All right. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. We're happy to welcome Lightbridge to this presentation this afternoon. We have Seth Grae, the Chairman and CEO. So, Seth, thank you for your time this afternoon.
Thank you for having me.
I'm glad to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
Thank you all for coming, and feel free to raise your hands if you have any questions at any time during the presentation. Lightbridge is LTBR on the Nasdaq. I want to call your attention to our Safe Harbor Statement. At Lightbridge, we are really the only company in the world that is developing a truly new fuel for the existing reactors, as well as for many new ones, including small modular reactors. We started by speaking with utilities that were looking to increase the power output from the existing plants while increasing the safety. We've developed a new fuel, a new method of producing the fuel. This photo is from producing samples of the fuel in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory that, as of November, are now in testing some of the samples in the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory.
I won't really present these slides so much as pick a couple of topics from each slide, you know, move on, and look forward to hearing any questions that you have. And what the utilities have told us is that the current fuel is really at its limit of these uranium oxide pellets and a zirconium metal tube, where if you try to increase the power much more, the pellets can swell, crack the tube. So we've developed a wholly new, truly advanced fuel that we believe really would make the current reactors into advanced reactors. You could think of the advanced reactor companies as taking very old fuel designs and designing new reactors around them. We're taking the existing reactors and have come up with a new advanced fuel to improve them.
And there are many key drivers for growth, you know, including that everywhere we go in the world, the utilities are trying to figure out how to provide the power that will be needed five years from now, ten years from now, that is just running away from them. The world needs reliable, preferably clean power. Data centers with AI and other modern industry are demanding massive amounts of power, including electric arc furnaces for steel production, and industry is going where the power is available. So this fuel is something that is not just on the drawing board. You know, these pictures are real. These are at Idaho National Lab producing samples. This is what, you know, one of our fuel assemblies can look like for some of the kinds of reactors.
What we're ultimately aiming for is that this will be a global standard for the existing reactors as new as well as many of the new ones: the water-cooled reactors, the pressurized water reactors, the boiling water reactors, the CANDU-type reactors, and significantly increase the economics, improve the economics by increasing the power output of the reactors. This is a cross-section of one of the variants of our fuel rods. This is an actual photo of an actual cross-section of something we've produced that shows an outer cladding made out of a zirconium alloy down the center line of the rod, a triangle-like graphite down the center line of a pencil as a displacer that can have chemicals in there that help keep the middle of this fuel rod a thousand degrees Celsius cooler than the current fuel, about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.
And that's part of the safety case while increasing the power output of the reactor, which took a lot of innovation, but we believe we're now proving in the Advanced Test Reactor in Idaho. And in between was the metal with the uranium enrichment in it. And if you go to our investor deck and click on this symbol on slide eight for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it will go live to the NRC's website, where you'll see that this fuel is actually featured on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website talking about the safety benefits of this fuel. This fuel has a litany of reasons why it is dramatically safer than anything else out there that are on this slide, but it starts with running at such a cooler temperature.
One of the issues with nuclear, like you saw at Fukushima, was if fuel heats up when it loses coolant, when it loses water to about 850 or 900 degrees Celsius, there's what's called steam-zirconium interaction, where the oxygen from the steam sticks to the edge of the fuel rods and you get free-floating hydrogen and you turned your reactor into the Hindenburg and could have a hydrogen gas explosion. That's what happened at Fukushima. This fuel is so cool and stays cool in these design-basis loss-of-coolant accidents where you won't get the hydrogen gas production. You won't get the explosions, among other safety features, and from the fabrication to the operations and materials, the shape we use, all of this feeds into some of the safety advantages. You know, from this slide, you can also see some of the economic advantages.
There's more surface area of the fuel than a cylindrical rod where the fuel touches the water, putting the heat out into the water. There's a shorter path for the heat to escape from the rod and the heat escapes through the shortest path. We're using a higher enrichment of uranium for more power in there, high-assay low-enriched uranium. And because it's made of metal, the thermal conductivity, the heat transfer is far superior. The heat just flies out of this rod into the water. And also, this fuel doesn't need what's called spacer grids that right now are these grates that the rods go through holding them up in a reactor, blocking the water flow.
