Hadron Energy, Inc. (HDRN) September 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you, everyone, for joining today. My name is David Chomiak. I will be moderating this meeting today. I'm an investment banking analyst here at HCW on the ECM team. And with me today, I have Sam and Hadron Energy. I want to give them as much time as possible to speak with you today. So the floor is yours, Sam.

All right. Thank you. Hey, everybody. My name is Sam Gibson. I'm the founder and CEO of Hadron Energy. My background's in mechanical engineering and engineering leadership. Today, I'm joined by Ross Ridenour and Andrea Vale.

Hi, everyone. My name is Ross Ridenour. I'm the Chief Nuclear Officer for Hadron. My background, 35-plus years of commercial industry experience. Prior to that, nuclear Navy submarines. I'm a nuclear engineer. Senior reactor operator licenses on three different nuclear power plants, two pressurized water, one boiling water, and most of my time was plant and plant operations. Eventually, I was promoted to more senior management and I've been a chief nuclear officer three times before this assignment and my last two assignments I spent six years in the United Arab Emirates setting up the operating company for the four units at Baraka and I worked for five years for the International Atomic Energy Agency so nice to see you good morning everyone I'm Andrea Bell my background is material science and engineering but I spent 32 years at the nuclear regulatory Commission.

I retired in January of 2025 and I had an office of about 500 people. So I had operating reactors, new and advanced reactors, engineering. And the great news for Hadron is that office is now split into two. So there's a dedicated office that we're going to continue interacting with. So it's very happy to be here and glad to meet you all.

All right. So thanks again, everybody. And before we get into it, our mission is very simple. We want to be the first to commercialize micromodular reactors, especially at the mass manufacturing scale. And the way that we're going to do that is by leveraging our several distinct advantages, one of which is being a light water based technology. And as most of you probably know, all 94 reactors in the United States are light water. It is the most mature technology, but what we're doing is taking it from the big project scale, making it into a product producing 10 megawatts of electric power. And because of this mature supply chain that we have, we're also able to secure fuel here in the United States, which is another distinctive advantage. Next, we have been declared the front-runner in micro-reactor licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We'll talk a little bit about our historic approval very soon. And finally, we have a very strong team with over 350 years of experience, which is actually the highest concentration of nuclear experts in the micro-reactor industry. So as we all know, there's a major problem today, and that is the demand is significantly outpacing the supply of power and the other problem is the grid is fragile and it's aging it cannot actually support very large capacity being added to it what needs to happen is we need to have behind-the-meter solutions that are powering at the point of demand and one of the most prevalent things is we need 200 gigawatts by 2030 in the United States alone that's enough to power 200 million homes. That is expected to double 400 million homes worth of power by 2035. So the demand is significant, and we need a solution that can service this demand. That's where Hadron comes in. We are developing the light water micro modular reactor. It's a 10 megawatt unit. As mentioned, it's made to be compact, modular. We're actually designing a one-pack, a six-pack, and a 12-pack. The three market segments we are addressing are data centers, military bases, and remote communities. And the best part is each has its own distinct benefits. Data centers we expect we can charge about 15 cents per kilowatt hour, which translates to for one unit 12.5 million in revenue per year. Military bases on average are about 30 cents per kilowatt hour or 25 million dollars in revenue per year and finally remote communities offer the best opportunity where we could charge about 45 cents per kilowatt hour and that translates to 37.5 million in revenue per year for one reactor so you can see that this scales up significantly we have a useful life of 60 years and we refuel every six years Okay.

