Oh, there we go. Okay. We ended up diversifying into a lot of other business lines as we began to develop. And this was because there was a lot of opportunity in the nuclear industry for, with big spaces, big capability gaps within the country for us to move into. So we saw big opportunities in fuel, transportation, and actually because there was a big shortfall of personnel in the industry, partly because nuclear was on the decline. And suddenly, when it was ramping back up, there weren't enough people, so we saw a big opportunity to get into revenue early. So I'll talk a bit about each of those lines as we progress through. But there's a bit of background about why now is a bit different in nuclear.
Firstly, there was just before I speak about corporate involvement from the private industry, there's a big push at the moment from the government as well to build back nuclear. And this is partly because the U.S. nuclear industry had sort of atrophied quite a lot because of dependence on Russian nuclear material. And that allowed for big capability gaps within the country. And now that the U.S. is trying to build back a lot of that infrastructure, the DOE this year has put out billions of dollars in RFPs and funding opportunities to help industry build back. But what's very unique about this time in nuclear, sort of unprecedented, is that it's taking place at the same time as the tech industry has really honed in on the fact that they need nuclear power for their data centers and their AI centers. These things are increasingly energy-hungry devices.
And there's a bit of concern, actually, that they might plateau in terms of how much energy they can actually draw down to expand on their capabilities. And that could mean AI sophistication reaches a certain level, and they can't really go beyond that because they need enough power. If China is building more nuclear power plants, or they have more nuclear power plants in the pipeline than all the other countries combined, they will actually have the power to keep increasing their AI sophistication. So they could feasibly take over where the U.S. is. And so obviously, there's a big concern in private industry that they don't allow that to happen. And so when you need a high baseload energy, and you need it consistently, you can only stand for 10 hours or 20 hours of downtime in a year.
And you want to be able to put these things any way you want. It really only leads you in the way of nuclear. So a bit about why we went for micro-reactors. So just for a bit of understanding, a micro-reactor is classified as any sort of nuclear reactor that outputs power below 20 MW. And a small modular reactor is anything that powers from 20 MW upwards. But I think the largest SMR I've seen is about 480 MW. So really, that's the sort of range you're looking at between 20 MW and 480. And within that, that's a big range. So they do cater to different sort of industries and end users. But the reason why we went for micro-reactors is that we saw that with small modular reactors, there was a lot of competition from other conventional energy sources.
So a lot of these things we're powering conventional grid systems. But then you're competing with gas, coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro. With micro-reactors, you're targeting areas where it's just diesel generators. So remote locations, mining communities, remote habitation, island communities, military bases, disaster relief areas, maritime vessels. Like where you can't put like the middle of Alaska where there's a mine or an Indonesian island, these things almost exclusively run on diesel generators. And there's never been any competition for them because other sources of energy you can't just put wherever you want. You can't just run transmission lines wherever you want. You can't just put wind and solar where there aren't optimal conditions for wind and solar. And obviously, geothermal and hydro have the same sort of constraints.
So this looked to us to be the much larger potential market, trillion-dollar market, essentially, because diesel had reigned unchallenged in all these different areas. And there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of sites around the world that use these diesel generators. And the cost of this diesel is very expensive. It's very polluting, but it's also very expensive, which means you can actually build a micro-reactor and outcompete the costs of remote diesel in all these different areas. And this isn't something that the U.S. hasn't done before. I think there's like two dozen universities already that have their own micro-reactors, but it's just never been done commercially. So it gives us an opportunity to be the first to do it commercially. And I'm pretty confident we'll be the first to get a commercial micro-reactor product out to market.
When we were building these reactors, we said, well, how do we make this as economic as we possibly can? The reactor has to be able to be moved by road or by rail or by ship and be able to get it anywhere in the world, and so the ISO container size constraint, dimension constraint is a very sensible thing to do, but in tandem with that, you don't want a lot of infrastructure and construction costs at the other end because say you are putting this in the middle of Alaska or in the middle of an island to power a community or something like that. Suddenly, construction costs in remote areas can be very expensive, prohibitively expensive, so you effectively need a reactor system to come in, be able to be put down and plugged into a local microgrid and just start outputting power.