The water flows from the bottom of the rods to the top, picking up heat, dumps it into a heat exchanger, so you're going to make power from the reactor, and then cooler water comes back to pick up more water. Without spacer grids, the water flows much more unblocked, much more easily from the pressure from the pumps of the reactor. We're moving much more volume of water around and around and around, picking up much more heat, dumping into the heat exchanger. That's part of the advantage too on getting a power uprate from this fuel for existing or new reactors. Nuclear in the United States, you see on the bottom of the chart here, is about almost 93% capacity factor. That means if a reactor ran at 100% of its potential every second of the year, that would be a 100% capacity factor.
Nuclear is already pretty good, much higher than anything else. In fact, you could see that's why a lot of modern industry is gravitating toward nuclear that needs reliable power. It's almost shocking how unreliable coal and natural gas are for industries that need constant power. That's because the fuel has to keep continuously being supplied to those plants or they lose power. Wellheads freeze up, fuel stops being delivered, ice on tracks delivering coal. It's always getting interrupted. The nuclear only shuts down for about three weeks every 18 months to refuel. That's the difference between 92.7 and 100. It's known and planned years in advance when those three weeks will be in the spring or fall when there's lower power demands for heat or air conditioning.
And the utilities can plan to make up for that power, you know, with fossil fuel or other fuels during those periods, other energy sources. But the utilities want to increase above 92.7% to get even more power out of these reactors. And the Lightbridge Fuel will help not only increase that percentage by refueling every two years instead of every 18 months, but dramatically, rather significantly increase the power output of these plants every day, increasing the revenue to the reactors. We have a robust patent platform protecting our fuel, patented around the world, even in Russia and China. We have new innovating and inventing that we're doing and also have trade secrets in certain areas on both the design of the fuel, as I mentioned, as well as the method of producing the fuel that we also developed.
Some of the recent milestones have really been, you know, amazing and very substantive. So just in March of 2024, we did our initial demonstration of our method of producing these rods at Idaho National Laboratory. In February of 2025, we completed the co-extrusion, which is really going to be the method using for producing the commercial fuel and demonstrated this with an eight-foot cylindrical rod. The strategic significance of this is tremendous. Idaho National Laboratory, with support of the U.S. Department of Energy, brings us the facilities we've been using to do this work, as well as the reactor, the Advanced Test Reactor that we're testing it in.
Through Department of Energy stockpiles we've received from Idaho National Laboratory, the highly enriched uranium we're using for testing now in that reactor, which is higher enrichment than we'll use commercially, but speeds up the testing of the fuel in the reactor. A lot has been done to really speed up the testing. One of our other very good relationships, in addition to the U.S. Department of Energy and with Idaho National Laboratory, is with the company Oklo, a larger publicly traded company. They've also been developing their technology at Idaho National Laboratory. Our engineers have gotten to know each other. I've known Jacob DeWitte for many years, the CEO of Oklo. You don't see cooperation between advanced nuclear technology companies, even though the Department of Energy would like to see companies they're supporting work together. I think there's two main reasons you don't see it.
One is that either the companies are competing with each other and don't want to help each other, like they're all developing small reactors or micro reactors or something that's competitive, or the technology is just too different from one another to really do much. And you'd think, oh, Oklo and Lightbridge were not competitors. The smallest reactor Lightbridge will ever fuel is probably bigger than the largest reactor Oklo will ever make. And Oklo is looking to produce high-quality steam and heat for industry. Lightbridge is just looking to produce electric power primarily over the grid. But you'd also say, well, how can we collaborate? Our technologies are so different. Well, it turns out all of them are very different. They both use metallic zirconium. They both use metallic high-assay low-enriched uranium.
We're going to need to have some of the same licensing with the NRC, including for some of the same security. We might need some of the same equipment, some of the same personnel. We are looking at co-locating our fuel fabrication facilities together, even though our fuels will be very different and for different reactors, there will be theirs will be for their advanced reactors. It turns out we both could save capital cost and operating cost on the facility if we co-locate together. That's something we're looking into, as well as other sites where we might have our facility. We're also looking at using advanced recycling and reprocessing technologies we each have working together, including potentially using Oklo technology for recycling used Lightbridge fuel and perhaps using recycled materials into fuel for Oklo's reactors. We're also looking at other ways we can cooperate.
And we're finding that partly due to some of these commonalities in our technologies, even though they're going to end up for very different products, that we're probably going to have more ways to cooperate as companies. In Romania, at the RATEN ICN Institute, we've been doing feasibility studies on our fuel for CANDU type reactors, which are something of a niche, about 45 of them in the world, but a good niche, and maybe growing. In all of the nuclear power in Canada is CANDU reactors, for example. And these are water-cooled reactors that we believe will benefit from Lightbridge fuel. And these studies are going very well. Our long-term partnership with Idaho National Laboratory is our most important partnership. But to some degree, you know, the kids are growing up and have to move out of the house. We're outgrowing Idaho National Laboratory's facilities for producing nuclear fuel.