One thing that always comes up when you start discussing nuclear power is safety. And obviously we want to make sure the plant we're designing is very safe. The issue is when uranium splits into two particles, the two particles themselves are called fission products and they're very radioactive. You want to make sure that your plant is designed to keep the fission products where you want them to be and they don't get out to the outside world where they can present a hazard to the health and safety of the public. Most plants have four barriers between the fission products and the outside world. We have five. Because of that, our level of safety, and I'm going to give you a number in just a moment, is magnitudes better than what you see with very safe commercial nuclear plants. But the five barriers, starting at the bottom, you have a fuel pellet. It's about the size of the end of my finger. It's made of uranium oxide. We've been making these fuel pellets for 70 years. There's really hardly anything we don't know about them. They're extremely safe. The fuel pellets are stacked inside of hollow tubes called fuel rods, made of a special metal called zirconium, which is transparent to neutrons, meaning it doesn't absorb neutrons. Then you put a certain number of fuel rods in a square matrix. That is what's called a fuel bundle. And then you stack a certain number of bundles inside of a thick-walled reactor vessel to form a reactor core. In the cutaway on the right, the blue glow at the bottom, is the reactor core. The pressure vessel is the next barrier that contains the high pressure system for the primary coolant and that's about three inches thick. And then the next barrier not shown in this diagram is called the containment vessel which surrounds the entire assembly and then that module, the entire assembly, is placed into a concrete vault that's below ground and then we flood it up with something called a suppression pool to about 70 to 80 percent water. Real numbers, the regulation says your core damage frequency because of your design can be no greater than one event every one million years of operation. All the plants operating today, core damage frequency is one event every 100 million years of operation. Our plant, because of its unique design, is one core damaging event every three billion years of operation. So it is literally walk away safe. Supply chain. Not a very glamorous topic. Sam always mentioned it. But it's very important to make sure that if you're going to operate these plants for 60 years, you have a very deep and broad supply chain that can continue to supply you with the equipment you need. So we have light water reactors. And light water, just so we know, that's just pure water. That's all it is. It's been around for 70 years. It's the most used reactor technology in the world today. But we have, as Sam mentioned, a U.S.-based fuel supply. All of the components needed to manufacture our fuel are sourced from the United States. We have a very mature light water reactor vendor base. We have talked to 70 or 80 vendors in the last year and a half since I've been with the company. And no problems getting the equipment. Another interesting thing that we do that we don't think other reactor suppliers do is 70% of our components are off the shelf, meaning we can just pick and choose what we want and say deliver it to our site and we'll go ahead and install it. Custom work, and we do need some custom work, is expensive and typically takes a long time. We have master service agreements with critical suppliers for key components that there aren't a lot of suppliers for, like control rod drive mechanisms, nuclear instruments, and so on. The lead times for these components are about 18 months to two years. We have MSAs in place, meaning they agreed to deliver those components to us, provided we give them at least a two-year notice. And then the last thing, there's no exotic fuel bottleneck. Fuel has to be approved for use in a commercial nuclear power plant by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The only approved fuel and coolant mixture, uranium oxide and light water, that is the only fuel and coolant mixture approved by the NRC in a commercial nuclear plant. So if I'm using anything else, triso fuel, liquid sodium, liquid lead, whatever, you have to go through a fuel qualification process to prove your fuel is safe under normal and accident conditions. That takes a minimum of five to eight years. So again, I love nuclear power plants, but if somebody is saying we're going to be commercial and I'm using liquid sodium, and I'm going to be commercial by 2030, that isn't necessarily true because they have to have their fuel qualified first. And then Hadron versus Legacy and New Age Reactors, two general categories. You've got big units, Westinghouse, Hitachi, BWRX300, and then you have the small modular reactors, and you can see the names OHLO and X-Energy up here with liquid sodium and high-temperature gas. They occupy unique niches. We're in a different place because we can, number one, we're a light water reactor. So it's, again, as I mentioned, we know where all the components are going from, are coming from. We know how to operate these plants, 26,000 years of operating history and so on. And one of the more beneficial things we do is we can operate behind the meter, meaning we don't have to be attached to the grid. So if I have a data center, and it's a 100-megawatt data center, and most data centers being built in the next 5 to 10 years or 100 megawatts or less, we can site our units next to the plant, the data center, and simply supply power directly to it. And we don't need a large body of water to supply cooling. Most larger plants need a river, a lake, or the ocean. We don't. We use a cooling technology called air-cooled condensers, been around for 50, 60 years. Very well known, very proven. And so a lot of benefits. We can put these plants pretty much anywhere as long as you know where your AI data center is going. You can put a plant there, and we don't have access to the grid, and we don't need cooling water.

