Deep Fission, Inc. Common Stock EnerCom Denver – The Energy Investment Conference

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 Advanced Reactor Demonstration 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 Advanced Reactor Demonstration 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 atmospheres 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 a mile 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 a mile 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 a mile 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 a mile deep, which is about 1,600 meters, you get one atmosphere of pressure for every 10 meters. That is 160 atmospheres 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 a billion dollars 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 mile 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-inch 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 gigawatts 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 53, 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.