They don't produce commercial quantities of nuclear fuel. We're going to advance beyond just the Advanced Test Reactor, which is the world's largest test reactor, into demonstrating in commercial reactors that utilities have. I think it's very similar with Oklo is sort of the kids are going to have to move out of the house and, you know, beyond just the National Lab and, you know, some of that we'll be able to do together. But truly, what the Department of Energy and Idaho National Laboratory have done as part of, I think, of a great power competition with Russia and China, and we're very much on Team USA, is they've made these multi-billion-dollar facilities available to us, without which we could not be doing what we're doing.
This is really remarkable to have given us the enriched uranium, the facilities that we're using to make the demonstrations of our fuel, the use of this reactor, the facilities we're going to use this year for the examination of fuel samples as they start to come out of the reactor. It's really a fantastic partnership at Idaho National Laboratory. Virtually all of the nuclear power in the world is from water-cooled reactors. Different variants of Lightbridge Fuel can work in all of them. Most are pressurized water reactors, and those include Russian VVER type reactors. Then there's boiling water reactors. There will be small modular reactor versions of those that our fuel could be used in. For example, NuScale and Rolls-Royce and Holtec are developing pressurized water reactors, small modular reactors.
GE Vernova with Hitachi is developing a boiling water small modular reactor. Those could all use Lightbridge fuel. Then there's pressurized heavy water reactors around the world, including those CANDU fuels, CANDU reactors I mentioned earlier, that also, you know, could use our fuel. While our focus is on the large pressurized water reactors, because the utilities that advise us mostly have those, and because that's where most of the power generation in the world is and where most of the orders for reactors are now is large pressurized water reactors, we're also looking at these different opportunities going forward. This is one of them at MIT that's 100% funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, looking at Lightbridge fuel for NuScale small modular reactors. A lot of this work, we believe, could also be applicable for other small modular reactors.
This is going very well. MIT, in late 2024, published a paper and presented it at a major conference on the safety benefits of the Lightbridge fuel that came out of this work. Similarly, the Department of Energy is 100% funding work at Texas A&M University, also looking at Lightbridge fuel for NuScale small modular reactors. Part of the reason the Department of Energy does this is to help train students, undergrads and a lot of grad students at these universities in what might be coming next in nuclear and where what we want the workforce learning about as they're advancing, you know, into starting their careers in nuclear. We first were dealing with these utilities coming up with the concept of this new fuel in 2010 when we first just announced it as a concept. We've been moving forward ever since then.
You know, there's sort of two overlays you could put on this, which I'd say is a pretty good timeline for developing a nuclear fuel overall in the world. If you look at, you know, what's been done historically for these other fuels that were developed and how the advanced reactor developers are trying to figure out how to commercialize with new versions of reactors. One thing you could look at is say, boy, there's other labels you could put on this of everything that could go wrong, did go wrong in the world. This starts with the global financial crisis, markets down, forecasts for energy use down. Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, and we lost access to the research reactor in Russia that the U.S. Department of Energy was approving us to use. We never wanted to go to Russia, you know, again after that.
And just when things started looking, the Department of Energy was sort of saying, you might want to take another look at that. They invaded Ukraine again. That's definitely out. Fukushima in 2014 and in the years following that, research reactors that we were going to test in Norway and Canada closed. And there was literally nowhere in the world we legally could test our fuel. We lost access to Russia. And then Norway and Canada closed their reactors. And China was developing a research reactor that would have been impossible in terms of Chinese and American approvals to access. And also, again, we wouldn't want to in terms of trusting on the intellectual property, et cetera, of doing it there. But also opportunities. Along the way, the U.S. government decided to make the Advanced Test Reactor, the best reactor available to a very small number of companies.
Very few companies were one of them. And our fuel's actually in that reactor. And I'd rather be in that reactor in Idaho than any of the other reactors we were talking about as a place to work. And by becoming very much a part of Team USA, we're getting other support that really is bringing about support for nuclear. And frankly, although support for nuclear ranges from micro reactors to advanced reactors, small modular reactors, fusion, most of the support really, and most of what's getting done is large pressurized water reactors, be it finishing the Vogtle Westinghouse AP1000s in Georgia.