If you can do that, you can avoid all of the costs of construction and infrastructure and anything supporting it. And it also obviously makes our lives a bit more simple because those sort of construction projects could make it feasible to launch these kinds of systems. So we brought on two teams. One was actually based out of California, University of California, Berkeley. And we brought in their engineers, scientists, and professors. And we said to them, could you make us a mini reactor that fits within an ISO container that can deploy anywhere in the world? And obviously, it's going to be very passively safe. And so if everything was to simultaneously break in the reactor, it wouldn't matter. It would just passively radiate that heat out.
The worst accident scenarios you could get with a big reactor like core melt, coolant leak, things like that, it wouldn't really matter. Therefore, you would need one or two people to be at this site. They wouldn't even need to be nuclear engineers. The team at Berkeley came up with the Zeus reactor. Their solution was to remove the primary coolant completely and thermally conduct the heat out of the reactor through a solid core. That simplified a lot of the mechanics. It simplified pump systems. It simplified pressurizers, everything like that. We proceeded with that design with the Berkeley team. To de-risk our business further, we brought in a second design team. That was actually based out of the University of Cambridge in England. We gave them the same MO.
It had to be transportable, had to be passive cooling, very few people to operate it. If everything was to break in the reactor at the same time, obviously that's impossible. But hypothetically, then you still wouldn't have an accident scenario. It would just sit there until someone fixed it. And you could turn it back on. And they came up with the Odin reactor. And the logic behind this one was that they were going to use very high TRL level components, already licensed fuels. And this way, it would have an easier time through the regulatory framework. And also, they targeted using inexpensive materials too. So the mass manufacture of these things would be more simple. It would be more inexpensive. And when we did have economies of scale, it became way more feasible to beat out the costs of remote diesel, in fact, several times, hopefully.
So as we were building out these reactor systems and we were looking at how we would eventually manufacture these systems, it became very clear that actually in the U.S., the capability didn't exist to supply us the fuel we needed to build our reactors. And we thought, well, this is a big problem. And it actually looked like no small modular reactor or micro-reactor company would be able to source the fuel necessary to power its reactors. So obviously, this precipitated a big conversation with the U.S. Department of Energy and the national labs. And we said, well, what are we going to do here? Because I think we're all in the same boat. And initially, they put us in touch with some lab leaders. And we discussed solutions.
And one of the first things we thought would mitigate against it was to put together a fuel fabrication facility, the only one of its kind in the country. And this would be to fabricate deconverted fuel for not just our reactors, but every other reactor company. This still did leave a big capability gap in where we would get our fuel from. So actually, we began investing in an enrichment company. And so by investing in this enrichment company, U.S. owned, U.S. patents, we built it up. And we built the deconversion and fuel fabrication facility along that. We suddenly had that whole supply chain. And actually, it opened up an entire huge potential business for us because we know everyone's going to need this fuel.
The current organizations that are licensed to actually enrich, they don't have the capacity to produce the fuel that this sort of nuclear renaissance needs to power it, so we want to be that company that produces that. As part of our initiative with regard to fuel, the DOE made us part of their HALEU Consortium. We were one of the founding members, and that was a consortium set up to tackle the difficulties the country was going to be having with fuel and the DOE's efforts to build that back. It's going to be a very crucial part of our business, and it will certainly be a revenue-generating part of the business much before the micro-reactors.
So as part of when we were doing this analysis, we realized that the other big component that was missing was the ability to transport commercial quantities of HALEU fuel around the country. Great. I mean, you've fabricated a fuel. And then suddenly, you have no way to move it. Or at least you can only move small little bits. So how many trucks do you need? 20, 30, 40? So again, this took us back to the Department of Energy, who put us in touch with the national labs because they had also been working on a solution. And they had been working on a solution to produce a technology that could move commercial quantities of HALEU fuel, HALEU fuel being the more enriched type of fuel that a lot of these advanced reactors would need.
And we bought out that license because the DOE's funding had been cut for this particular tech. So we took that tech, we bought it out. And then we took it to a lot of our engineers and contractors. And we paid them to go and develop it further so it could accommodate all different fuel forms, hydride, nitride, oxide, everything that the industry might need. And we even brought in the former executives of UPS to build this company around our technology. And so this is going to be, again, another revenue-generating item before the micro-reactors get here and something everyone's going to need. And the final business that we settled upon that we'd diversify into was consultancy.
And we're in some negotiations at the moment to acquire some existing consultancy businesses because the nuclear industry is actually quite old in terms of the sort of age range of the people who operate in it. And that's partly because the middle was kind of gutted during nuclear's decline and a lot of the brains left. But that's also put a squeeze on the number of personnel available to render services to design things, to put regulatory plans in place, to build up reactor systems. So there's a big market here. And so obviously, we want to be involved in that. And actually, as we built up our teams already, they've reached a certain size where we can start contracting out.
