Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
DF’s advisory board is filled with high-profile names, including physicists and energy experts. Former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu is one of two Nobel laureates in physics.
DF’s vice president of engineering is a former executive at Kairos Power. He is one of the nuclear industry leaders in the race to commercialize next-generation nuclear energy designs.
DF submission was one of eleven projects chosen in August for President Donald Trump’s nuclear pilot program. The program does not fund the selected companies directly but aims to expedite their testing and ultimately offer a fast track to commercial licensing. And it intends to get at least three reactors operating before the Fourth of July next year.
However, to make this happen, DF will need to ascend a steep financial hill. The Trump announcement has significantly sped up the company’s project timeline.
A month after the Trump announcement, the company went public in a rare maneuver called a reverse merger. It involves using a shell company and that does not require disclosing as much information to regulators in the process. It is generally a quicker, cheaper way to go public than the traditional initial public offering route.
Asked why DF had chosen a reverse merger, given that this form of going public can raise some questions for investors, Frader replied that the new pilot program altered DF’s timeline. She said, “Initially, we were targeting 2029 for our first reactor, but the program allows us to build one in 2026. The reverse merger gave us a faster path to align our financing with this accelerated timeline.”
DF’s shares sold well below typical prices and raised thirty million dollars. The company plans to list on a less well-known stock exchange for smaller firms. Frader said that the company intends to start there and then switch to the NASDAQ Stock Market.
The details of DF’s go-public maneuver “suggest that DF wasn’t able to raise cash from new or existing shareholders, who first capitalized the company with a four-million-dollar check last year.”
It was reported last week that the nuclear industry is seeing an increased number of nuclear companies going public through reverse mergers. It has documented six such mergers that are complete or are in the works.
A flurry of these maneuvers also happened in 2021 with climate technology startups. Most of those companies’ stocks offerings didn’t do well, but there are initial signs that this new round might turn out differently. A few of the nuclear companies using reverse mergers are seeing initial boosts to their stock prices amid the interest in finding energy sources for AI.
DF says its underground design could be scaled up to provide a great deal of energy while occupying little space. It claims that it could nestle one hundred nuclear reactors into a one-mile-deep hole on less than three acres of land and generate one and a half billion watts of electric power.
Parts of Kansas are prone to earthquakes. DF was asked about the geological stability of the site in Kansas.
The company said, “DF always conducts rigorous geological analysis when evaluating potential sites including seismic activity and other environmental factors.”
Please read Part 3 next