Now it looks like finishing building two unfinished AP1000s in South Carolina, extending licenses of essentially every large reactor in the United States to keep operating for what looks like will be 100 years now that they'll go to, as many dams are in the United States, 100 years old, and you just replace equipment as you go in those systems, and you know, we very much feel that power over the grid from large pressurized water reactors has been where most nuclear power has come from. If you look at the orders for new nuclear power in the world, that is where, you know, the orders are for the most part, and we think will be for some time, you know, although we could fuel small reactors as well. There'll be some very important milestones coming up on our fuel development.
And we'll also in the next few months put out a model of the timing and a lot more detail on this that we're honing with utilities we're talking to and others before we finalize it and put it out. And our role in the global nuclear energy resurgence. So we do have these significant upcoming milestones that we believe will physically be demonstrating the benefits of our fuel from what we're doing in the Advanced Test Reactor in particular, but also other testing we're doing for the power uprates for producing, you know, fuel that will run longer in the reactor between refuelings, significant safety advantages, as well as further enhancing non-proliferation.
Now, in terms of the small modular reactors, and there are many use cases for many of them, we think we will be just as good, if not better, for them as for the large reactors that the lack of spacer grids, this better flow of the water is even better for improving the economics of a reactor that uses natural circulation instead of pumps, and some of the small modular reactors like the NuScale reactor fall into that category, so you know, there are different kinds of reactors that are going to be coming out, including, you know, commercialization eventually of some of these small modular reactors, and that will be part of our commercial case. One of the advantages is the ramp rate and load following. Right now, these pellets in tubes in current nuclear fuel will swell and crack the tube and release radioactive fission products.
And that's not a good thing. It won't be a big accident, but radiation alarms will go off. Utilities have to deal with that. It's a problem. There's an economic cost to that. We believe our fuel will solve all of that and allow reactors very quickly to go up or down in power without worrying about that. So that means much more quickly coming out of an outage and getting to full power, which is better economics than a very slow ramp, taking a long time coming out of an outage. But also for load following, some of that could be during the course of the day on just when there's more power needs and then drop off. And some of that could be fairly quickly as renewables come online and offline. And with a Lightbridge fuel, you really could surge up and down in the power, we believe.
The coal-to-nuclear transition is a very interesting opportunity where the U.S. Department of Energy has looked at sites that have closed coal plants on them and determined that 190 of them are usable to put reactors on for these SMRs. Just about 200 gigawatts electric of new power of SMRs could be put on those sites. To put that in perspective, the U.S. right now has 100 gigawatts of power from large reactors. So this would be twice as much power from small reactors on coal sites as we currently have from all the big reactors in the U.S., tripling nuclear in the U.S. That doesn't mean all of these will happen, but a lot are very seriously being looked at now in communities that really need the jobs, a grid that really needs the power.
This transition from coal to nuclear is a very real opportunity, analogous, I'd say, to putting more large reactors on sites that already have large reactors in communities that welcome it, that have the trained workforce. And I think is also a good opportunity. And globally, as you know, energy demand is just surging. And industry is looking for where they can get the power. And why would utilities provide more power from an uprate using Lightbridge fuel? Well, again, we'll put out some revised numbers soon, but these are some of our past numbers that I think these numbers are improving as people are paying more for power. But a typical reactor just on a 10% uprate from Lightbridge fuel, and we think we hear north of 30% uprates.
But from a 10% uprate, which would require almost no modification to many of the existing reactors, it's about $60 million per year of economic benefit to the reactor to one typical reactor from increasing the power by 10% and lengthening the fuel cycle from 18 to 24 months. The savings from lengthening the fuel cycle come from avoiding one outage every six years. It costs millions of dollars to have an outage. But the economics mostly come from just selling more power every day. The enhanced reactor margins are very important here. And these reasons why electric power is disproportionately growing within our energy needs include, for example, the shift we're seeing globally to some extent from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electrified vehicles. You know, we're seeing industry, like I mentioned, steel production moving from coal to electricity for electric arc furnaces for steel production.
