Scott Nolan

Scott Nolan says fuel can be about half the cost of energy from a small modular reactor. Once the plant is no longer a multi-billion-dollar construction project, the fuel bill is a much larger share of the total. At today's market prices, and depending on the design, enrichment can push the levelized cost of energy to about 50 percent fuel. That cost counts both the capital that built the reactor and the cost of running it.

That is the second half of what he saw in 2023. Removing the fuel bottleneck was not enough. For advanced reactors to scale on HALEU, that fuel also has to get cheaper, and enrichment is the piece he thinks a new company can move.

Scott Nolan says interest during a long construction job, not the famous accidents, is a large part of why American nuclear plants got so expensive. Vogtle ran far over budget and behind schedule. About 20 percent of that cost overrun was interest, and that was in a period of historically low rates. When a plant takes about 10 years to build, the overnight construction cost matters less than the interest paid while it sits unfinished. His fix for the big reactors is to build them faster and to build more of them, so the work finally gets economies of scale.

John Collison points to the 1970s slowdown, when mortgage rates reached about 18 percent in 1981 and the cost of capital was well north

Scott Nolan says the AI power buildout has not changed the uranium market yet. Most fuel contracts an enricher signs are still with the existing reactor fleet and the utilities, for low-enriched uranium, not with new data-center plants. Small modular reactors should grow over the next decade, and they are still a small market today.

Power for data centers in the next couple of years can come from those small reactors or from natural gas. Either way, near-term uranium demand stays with the existing fleet. His five-year view is a push off natural gas toward true baseload, and he expects that baseload to be nuclear. Whether the plants are gigawatt-scale or small reactors comes down to which de

Scott Nolan says advanced reactors cannot scale without high-assay low-enriched uranium, HALEU, because that fuel is what makes a smaller core possible and almost nobody outside Russia sells it.

Today's grid reactors run on uranium enriched to about 3 to 5 percent. HALEU is enriched to just under 20 percent, about 19.75 percent. The higher level unlocks a much smaller core, so the reactor can be built in a factory and shipped in modules instead of constructed as a one-off on site. That smaller format is a large part of how the new designs try to bring cost down.

Supply is the other half. Only Russia makes HALEU commercially today. In mid-2024, Congress passed a ban on imports of Russian ur

Scott Nolan says Founders Fund does not programmatically start companies, and the firm does not want to either. Everyone there is selected for wanting to be an investor, not hoping they can someday be an entrepreneur. The mindset that follows is do not start companies, and do not do it programmatically. An airplane covered in war wounds is the picture, and it raises the question of all the companies that never got started out of Founders Fund.

Being an investor is a great job and a great career, so the bar for him to go start something stays extremely high. The work has to be extremely important. He has to believe no one else is doing it, which is why a long search for someone already doing

Scott Nolan felt high certainty, by the end of his first week or month as an intern at SpaceX, that SpaceX would eventually win. The company then had under 50 people and was at most a thousandth the size. The reason was the speed of execution.

He walked away with the lesson after Boeing, and it was still fresh in the early years at Founders Fund. Small teams can look completely outmatched and still beat incumbents by moving quickly with a good group of people. The speed is a reason to stay optimistic about the odds of a five person startup and to bet on the small team.

The bet fits when the founders have a vision, insights about how they want to do the work differently, and a motive beyond

Scott Nolan says the hard part is not simply doing uranium enrichment. The real challenge is doing it in a way that can scale and stay highly cost competitive, so a United States capability is truly commercial and can compete with Europe, Russia, and China over time.

Nuclear is perceived as incredibly complicated. Fusion is pretty difficult, new physics and new science, but fission has been around for a long time. For reactors, from advanced designs to gigawatt scale, the most interesting question is the cost implication, more than the technology alone. Enrichment has been done before, and a number of countries already do it. The United States built a first-generation technology to win Worl

Scott Nolan says the uranium enrichment plant is in Paducah because that community most recently did the work in the US, already welcomes it, and has the talent.

The search for the site lasted over a year, ran through over ten states, and covered over a thousand plots of land. Paducah, in Western Kentucky, is where the last US enrichment facility stood: a gaseous diffusion plant on a DOE site that shut down in 2013. A fresh facility is going up on the same site, and the technique will be unveiled in the first half of next year.

The plant is meant to last decades, so community support and the local talent base came above anything else. Paducah was already familiar with enrichment, comfortab

Scott Nolan says General Matter won the $900 million by competing for a capacity-building award Congress authorized, aimed at a ban on uranium imports and the lack of fuel for advanced reactors. The team was down-selected under the Biden administration and awarded under the Trump administration earlier in the year.

