Lightbridge Corporation

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the LightBridge Corporation Business Update and Second Quarter 2024 Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce you to Matthew Abinante, Director of Investor Relations for LightBridge Corporation.

Thank you, Marvin, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. The company's earnings press release was distributed yesterday and can be viewed on the investor relations page of the Lightbridge website at www.ltbridge.com. Joining us on the call today is Seth Gray, Chief Executive Officer, along with Andrei Mushakov, Executive Vice President for Nuclear Operations, Scott Holcomb, Vice President of Engineering, and Larry Goldman, Chief Financial Officer. I would like to remind our listeners that any statements on this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Today's presentation includes forward-looking statements about the company's competitive position and product and service offerings. During today's call, words such as expect, anticipate, believe, and intend will be used in our discussion of goals or events in the future. Presentation is based on current expectations and involves certain risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ significantly from such estimates. These and other risks are set forth in more detail in Lightbridge's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lightbridge does not assume any obligation to update or revise any such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our first speaker, Seth Gray, Chief Executive Officer of LightBridge. Hello, Seth.

Hello, Matt, and thank you all for joining us to discuss LightBridge's second quarter 2024 results. LightBridge has continued to make progress on our fuel development program, and we will get into these updates shortly. I would like to begin today with an overview of what we are building at LightBridge. There's undeniable excitement around nuclear energy right now. At COP28, we saw an international commitment to triple nuclear capacity globally by 2050. Here in the U.S., the Advance Act, which was signed into law this month, has the potential to accelerate deployment of advanced nuclear technology. This momentum around the nuclear industry is critical as we confront the challenges of climate change, energy security, and producing enough electric power. Lightbridge fuel is truly unique. It doesn't consist of pellets in a tube. It's a complex, high-tech metallic rod with multiple zones engineered for performance. We expect that the center line of our fuel rods will be about 1,000 degrees C cooler than traditional fuel rods, deliver longer fuel cycles, power uprates, and higher burn-up, which means more energy from the fuel source. Our fuel development spans several sites across two continents, including Idaho National Laboratory, the nation's leading nuclear energy research and development laboratory. It is also DOE's lead nuclear fuel testing laboratory. Earlier this year, we celebrated a landmark achievement at INL. where we successfully demonstrated certain key aspects of the sophisticated extrusion process for light-bridge fuel. A video of this extrusion is on our website. We are also collaborating on two Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University program studies at MIT and Texas A&M University, along with NuScale Power. to better understand the performance of light-bridge fuel in a new-scale small modular reactor. We are also working with RATEN-ICN in Romania on a comprehensive engineering study to assess light-bridge fuel for use in CANDU reactors. These studies can potentially expand the applications of our fuel technology, paving the way for broader adoption of light-bridge fuel. Our goals are ambitious. to develop nuclear fuel that significantly improves economics, enhances nonproliferation, and the ability to quickly adjust power output by load following to complement renewables. Many companies are developing new reactor designs, but LightBridge is fundamentally rethinking nuclear fuel for the vast majority of reactors operating today and water-cooled reactors planned for the future. Now I'll turn the call over to Andrei Mushakov, Executive VP for Nuclear Operations, to review our fuel development activities. Andrei.