We're seeing a global shift toward electrification more and more. Energy is growing disproportionately. Nuclear is growing disproportionately within nuclear. Nuclear is growing disproportionately within energy. I'd also say nuclear is disproportionately needed by modern industries like data centers for AI that want that constant reliable power that you just really can't get without growth of nuclear within that diversified energy base. When you talk about the future of nuclear power, these charts, you know, just pop off the page of these various projections from very credible agencies. It almost seems like it's not realistic. I mean, how could we go from, you know, current capacity to these giant future capacities in, you know, 24 years, these projections for 2050? The answer is you're going to have to get a lot more power from your existing plants.
You have to build a lot more plants where you're not going to have the data centers with AI. You're not going to have the new modern industry that we want. An analogy for the small modular reactors is military aircraft production in World War II, where the United States in 1939, before we entered the war in 1941, was producing fewer than 3,000 military aircraft per year. By the end of the war in 1945, we had produced over 300,000 military aircraft. There was no strategic planner in Germany or Japan who saw that coming. And without this, it would have been very unlikely to have won the war, along with other reasons we won the war. But what we did was we shifted, including some Henry Ford's old original assembly plants from the Ford Motor Company, to assembly line production of aircraft instead of hand-building them.
And we did it very quickly. And you could see on this photo on the bottom, people at the time described it like a miracle that parts would go in one end of the plant and an airplane would fly off a landing strip from the other side, and then another one, and then another one. And you'd be in areas with a few of these plants and you just see these planes taking off, going to the war effort. No one imagined you could do that just a few years earlier. It was like a miracle. And these are about the size of small modular reactors. And you could get to, you know, starting to build some of these small modular reactors in factories, in shipyards. Now, they don't fly. They're harder to deliver. There's a cost there.
But there can be benefits from mass production of either the small modular reactors or at least big modules of components that will then be shipped off to the sites for the reactor construction. There also can be large modular reactors and modules made. And I think we'll see that in the coming years of much quicker deployment of large reactors through more modularity in their design. There's fantastic bipartisan support in Washington. We are privileged to meet with a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who've been really agreeing with each other on nuclear, probably more than anything else. When one of the bills recently passed in the Senate on a voice vote of 100 to 0, someone from the Senate said to me, "I've never gotten that kind of vote for my Mother's Day resolution." So this is really a unique area of tremendous support.
I was at COP28 in Dubai when the original pledge was made by the U.S. and many other countries to triple nuclear globally by 2050, and now the U.S. says as part of that, it will quadruple nuclear domestically by 2050. Again, that's 24 years from now, and we're really starting to see things starting to gear up to get there. We don't need quite a World War II effort like with the airplanes to get there, but we need to start building more reactors, getting the crafts, the trades, the pipe fitters, the welders moving from one reactor to the other, holding down those costs, those prices as we deploy reactors.
This has been a real shift politically from viewing nuclear as part of national security to help take military bases and other critical infrastructure off the grid that could have a cyber attack or a physical attack on the grid by the enemy. And we don't want to lose the military bases, power to them. So reactors on base is part of national security. Climate nuclear emits no CO2. Onshoring manufacturing, relying on domestic sources for our energy. All of these fit with nuclear and feed into it. I was one of 10 people from the industry President Trump had invited to meet with him at the White House during his first term.
It was out of this meeting that a lot of the ideas came that were executed on in his administration, then the Biden administration, and now continuing in the new administration again for what was called the Nuclear Fuel Working Group with these ideas of support for high-assay low-enriched uranium, for advanced fuels, for speeding up licensing at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, holding down licensing costs. A lot of it started with this meeting. Then we had a lot of follow-up meetings at the White House and with people in Congress who have been supporting these efforts through legislation. It's really been driven by, you know, from the top. You know, you've heard about many of these bills that, you know, include within them significant support for nuclear directly or indirectly, including support for clean energy.
The strategic and the climate supporters overlap in these advanced nuclear technologies and getting more nuclear power on the grid. We'll be reporting soon, you know, our cash, which will be a larger number than that. But we have no debt. We are in a very strong position. It is much lower cost to develop a nuclear fuel than a nuclear reactor. We have an excellent and growing team. And it's amazing how many people, we don't poach, but from other companies and other places are contacting us to work at Lightbridge, where there's just a palpable excitement of the engineers at Lightbridge, the engineers at Idaho National Lab who are working with our engineers on the project about producing this fuel, about testing it, about the rapid progress. It's just an exciting thing for people to be working on now.
We have a world-class board of directors with experience from government to the private sector, including Wall Street, and I'll stop there. You can contact us at any time at ir@lightbridge.com. But I really look forward to your questions and your comments.
