Terrestrial Energy Inc. (IMSR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Thank you. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Tyler Grombach, VP, Investor Relations and Public Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Terrestrial Energy's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Tyler Grombach, Vice President of Investor Relations and Public Relations. Joining me today are Simon Irish, Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Thrasher, Chief Financial Officer. Simon will begin with a review of our strategic and operational progress during the quarter, and Brian will follow with a discussion of our financial results. We will then open the call for questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that we have posted the quarterly results press release and summary slides to the investor relations section of our website. at terrestrialenergy.com. I'd also like to remind you that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements about our business, operations, and financial outlook. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to review the risk factors described in our SEC filings for a more complete discussion of those risks. With that, I'll turn the call over to Simon.

Thank you, Tarlan, and good morning, everyone. When we last spoke in May, I reported progress against the three-pillar framework of business plan execution that we set out in March guidance. Today, I will do the same for the second quarter and then spend the greater part of my time on our business model and our recent update to unit economics. Brian, then, will be the will follow with our financial results. Over the past several months, we've been in front of investors more than to any point in the company's history, and that was deliberate. The nuclear tech sector is in a period of secular development. is still a young and expanding sector for portfolio allocation as the market recognises the structural long-term bull case for SMRs and nuclear energy supply. In this context, we're hearing a strong desire to understand the factors that differentiate nuclear plant designs, nuclear technology, regulatory and supply chain strategies, and business models. We understand the importance of this to investors' analysis for nuclear tech stocks, and during this call, we'll be discussing some of the unique factors that strongly position terrestrial energy. I will summarize the five nuclear plant design factors that differentiate the IMSR plant, talk further on our business model, and then our differentiated dual-threaded energy. strategy all this differentiation is in pursuit of one aim the mission set by the company at its founding in 2013. to use nuclear innovation to solve the only problem worth solving with private capital, the affordability and capital efficiency of nuclear plants, and by extension, the cost of nuclear power, and solve that problem quickly and at scale. We are differentiated as everything we do, every decision we have made, points back to that founding problem statement in a clear and logically compelling way. This goal is the first point of differentiation. First, let me now talk through second quarter progress across the three pillars of business plan execution. referring to slides four and five of this quarter's investor update. And I will start with our engineering and regulatory programs. Thank you. Project Tetra and Project Tefla are test reactor and fuel line pilot projects, both in partnership with DOE, advanced in the quarter. Petra will support the data collection required for the NRC operating license application for the IMSR plant. Project TEFLA will develop the fuel production processes for IMSR fuel salt commercial supply. On the regulatory side, on May 12, the NRC issued its safety evaluation report, approving our top of report on postulated initiation events methodology. It follows the previously issued safety evaluation report on IMSR principal design criteria, an early development and a point of differentiation. As I described during our first quarter earnings call, these approved NRC analyses form foundational elements of the IMSR plant's licensing basis and can be referenced in future applications without re-evaluation. Our graphite irradiation testing continued at NIG Patton. one of the world's most powerful test reactors. This work is essential for terrestrial energy's reactor materials qualification, licensing readiness, as well as supplier down selection. Over the quarter, we adjusted our NRG testing program, adding further irradiation cycles, which is also evidence in quarter-on-quarter variances with R&D expenditures. Turning to the second pillar, supply chain developments. Procurement of fuel components and services continues for both the Tetra and Tefla projects. This quarter, we announced an engineering service agreement with Zachary Nuclear, which supports the development of projects at the Texas A&M Reli site, and importantly, the site characterization and data collection work to assemble an NRC construction permit application for the planned commercial IMSR plant. on that site. Turning to the third pillar, I'll a commercial pipeline of IMSR plant projects. In June, we signed a ground lease and research agreements with Texas A&M for exclusive use of a 77-acre site at the RELLIS campus. development, provides the path to complete site capitalization work and environmental evaluations for the IMSR plant and other facilities on the Texas A&M site in advance of construction. In May, we announced the relationship with Riot Platforms to supply electric power for data center operation. The party's intention is to develop a best-in-class pairing of a small and modular reactor plant with a large data center, taking advantage of the competitive operating characteristics of the IMSR plant, notably its capacity to use natural gas as a bridge fuel, initially to deliver far commercial operation and power supply and then longer term as a backup after nuclear systems are in operation This arrangement would take advantage of a differentiating feature of the IMSR plant design, namely the ability for its non-nuclear thermal and electric facility to be customized. This is not possible with the balance of plant systems tied to light water reactors. Our next step with Riot will be to down select to a first site, part of the program targeting 4 gigawatts of IMSR plant generation in support of RIOT data center operations. With