The money is non-dilutive. It helps stand up the first facility and takes a large share of the cost off the table. Equity and debt are the other two pieces of the funding picture. The award is the lever that gets a long hardware project past the point where many companies run out of money before the first plant is online.

Scott Nolan says a cheap satellite makes launch price the problem you can no longer ignore. A one hundred million dollar launch was acceptable beside a satellite that cost a billion dollars, and it has to be rethought once the satellite costs one million dollars.

The part of SpaceX he keeps is working on something not everyone agrees is the most important thing. He looks for industries that have not lived up to their promise over the last 50 years, then for the bottlenecks inside them. A market that already needs fixing can still be the right target when it is a big lever on a much bigger industry, even without a completely new greenfield. In the early 2000s, everybody was talking about mod

Scott Nolan says the facility in Paducah, Kentucky is aimed at delivering enriched uranium by the end of the decade, in time to help plug the gap after the ban on Russian uranium imports.

Almost three years in, the team is just over 200 people and scaling quickly. Headquarters and engineering are in L.A., and the plant under construction is in Paducah, in western Kentucky. Licensing, engineering, manufacturing, and construction all target the end of the decade, and an NRC license was submitted last week. Contracts line up with the ban, which starts January 1st, 2028. Utilities have some inventory and other contracts that can cover a little time, and the goal is to be online as soon as possi

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan made his first movie on the weekends while working a full-time job, after film school turned him down.

After graduating, Nolan applied to the National Film and Television School in England and the Royal College of Art and was turned down by both. He immediately found work as a camera operator in a small video shop, making corporate videos and media training videos. The script for his own film was written for what he could do with really no resources, a camera, and money scraped together. He wrote it on a typewriter. The crew used the bonus from his cameraman job and shot only on weekends for almost a year. They rehearsed each s

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan runs a film set on punctuality, discipline, and secrecy, and he prefers to shoot every frame himself.

Of the more than 600 people who worked on Dunkirk, only 20 were allowed to read the script. Copies kept on set were watermarked with the actors' names so a missing copy could be traced to its owner. When he recruits an actor, he brings the script to the house, stays in the living room drinking tea until the actor finishes, and then takes the script away. He refuses a second unit. Matthew McConaughey's description, as Senra reads it, is simple: minds do not wander on a Christopher Nolan set. Crews know Nolan for shooting fast, f

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan waited something like 23 years between coming up with Inception and actually making the film.

The idea first took shape in late-night sessions after lights out. Sharing a dream was the jumping-off point. Playing music outside someone who was asleep would translate in an interesting way. Nolan came up with a couple of the ideas that went into Inception when he was about 16. He had put the wait at 10 years. It was probably more like 20, and he had been thinking about it for a very long time.

Edwin Land came up with the instant photography camera around 1946. By 1973 it was the size he wanted and it could do color, about 30 years

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan kept creative control by working a little faster and a little cheaper than people expected, so nobody had a reason to interfere.

The efficiency of filmmaking was his way of keeping control. Pressure from time and money felt like a restriction, yet it forced decisions. A known deadline made his creative process speed up exponentially. He guarded creative power by spending less and moving faster. He made the choice very early: work a little bit faster than expected and a little bit cheaper than expected, and the studio would let him do the work his way. A big movie pushes a director to hire an enormous number of people, then feed

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan strips a screenplay down because a simpler document shows clearer thinking and a grip on the essence of the film.

He is not looking for a script to arrive fully formed. No project he has worked on landed that way, and he does not want it to. He wants complete control, and that starts with the writing: he either wrote the script or had a hand in writing every one of his movies. He enjoys screenplays because they are very stripped-down, simple documents, and the more stripped down they are, the better. He feels more of a craftsman than an artist. George Lucas reached the same conclusion, as Senra reads it: he makes a movie, not a

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Christopher Nolan can leave a studio with the money for an original film because obsession already carried Memento from a wall of rejections to the start of a near-vertical career.

Nolan had spent a long, anxious year trying to secure distribution. Every distributor in town turned the film down with the same variation: this is great, we love it, we want to work with you, but this is not for us. The film was personal. Memento was born on the back of obsession, and failing to get it made would have been almost inconceivable. Nolan made the movie because he had to. Once a filmmaker burrows in so deep that the film disappears, the only move left is