Near term, what are the kind of, like, what are a couple of, like, key milestones that we should watch for in terms of the development progress and then, like, the licensing pathway, you know, after that to put into a commercial reactor?
Some of the key near-term milestones will be we expect the Advanced Test Reactor will have a refueling outage in April of this year. It will take out some of the samples and they'll cool and have post-irradiation examination.
And then by the fall, we expect to have initial results of how that's doing, the physical results of those fuel samples in the reactor. So that's very important. I think that some of the licensing milestones will be as we start to generate that data, it's under what's called NQA-1, our Nuclear Quality Assurance Program. So the NRC can use that data, can use those results, as can utilities. And that the utilities will need to be comfortable and work with us so that they can use it in getting licenses from the NRC. They will apply to the NRC for the fuel to be used in their reactors. And as we move toward building our own pilot scale, expandable to commercial scale fuel fabrication facility, we'll also be using that data for our licensing with the NRC.
So we will be this year having more engagement with the NRC, working closely with utilities that themselves will need to engage with the NRC. And it really goes to our worldview, which is that we are developing a product that the customers told us they want. The customers are the utilities. We are developing what they need for their existing reactors and new ones. And while we could just say we want to develop for licensing of the NRC, we have to do that, obviously. But in some cases, what the utilities want exceeds what the NRC requires or is different from what the NRC requires, in addition to having to meet what the NRC does. And you'll see in a lot of what Lightbridge does, we're sort of old school in that we're having lots of samples getting irradiated.
We're going to do different testing and redundancy to give great assurance to the regulator and to the customers at the utilities that this is, you know, a product that will do what we claim it does and that they will be convinced of that. While the NRC is obviously extremely important to us, it's sort of a pathway toward answering what the customers need of utilities being able to provide more power, more economically, even safer. We think no one else will be able to do that.
Realistically, how much HALEU do you need to build out your kind of larger scale pilot fabrication facility? And then to, like, do a first of a kind fueling of a commercial reactor?
We're very fortunate to have received actually highly enriched uranium from Department of Energy stockpiles at Idaho National Laboratory for the testing we're now doing in the Advanced Test Reactor. That's higher enrichment than HALEU, but that makes the testing go faster under National Laboratory technologies that they've invented that we're really at the leading edge of benefiting from. That's one way that our relationship with the government and the National Lab is helping to speed up what we're doing. Under our contract with Idaho National Laboratory, we will receive all of the enrichment, be it HALEU or highly enriched uranium that we need for this. As we transition to full commercial production for large reactors, that exceeds what the Department of Energy can provide.
And that will require enrichment from the enrichment companies, be it existing companies like Urenco or Orano or those that are starting to enrich, like Centris or newcomers like Global Laser Enrichment and ASP Isotopes and others. And they're all sort of racing to be able to fill this need. Frankly, I think they would have filled it already if they thought a lot of the advanced reactor companies really would need as much HALEU as soon as they say they do. So they're a little bit waiting and seeing if that demand comes along. We are part of what's called the HALEU Consortium that includes, for example, TerraPower that's led by Bill Gates as its chairman. And we're a little bit letting Bill Gates and others do the heavy lifting on making sure that this comes about.
But the bottom line is, talking to the big enrichment companies, including Orano that's going to build a new enrichment facility in Tennessee that they say will produce HALEU, among other enrichments, is that they will produce it when they see the commercial need. And they understand that they really will make sales. And Lightbridge, along with advanced reactor companies that are developing demand for HALEU fuels, including our partner Oklo, you know, will start to cause orders to be placed. Now, Lightbridge itself won't need it because the utilities separately order the uranium, the conversion, the enrichment, the fuel fabrication. It will be the fuel fabrication. But as utilities start engaging with the NRC that they are really looking to license this fuel, that's a great demand signal.
And as utilities start talking to their enrichment suppliers like Urenco, Centris, and others, that they are looking, you know, at orders. Those enrichers will take the steps to supply it. There's no need for new technology to do that. There is some new enrichment technology coming along. But all you need to do is add another cascade of the same kind of centrifuges to a place that already enriches uranium to just enrich it further. We don't need any new technology at all. So as the demand comes, as utilities start placing orders to the enrichment companies, they'll use that to produce.
