will not be able to start commercially generating electricity until we have approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
We are able to do that in parallel, and again, targeting using Part 57, a new regulatory path that is now available or will be available by the end of the year. We expect that to be a fast path from building the first reactor to then getting it licensed for commercial generation. We have also sited at a commercial site. We are at an industrial park in Parsons, Kansas, and this is a remarkable site because it has a lot of the infrastructure that we would need in order to build quickly. It has a security perimeter. It has roads. It even has a rail line that goes through it. It has its own water. They have got 14,000 acres, so this is a big facility. It is zoned industrial and even zoned nuclear.
That gives us a big step up when it comes to all of the things that we need to have worked together in order to begin generating commercial electricity. It is also in a community that has a vision for economic development and growth. When we first started going out and looking at where are we going to site our first reactor, we were very interested in finding a community whose vision aligned with our own, where they want jobs, they want economic development, they want additional tax revenue, and they can imagine the benefits that we can help bring in. We are very happy to have found that partnership in Parsons, Kansas. Which does not mean there is not a lot of community work still going on. There is.
There is a lot of questions that we continue to answer, but we feel really great about this location where we are siting our reactor. I have already touched on the fuel and even a bit on the supply chain. The ability to source everything that we need from U.S. manufacturers and from dozens of U.S. manufacturers, so we give them the specifications, they can build it, is very helpful. We feel great about the supply chain partners we are working with already and our ability to deliver this on time. But we also know that if, for some reason or another, one of them were not able to deliver, there are others that we could go to who could do the same thing. Having the ability to leverage commercial supply, it is almost like going from NASA specialized suppliers to commercial space industry suppliers as SpaceX did. Right?
When you go from a specialized government-approved, limited number, slow, expensive, as soon as you start opening up to commercial suppliers, many more potential suppliers you can use, and it's cheaper and it's much faster. Construction and manufacturing is similar. Most of our construction is underground, and we're able to leverage the safety of being 1 mi underground to need significantly less construction, and the construction that we do need is mostly not safety related, which is a huge advantage because we can, again, leverage the fact that we're 1 mi underground rather than having to build to nuclear safety qualifications. I'll also mention that for a young company, we have the largest pipeline of any advanced reactor company in terms of the customers that are signing up to work with us and to purchase electricity. We have 18.5 GW of LOIs that have been signed.
This is important because we're still flying a little bit under the radar in terms of many people still haven't heard of Deep Fission. But the people who sign LOIs, they're the ones who understand the importance of speed to market, cost of building, and the ability to actually start producing commercial electricity. The fact that we have the greatest pipeline of LOIs, I think is a signal from some of the people who really have the most discernment over what reactors are going to be able to be built the fastest. We're looking at six-month total build time. This is, again, sort of unheard of in the nuclear industry. But if you look at oil and gas drilling, and I'll take the example of the containment dome again, building a containment dome is measured in years, whereas drilling a borehole is typically measured in days.
That is a very dramatic difference. We're not talking about reducing the time to build by 50%. We're talking about a whole different scale of timeframe in order to build what we need to build. And it's remarkable. Even the other advanced reactor companies who are looking to build much, much faster than conventional nuclear really can't compare with our six-month to build timeframe. Security advantage is another thing. In this day and age when people are thinking about energy security as national security, and when we've seen incidents in the Ukraine and in the Middle East where there have been attacks in or on or near nuclear facilities, having your reactor buried 1 mi underground is just a massive safety advantage.
And knowing that it's very hard to come up with a scenario in which you have a drone attack or a missile strike or something, knowing that that's unlikely to have any sort of impact on humans or the environment is a very reassuring place to build in this day and age. In fact, we've had to think earthquakes, same. They're much more magnified at the surface than they are underground. So floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, it's really hard to come up with any sort of scenario in which something on the surface is going to impact your reactor at the bottom of a borehole. The only one we've been able to come up with is if you physically pull that reactor back up to the surface and then have an accident, and then, yes, that could be the worst-case scenario.
But even in that, it's going to not be easy to mobilize a rig in order to pull that reactor back up to the surface. This is not something that's going to be able to happen overnight. You're going to be able to see it and identify it and take action. This is our commercial deployment plan. Again, I focus on this because I believe that commercial deployment is everything when it comes to the deployment of power and nuclear power specifically. If you don't have a plan for commercial deployment, you're going to miss out on the race, which I really see is happening in the next five years. We have already had our groundbreaking. We've broken ground. We've started to build.
Right now in 2026, we're doing a bunch of commercial borehole proof of concepts, so testing, drilling, working through a process to show that we can drill to the specifications that we need. Then we're also doing emplacement analysis. We're going to do some tests before we move into the nuclear environment, showing that not only can we drill and build what we need to, but we can stand up our teams who are going to operate the reactor. We are working with both a nuclear team and a drilling team, and we need to make sure that they're able to work together seamlessly, and we want to get that all done before we start operating in a nuclear environment. Then in the first half of 2027, we are looking to deploy our first reactor. That will be under the Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program.