All right, thanks, Ross. All roads to commercialization lead through the NRC. That means that if you're hearing about approvals and fleet approvals, those have to go through the NRC. And as Sam mentioned, we're the front runner for licensing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Now, I want to give credit to some of the milestones that have occurred in the press recently. There's been criticality at a number of sites, I think about five recently, and that means sustaining the fission reaction. That is notable and it should be celebrated. However, that is an approval under the Department of Energy. A DOE approval is not automatically an NRC approval. So again, fleet approval and commercialization has to go through the NRC. There's also a regulatory framework that's being worked right now, and it'll be finalized by the end of this year, available for use in January. And it is tailor-made for micromodular reactors, in particular for Hadron. What I want to leave you with is the most important part of that rule, which is a streamlined licensing process of six to 12 months. And if any of you have been following the NRC at any point in history, it has taken years for some reviews to be approved. This is a significant milestone to be able to have something, a licensing action in six to 12 months. So that's very notable. There's also something called the Bipartisan Advance Act of 2024. And of course, the more recent presidential executive orders. All of these are focused on various things, but highlighting NRC licensing and other operations. All of that will streamline licensing. Why is this important to have, John? That rule that I just mentioned is for low consequence rule, excuse me, low consequence reactors. Hadron is a low consequence reactor. And what that means is if there's an accident of some sort, the impact on public health and safety would be minimal and the environment will be minimal. Because of that low consequence, Hadron can take advantage of this new framework. So that streamlines the licensing process even more. Sam mentioned the historic milestone, and it really is. I can't undersell this. There's something called a quality assurance program description, or QAPD. So the NRC reviewed Hadron's plan and approved it and wrote a safety evaluation. That is the first time in history that a QAPD has been approved for a micromodular reactor. So that's already setting Hadron up to be a front runner and licensing. There's also thinking about all this streamlining that I've been talking about. Of course, the aperture has opened up wide for a lot of companies to come into the NRC, just like any other company or government agency. They're very limited resources. So we sent our letter of intent back in 2025 to the NRC, and that lets the NRC know that a company is serious, sets up budget talks, sets up pre-application engagements. So we did that in 2025. We also submitted what's It's called the Regulatory Engagement Plan, or REP, and that is the roadmap with every interaction, every submittal, every meeting, everything that's needed to get to deployment. Of course, this is a living document, but we take these milestones very seriously and we try to adhere by what's in there. That's also with the NRC, and I've already mentioned the QAPD. There's also two very major applications that are coming in 2028. The first is the manufacturing license or ML. Again, that'll be the first manufacturing license in 50 years submitted to the NRC. Not clairvoyant, but my amazing folks who I had put guidance out on the street before I retired. So that exists now as public. Anybody could use it. So it sets up applicants to have repeatable factory fabrication in a more efficient way. Again, another streamlining technique. And then finally, the combined license. That takes a construction permit and an operating license and puts it together, submits it to the NRC. And the way that would look is that construction would start and then everything is being reviewed at the same time. When you compare that to the two-step process, if someone starts a construction permit, takes months or years to construct, and then later submits an operating license, You don't get the financial stability or the regulatory stability of combining it into one. So all of these things together sets Hadron up for very streamlined licensing.

All right. And the reason that we're able to achieve these historic milestones is truly the people that we have at Hadron. As mentioned, we have the highest concentration of nuclear experts on our team with over 350 years of experience in the nuclear industry. You've had the chance to meet myself, Ross, and Andrea. There's two others I want to point out. One is Eric Williams. We just hired him from TerraPower, which is Bill Gates' SMR company. He was their COO and Executive Vice President. Now he's our Executive Vice President, leading as our design authority. He's actually taken a blank sheet of paper and gone all the way through to construction of TerraPower's nuclear power plant. so great experience and the next gentleman I want to point out is Ken Kennevan. He was actually the past CTO for Westinghouse with their eVinci micro reactor. We have very tangible milestones coming up one of which is a demonstration unit. We'll also be showing off our new headquarters very soon but each and every single year leading up to what Andrea pointed out about 2028 we have what's called topical reports being submitted to the NRC. We're also, in parallel, while we're navigating the regulatory landscape, which isn't actually the bottleneck for us, we're also charting down the path with multiple customers. I'll get to that next. We've also brought together an incredible board of directors that span public company finance, Wall Street experience operations and we also have multiple nuclear experts on the board too and this is where I wanted to bring the discussion to our commercial traction this is kind of a summary slide here we've got over five gigawatts of MOUs and LOIs that we're progressing towards power purchase agreements that's our business model build own and operate and as mentioned in the beginning, we'll be selling the power at a predetermined price for generally a 15-year to 20-year term. And we've also developed a significant amount of support from the government actually receiving a letter of support from the president last fall. This was a really exciting achievement for us. And besides the support we've seen from customers, investors and the market we've also developed our IP portfolio multiple patents and that really defines our technology gives us our moat and then finally we've had multiple regulatory engagements beyond just the NRC with national labs and other government stakeholders so that brings me to the last slide the main takeaways for you are we're defining ourselves as a light water microreactor which is highly differentiated mature supply chain with available fuel we have the NRC front-runner status for licensing our team is the most experienced in the entire micro reactor industry we continue to group amazing engineers and we've also demonstrated significant demand for our power plant so we're happy to take any questions and thanks so much.