And we're starting to see things that people never imagined happened, like Microsoft told Constellation it needs a lot more, you know, clean power for data centers and PJM in the northeastern region of the country where we are here in New York today as part of it. And Microsoft decided to reopen Three Mile Island. Now, if reopening Three Mile Island isn't politically a controversial thing, you know, it's hard to imagine what would be. And that Microsoft thinks that's a great idea. That's something just, you know, a couple of years ago, people would have thought it was impossible. Constellation was literally dismantling the plant. So when Constellation and others start telling enrichers that they're going to order enrichment because they have data centers and others that need more power, it's going to happen.
Okay. Yes. Thank you for a great presentation.
If the timeline wasn't disrupted, you know, you were saying about Russia, the invasion of Ukraine and such, if that disruption didn't happen, would your company be farther along? Would you, or has it really been more of a, well, of an industry?
Yeah, yeah. It's both. You know, on the one hand, you could say yes, had we started a few years earlier in the Russian reactor or the one in Canada or the one in Norway. But what if then the problem happened? We're only partway through. That, in many ways, would have been worse. So if it was going to happen, when it did happen, it wasn't bad. The second is the world really did go into a period of not needing much energy growth projected.
You know, the utilities had been looking when they started talking to us in around 2010 of needing a lot more power. But then with the global financial crisis, all that talk disappeared. We decided to continue the effort anyway, figuring we're going to rendezvous with the future when that's back. The timing seems to have worked pretty well because the power demands being projected now are so much greater than the power demands then. Nobody else had an effort to figure out how to meet those with new fuel for the existing reactors that just nothing can produce as much power as they can. Nothing can come close to producing the power that nuclear reactors can. Nuclear has about a 3 million to 1 advantage on energy density of just from the fuel material of how much energy you make from it.
So yes, you'd always wish for a world where nothing goes wrong. But don't plan a 15-year project if you're living in the real world. Things will happen. And I just think that, you know, we were hoping for this rendezvous with the future that needed more power. And it's happening in ways that I'd say are exceeding our expectations on just how much more power the world needs. And, you know, it wasn't that long ago that Amazon was looking at HQ2, looking at what kind of tax breaks can you give us to come there. They don't do that anymore. It's do you have the power? If you have the power, then we'll ask you about the tax breaks. But if you don't have the power, nobody's coming for all this reshoring of manufacturing, reshoring of other industry, you know, everywhere, data centers.
You're not going to get it if you don't provide the power. And one of the things I've heard from people at utilities that keep them up at night is that they're hearing from everybody the pressure of where we're going to get more power. Their governors are saying in their states, we're not going to attract industry. I'm going to lose industry if we don't have the power. The public service commissions, the companies that are looking to come or maybe leave. And we're really seeing people voting with their feet of, wow, you look at where industry is being built in the United States and where employment is growing. It's where there's power. And there's no policy you could have that will overcome not having it.
Any other questions, comments? All right. Well, one last.
So based on public projections and stuff, when does revenue start kicking in?
Yeah, we're going to put out the, you know, the model in the next few months. But, you know, I'd say it's in the next several years you'll see first segments of rods and rods in commercial reactors that are powering cities and what's called lead test assemblies, which is really the final commercial product of the bundles of rods that go in commercial reactors in less than 10 years. We think in about eight years. So, you know, and again, when we look at the projections of when the power is needed and triple by 2050, we think the timing fits. We also think we're kind of the truth tellers that a lot of the timescales being put out by some companies developing reactors might not be quite realistic. And I think it's not going to be anything dramatic that happens.
It's just that companies are going to keep saying to utilities, we need power over the grid. The utilities will figure out how. They're going to extend licenses of existing reactors. They'll get more power from existing reactors. They'll build more reactors. Most people won't see them because they'll be built on sites that already have reactors that they don't see anyway for the most part, and it's not going to be as much behind the meter, small reactors next to data centers. I've been hearing from some people at big tech companies, particularly at conferences where I've been talking to them is, you know, in the end, they don't want to own or operate a reactor. They don't want to own or operate a gas plant. And they don't even want to own or operate a data center. You know, let Equinix or someone do that.
They want to design chips or do their software development, you know, or whichever lane they're in on AI or search, and they just want to get the power from, preferably from utilities because it turns out it's hard enough to site a data center. It's getting really hard. Try siting a data center with a nuclear reactor next to it. It's a lot easier. Let the utilities figure that out. Put a new big reactor where they already have some, you know, expand the capacity of the grid. That's the direction I see it going mostly. Although, as I said, there will be spaces for, you know, some of these in some places.
All right. Thank you very much. Really appreciate your being here.
Thanks