It'll be a full commercial reactor, but we are going to operate it at less than full power in order to speed our ability to deploy it commercially. We're looking at 5 MW electric, in large part because that's what we can connect to the grid quickly without needing to go through an extensive process for grid interconnection. The target for transmission connection is the second half of 2027 to begin commercially generating electricity. Then beyond 2027, we are looking at high volume deployment. We want to use Part 57, which is a new regulation coming out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, specifically aimed at high- volume deployment. The concept is you get one license for a site, and then you can build as many reactors on that site as you need to.
Our initial site in Kansas, we have an LOI for 2 GW. Just back of the envelope, about 100 reactors is about 1.5 GW of power. We'll be building a little bit over 100 reactors there at that site in Kansas. I've touched on the Department of Energy authorization. This is the Reactor Pilot Program that we are working through. It is a great pathway to be on because it simplifies things and it speeds things for us. I'm also really excited that our first significant safety milestone was achieved a couple of weeks ago, with the approval and acceptance by the Department of Energy of our Documented Safety Analysis agreement.
This is a document that lays out the foundation of our safety case that we will then build on for the detailed safety analysis, but it's really a significant milestone because it covers everything that's different about the approach that we're planning on using, and it has now been approved by the Department of Energy. At the same time, we're also continuing to work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We're meeting with them regularly, and getting them ready for our commercial license application. We're not planning on submitting that license application till Part 57 comes out. It's already been released in draft form, but we're expecting the final form to be out by the end of the year, and that does seem to be tracking on time.
As soon as that's out, we will also submit our commercial license application so that that can then move forward in parallel with the work that we're doing with the Department of Energy. All right. Really just to summarize, the concept of building a reactor in a borehole 1 mi underground is counterintuitive at first. I think there hasn't been a lot of interaction between the nuclear industry and oil and gas industry, which is why nobody had ever thought about this before. Me and my dad, co-founders, are also the co-founders of Deep Isolation, that was also presenting here at this conference. We were among the few people that understood both the nuclear industry and the oil and gas industry.
By combining them, we're really able to do something dramatically different, and I think very exciting, and we are thrilled that we are looking to deploy this in just one year's time. With that, I think we have plenty of time for questions. Oh, I won't read the forward-looking statements, but you all should. Public company. Yes.
What kind of lithology do you require now that you have to look at specific bedrock?
Yeah, great question. No. Really what we're using the rock for is to hold the casing that holds the water in which we emplace our reactor. The properties of the rock, they matter more from the how do we drill it perspective than can we build it there perspective. In Kansas, we're actually drilling into granite. It's granite from 2,000 ft. When we started the siting process, we looked at a couple of different locations. This one that had granite, we had looked at another one that had shale, and some other sites. I think all of them would have worked. Now, the granite site, there's certain challenges drilling a really hard rock. It's slower. Yes, exactly.
We're aware of that, but we also think that this one is, if anything, going to be our slowest, and it should be able to go faster once we're in other types of rock. Yeah, great question.
How close can you gather that you're going to sequentially build an array?
Yeah. We're working out the detailed surface design. There's really two aspects to that question. There's the geology, how closely can you do it geologically? The answer to that is actually quite close. But we're looking at it's more dominated by the surface structures. We need to be able to have trucks that get in. We need to have a rig that comes in. We are going to be replacing the reactors about every 10 years, so we need to have the ability to bring in a new reactor and lower it down the well. We think it's going to be about one reactor per acre.
Per acre?
Per acre.
A 10-acre thing puts four in the corners and the middle.
Exactly. Yeah. The site that we're building on right now, we have leased 100 acres, and that's hopefully enough for about 100 reactors and 1.5 GW. Yeah.
What happens to that reactor after 10 years?
Yeah, great question. At the end of 10 years, we've gotten the cost of our reactor down so low that the cost of the reactor is completely dominated by the cost of the fuel itself. The reactor canister, I'm not going to say it's inconsequential, but it's relatively inconsequential compared to what the nuclear industry is used to. Our thought is why would we bring this reactor back up to the surface and have to deal with fuel handling and open it up? That can be done, but it's probably cheaper and simpler and safer and faster instead to dispose of the whole thing, still within the reactor itself. Our expectation is that we will do temporary storage of that reactor, as it's done now, which is in a spent fuel pool.
The difference is that for typical reactors, your spent fuel pool is above ground, on the site next to your nuclear plant. For us, our spent fuel pool is going to be at the bottom of our borehole. At the end of the lifetime of the reactor, let's call it 10 years, it's been operating for 10 years, we will lower it deeper into the borehole, where there's water still down there at the bottom of the borehole, and that will be our spent fuel pool. We'll then lower another reactor on top, and we can generate for another 10 years, lower that one then deeper into the borehole, add another one, and if we're operating for 50 years, that would be five reactors that are stored at the bottom.
Then at the very end, 50 years into the future, we will have a decision to make as to whether we pull all of those reactors up to the surface and ship it off to a Yucca Mountain facility or maybe a reprocessing facility or whatever the solution is. Or, and this is dependent on the consent of the local community, as well as the regulatory approvals to do so, but we have some expertise here in terms of nuclear waste disposal, so I think there is an option that we can seal it at the bottom of the borehole and never need to bring it back up to the surface.