Standard Nuclear, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Standard Nuclear's second quarter 2026 earnings call, our first as a public company. On July 16, our common stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker STDN. We are pleased to welcome our new shareholders and everyone joining us today. Yesterday, we issued our earnings press release reporting results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2026, and this morning we filed our quarterly report on Form 10-Q with the SEC. The press release is available in the investor relations section of our website, and an investor presentation will be posted there following this call. Before we begin, please note that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements and are based on assumptions as of today and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially.

Please refer to the risk factors described in our Form 10-Q and our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will refer to certain operating metrics, including funded backlog, total contract backlog, and qualified pipeline. Definitions of these metrics and important limitations on their use are included in yesterday's press release. With me today are Kurt Terrani, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Harrill, our Chief Financial Officer. Kurt will open with an overview of the quarter's results and an update on our strategy, followed by Kevin, who will take you through the financial results, and then Kurt will close before we open the line for questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kurt.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you everyone for joining us on our first earnings call as a public company. Let me start with what Standard Nuclear is. We make the fuel that most advanced reactors run on. That fuel is TRISO, and it is worth spending a moment on why it matters. TRISO is not a new idea. This coated particle fuel form was first developed in the 1960s and used across a number of commercial nuclear power plants worldwide. Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy has put the latest generation of this fuel technology through the Advanced Gas Reactor Testing and Qualification Program, a rigorous testing and irradiation program that took the fuel to record burn-up and temperatures with essentially no fuel particle failures.

After irradiation, the fuel was then safety tested by exposing it to temperatures far beyond anything a reactor accident would produce to ensure the release of radioactivity from the fuel stayed below safe levels. This is why the DOE calls TRISO the most robust nuclear fuel on Earth. Each particle is a speck of uranium ceramic about the size of a poppy seed, wrapped in layers of carbon and silicon carbide. Those layers are the containment. Every particle is its own miniature pressure vessel, holding the radioactive material inside at temperatures well above anything the reactor will ever see. It does that passively, without the need for a pump, power, or operator to actively maintain the cooling on the fuel.

This is what we mean by functional containment, and it is why a reactor running on TRISO can be small, sited close to the customer it serves, and safe without relying on active safety systems. What is new here is not the fuel. It is the ability to make it at commercial scale. This quarter, we shipped our first commercial fuel core load. We signed contracts on the back of it, and the demand behind those contracts moved toward us on every measure we track. The quarter tells the story through five themes. First, microreactor deployment is accelerating from pilots to programs with named sites and targeted dates. Second, we manufactured and shipped the first full core load of modern commercial TRISO fuel ever produced in this country. Third, we converted pipeline into contracts and contracts into funded backlog. Fourth, we scaled. Modular equipment is moving into both new sites now, putting capacity in place for up to 2.5 metric tons of annual throughput by year-end, subject to authorization.

Fifth, we broadened the platform. The Framatome joint venture, selection for negotiation under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program, and fuel transportation package development. Deployment creates fuel demand. Demand becomes contracts. Contracts become funded backlog. Backlog is matched with capacity. The platform work widens the base underneath it all. Advanced Nuclear is moving from pilots to scheduled deployments. Five participants in the Department of Energy's reactor pilot program have now reached criticality, four of them by the program's July 4th target. The demand signals are structural. Hyper-scale data centers need firm, continuous power. The reindustrialization of the American grid is underway. Defense programs such as Project Janus are targeting reactor deployments at nine Army installations as we speak.

That is just the start before additional installations under the other branches come on. As I hope it is clear to you all, energy security is a national imperative. For anyone less familiar with it, the Army's Project Janus is Department of Defense's program to put microreactors, that is small nuclear reactors, sited at military bases so that critical missions are run on reliable around-the-clock power. Every reactor runs on fuel, and the advanced reactor fleet moving toward deployment will overwhelmingly run on TRISO. Project Janus has now announced its awardees, and Standard Nuclear is proud to be the fuel supplier to a number of the reactor developers under this program. We are not the direct awardee, our customers are. That is exactly the position we want to hold. For developers we supply, each awarded deployment creates a TRISO fuel requirement on a defined schedule.