We've been approached by a number of firms to actually do design work, principally tech firms, because they need a lot of the time bespoke solutions to the enormous power requirements they have. Obviously, we're very happy to do that design work for them. Recently, we bought a big facility in Tennessee. Interestingly enough, when we bought this, there wasn't as much interest in the area. Since we bought it, there's been a big movement of big companies into the area. I think Orano bought a massive site just down the road from us. We probably did pretty well on the real estate appreciation since we bought this. I mentioned earlier on we partnered with an enrichment company that we invested heavily into. We moved them all into the bottom floor of our building.
We built laboratories for them so they could actually begin to rebuild a lot of the tech that they proved up in the 1990s and actually had very good results for enrichment, and NANO will take the top floor, and we'll work on things alongside them, integrated facilities, reactor designs, and things like that, so this will be our technical headquarters down in Tennessee with our corporate headquarters remaining in New York, so as we began to develop all these things out, other opportunities began to present themselves, and the good part is that because there's so much opportunity in industry that's sort of atrophied and is being built back, there were certain technologies we knew everyone would need.
We knew for our own Odin reactor, because it would be moving molten salt around a reactor system, there would be a huge benefit of not having to use pumps because pumps are very large sort of systems. We began working with some scientists that had developed an electromagnetic pump to move salts around a reactor. The benefit here was that the DOE had actually invested very heavily in this before we bought it out. Then once we bought it out, there was tremendous interest from other SMR companies and actually other micro-reactor companies because they want a simple design or at least to simplify their design further and reduce the costs and size. An electromagnetic pump to replace conventional pumps is a very logical and sensible idea.
So this will probably lead us into a lot of collaborations with big SMR companies, which is great because they are very advanced, a lot of them in their designs. And they're not a competitor of ours. They are targeting very different markets to us. And actually, as long as we build up a good relationship with them, then even when it comes to fuel supply, there could be an increased relationship there in the future. So as we built up, we've obviously tried to make friends with as many people in the industry as we can. I mentioned we were very heavily invested in fuel. But the only other U.S. licensed company that's permitted to go up to HALEU levels at the moment is Centris. Centris won't have the capacity to supply the entire industry with the HALEU it needs. And we can obviously supplement that.
But we still want to be able to source from them and be partners with them and hopefully actually render services to them like transportation potentially or deconversion facilities, things like that. And I don't know if anyone saw the panel yesterday, but Curio, who were on there as well, they're involved in the reprocessing because our reactors, if they operate for 20 years, the burn up of the actual fuel is less than 1%. So 99% of the fuel is unused, essentially. And if we could recover that fuel, we could just build a reactor straight away. And then the cost of that second reactor would be nothing. Now, currently, the regulator is looking at making allowances to permit companies to be able to do that. They can't currently. But it's anticipating that it will happen. And Curio is obviously working at that kind of design.
And the final collaboration that we've highlighted on here is blockchain because the regulations in the U.S. are probably the most comprehensive in the world just because the U.S. is the oldest nuclear power in the world. And so it's had decades and decades to build up regulations. And that's made it almost prohibitively difficult to navigate. It's certainly too difficult for a human. So we're designing an AI system at the moment with Blockfusion. And as we began to expand, there was a huge increase in interest around the world. I mean, Rwanda's highlighted here. But a lot of island communities that I spoke of earlier, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, countries like that that have hundreds of millions of people dotted across islands that subsist predominantly on diesel generators are obviously looking to change to that. Rwanda was in the same boat.
It had a population that 60% of the people had access to consistent power, and a lot of the reason why a lot of these African countries don't have that consistent power is because they're just remote communities, and it's unfeasible to put transmission lines all the way out there, so they wanted us to come in with micro-reactor solutions to be able to put power sources in these remote locations because suddenly, then you can have process heat for industry, you can have desalination plants, vertical farms, and then suddenly, the quality of life across the continent can be improved substantially, and people talk about Africa being very resource rich, but you forget that if it's not economic to mine the resources, then it's not really useful at all. A micro-reactor in the middle of nowhere can suddenly make a mining operation possible and unlock a lot of wealth.
So we've got a lot of things coming up at the moment. Obviously, the anticipated milestones and catalysts, we're going to start in the next few months of putting the consultancy business together. And that'll be followed very closely by licensing some of our technology like the ALIP out. But next year, we'll also start on the design of some of our facilities, deconversion, fuel fabrication, and actually how that'll integrate into the enrichment facility. And that'll be coupled by the fact we'll be finalizing our land package as well to build our prototype. So we want to get that all finalized next year. And as we finish up our demonstration work, our physical test work, we'll begin on the final design of that prototype and get building it. So we've been very fortunate that we started this company before there was this sort of research and interest in nuclear.
And that's allowed us to recruit some really important people. It's been very crucial and useful to our company's growth. So the former DOE CFO has joined us recently and obviously for advising us on how we can best position ourselves to solicit the government for funding opportunities, very useful. But on the military side, there's a huge interest from the military. And so we've got a former four-star general and a three-star general as well who are working with us at the moment on talks with the Air Force, with the Army, with the Marine Corps about how we power these bases because there's a mandate for them to be able to self-power. And currently, they can't do that. And for security, they also do want to be able to free up manpower so it's not always guarding in diesel that's brought in on a daily basis.
And just a couple of other people, the former negotiator for the North Korean missile crisis and a reprocessing expert that we've brought in to obviously help us with policy, Mr. Bob Gallucci. And in New York, where we're currently located, the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who actually shut down Indian Point. But he's very big on nuclear now. He realizes his mistake. And he wants to facilitate and help us build back nuclear across the country. All right. Happy to take any questions.
Two questions. Are you going to go forward with both the Zeus and Odin? What's the power of these guys?
It's a good question. Originally, the intention was to choose two designs and then down-select the most promising one. What ended up happening a little bit was that because the Zeus reactor was outputting a higher heat, it was operating at a higher operating temperature, it was better at producing process heat for industry. Whereas the Odin reactor at a lower operating temperature and a cheaper manufacturing cost would be better for scaling. They became kind of complementary. Now, what I do anticipate is that Odin is very likely because it's higher TRL levels, cheaper components, it's probably more likely to be the first prototype we build. Then the Zeus reactor, it could be adapted for more industry. It will certainly be coming after the Odin reactor. Power, each reactor is outputting about 5 MW of thermal.
And that converts to about one to 1.5 MW electric. The problem with the ISO container is essentially that's what constrains your power. If you do want to go a bit bigger than that, suddenly you fall outside of that ISO container size. And you can't just put it down. Then you need supporting infrastructure. So that sort of lands us in that five MW thermal power output.
I think you answered the question. But the average size that you're talking about with these reactors is like single-digit MW or kW? What is this?
Yeah, that's right. So it's a single-digit MW output, and for the communities we're targeting, that's obviously a very sensible thing. So say, for instance, we looked at a community in Canada, and they had a community of about 800 people. They needed a lot less than a one MW electric. I think they needed like 500 kW, but that was also a community that was spending $10 million a year on diesel costs alone. So actually, to put a reactor up there, if it outputs power for 15-20 years, that's $150 million-$200 million it would have spent on diesel that we're replacing, and we can produce these micro-reactors at a lot less cost than that. So the power for these kind of deployment sites is kind of perfect, but we're not outputting power to grid systems, conventional grid systems.
Competitive environment, who are you competing against?
It's a good question because a lot of them aren't very transparent with their development. But Oklo, I think, were the leaders in the micro-reactor race to begin with. But when they began partnering with Sam Altman from ChatGPT, they shifted actually their model from micro-reactors to higher output levels. So they were looking at 30-50 MW, I believe. So that makes them a small modular reactor that's targeting different markets.
Oklo?
Oklo, and so they're not really a competitor anymore, but there are other names in the micro-reactor race. There's Last Energy, there's Radiant, there's other groups. The difficulty is that it's very difficult for us to determine because they're private, and they don't have to release much technical information about their progress, so we know that they haven't submitted for formal licensing applications, so we know that they can't be that advanced, but it's very difficult to know where we are. Because we're probably one of the best structured and best funded companies, that's why I say we're in a position where I'm pretty confident we'll produce the first commercial micro-reactor. All right.
What are roughly the uses of funds that you've raised recently?
So principally, the uses of funds have gone into expanding the reactor design teams. It's gone into buying the technical laboratories we've got in Tennessee and the design of the facilities and the acquisition of technologies and the development of those technologies. Sorry.
If someone has any further questions, they can please be taken outside.