We will not name specific customers or programs beyond what the government and our customers have made public. Let me be clear about where we are focused and when. Over the next five years, the demand that is real, funded, and scheduled is microreactors, starting with what is concentrated in government and defense, and quickly followed by commercial behind-the-meter. This is where we are pointed today, and it is what our capacity is being built against. Small modular reactors also represent a substantial market, but they arrive later, as those designs work through licensing and reach commercial viability towards the end of the decade. We are not waiting on that market to prove our model. Microreactors fund the business today, and the fuel development and customer relationships that come with them are exactly what an SMR supplier will need.

The same design-frozen modules produce fuel for both, so nothing we build now has to be rebuilt later. Standard Nuclear is currently the only independent U.S. company producing TRISO fuel at scale for commercial customers. We are reactor-agnostic. We do not compete with our customers. We fuel them. This quarter moved that position from a description to an actual demonstration. Three developments this quarter and shortly after translated that market movement into Standard Nuclear execution. We delivered fuel, we converted demand into contracts, and we scaled capacity. First, we delivered fuel. During the second quarter, we shipped our first commercial TRISO fuel, a 50-kilogram batch of HALEU TRISO to Radiant Industries for its Kaleidos demonstration unit microreactor. That fuel is now at Department of Energy's DOME facility at Idaho National Laboratory.

Shortly after quarter end, we delivered the balance, completing delivery of a full core load of TRISO fuel for Radiant's first microreactor. This is the first complete reactor core of a commercially produced TRISO fuel supplied by an independent U.S. manufacturer. The core will support a full-power, full-temperature demonstration using fuel from our Oak Ridge production line. Second, we converted. Our commercial engine did what we built it to do: move opportunities from pipeline to contracts to funded and binding commitments. Total contract backlog grew from $91.3 million at March 31st to $241.5 million at June 30th. Funded backlog, the portion under binding commitment with firm delivery obligations, grew from $8.2 million to $61.9 million over the same period.

In August, we entered into a fuel supply agreement with Antares Nuclear, providing a firm commitment of 1 metric ton of HALEU TRISO fuel, with a customer option for up to 7 additional metric tons over the next several years. Giving effect to that agreement, funded backlog approximately doubled from June 30th to $119.3 million, and total contract backlog reached $576.9 million, more than six times the March 31st level. That is conversion. It's not churn, and Kevin will walk you through the movement between these categories. It is how market acceleration reaches our order book. Deployment dates and government program timelines turn fuel from a planning item into a firm requirement with a date attached to it. The customer relationships make that conversion tangible. The binding term sheet we signed with Radiant Industries in May became a definitive multi-tranche fuel supply agreement in August.

Because the May term sheet was binding, those amounts were already reflected in our June 30 backlog. The August agreement formalized the relationship. Radiant is the customer whose first core we just completed, demonstrating the core-to-reload model. In announcing the agreement, Radiant described it as securing its planned deployments through the early 2030s, and its president called securing the fuel supply chain a strategic advantage to deploying at scale. That is the change we have been describing. Fuel availability has become a gating item for reactor deployment, and developers are prudently contracting years in advance. Separately, the fuel supply agreement with Antares Nuclear we announced earlier this week carries a firm commitment of one metric ton, with customer options extending as far as 2035. There are multi-year, multi-ton relationships with reactor developers moving toward deployment, and both of these customers are Project Janus awardees, by the way.

That is what makes these two agreements the most important thing we did this quarter. It is the demand signal completing its full circuit. A federal program puts deployment dates on the calendar, awards a reactor developer, and the developer contracts with us for fuel. So a national program decision arrives in our backlog as a firm requirement with a date attached. What was a demand signal two quarters ago is a signed contract today. Third, we scaled. Construction is substantially complete at our two new production facilities, SN-TN in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and SN-ID in Idaho. The facilities are identical, each starting at up to one metric ton of TRISO fuel production per year and designed to scale to 2.5 metric tons each for a combined capacity of up to five metric tons per year.