the right platform development, the indicative generating capacity of our pipeline of commercial projects grows to 7.8 gigawatts. Given these and other characteristics of the IMSR plant design, our commercial opportunities cover three large market verticals, data centers, industrial process heat, and the replacement of retiring coal plant capacity. I would like now to turn to our updates on unit economics and start with a brief recap of our business model. Referring to slide six of this quarter's investor update. Bristol Energy does not plan to build, own, or operate IMSR plants. We will leave these activities to others with long established and recognized industry capabilities in construction and operation. In this respect, our business model is relatively conventional for a React developer. From this position, we can operate a capital-like business model, allocating capital efficiently to build high-margin businesses where we have a competitive and defendable advantage and typically based on proprietary IP concentration and production capabilities. With additional engineering work over the last 12 months and directed at projects such as TETLA, we have updated and re-estimated our IMSR plant unit economics and, by extension, our serviceable addressable market. Our business is to manufacture and supply to operating plants IMSR core units, a major reacting component, and designed to be replaced every seven years over the plant's 56-year design life, This implies the supply of 16 IMSR core units, or accumulative revenues of approximately $1.6 billion. The IMSR core unit contains the foundational IP of our company, an innovation that unleashes the extraordinary industrial potential of molten salt reactor technology. Our IMSR fuel salt supply business will capture proprietary expertise enabled now by TEFLA and other innovations. Both qualify as principal businesses because each combines concentrated proprietary IP with proprietary production capabilities. On slide 6, you will note that estimated cumulative lifetime revenues per unit are now $2.7 billion, up from $2.1 billion, with a blended gross profit margin of 33% up from 22% in our prior model. Of those revenues, 79% occur following the construction of the plant and will be secured through long dated supply contracts for the periodic replacement of the core units and regular fuel salt supply. The dominant activity at 58% of total revenues is core unit supply supply, with fuel salt supply being 21%. These businesses will drive most of the value creation in our future business. Our review of unit economics. included a re-estimation of gross profit margins for the core unit and fuel supply businesses to 33% and 40% respectively. higher than the margins for pre-construction and construction services. And this further points to the dominance of these two principal businesses. We expect to announce developments in the coming quarters as we move forward with our programs to build these two important supply businesses with their production facilities. Referring to slide 7, the updated unit revenue estimates have increased our service of addressable market to $2.3 trillion by 2050, up from $1.9 trillion, a $400 billion increase. This reflects the market that our plant design and supply businesses are built to serve at scale. I want to spend a few moments on our fuel strategy and development of IMSR fuel salt supply. As an our view, this is one of the most differentiated and underappreciated parts of the IMSR plant story. Referring to slide eight, conventional nuclear fuel production can be represented as a three-step process. the production of the isotopic form of the fuel, whether any EU, HALU, or even plutonium. Second, the production of the chemical form of the fuel, whether oxide, fluoride, or metallic forms. Third, the production of the physical form of the fuel, whether complex fuel in reactor assemblies or complex triso fuel elements. Each of these three steps requires a physical and discrete plant. It has to be built, licensed, and operated. For many novel fuel forms today, this requires the construction and operation of three new plants, one for each step. In contrast to virtually all other SMRs in the nuclear tech sector today, Whether those using generation three or four technologies, IMSR fuel salt production stops at step two. This is an important point of differentiation. As the IMSR is a molten salt reactor, a liquid-fueled reactor, rather than a solid-fueled reactor, its fuel does not have a physical form factor, so no step three. The reactive fuel feed to IMSR plants is in the form of powdered output from the chemical production process from step two, which in our case involves the fluorinated form of uranium and the addition of fluoride carrier salts. under a tightly confined production process to create the IMSR fuel salt of Alder. This approach therefore avoids the very considerable risk, cost, and complexity of step three and further points to a strong, scalable, and relatively capital-light, inexpensive dual supply chain to support IMSR plant operation at feed scale. I would like to draw attention again to the first step, the isotopic step, where we chose many years ago to use the long-established isotopic standard for civilian reactor fuel. LEU, enriched to less than 5%. This avoids the costs, uncertainties, and complexity of HALU chosen by other Generation 4 reactor developers, and the more complex and costly regulatory requirements that cascade sequentially into steps two and three of the fuel production process. While we rely on the industry's common isotopic form for our fuel, we've been working with Westinghouse on supply of the required chemical form. enriched uranium tetrafluoride. With this arrangement, terrestrial energy has one plant to build, a plant to complete step two. The production process now catalyzed by TEFLA, our fuel pilot project in partnership with the DOE and supported by Westinghouse Supply. we are heavily differentiated with this fuel supply strategy. In addition to our fuel supply differentiator unmatched in the nuclear tech sector of advanced reactors, We have five foundational nuclear plant and reactor technology differentiators, referring now to slide 10. First, our plant is small and right-sized at 390 megawatt electric. the market opportunity for financeable and near and co-located power generation. The IMSR plant is one sixth the size of conventional nuclear plant. Next, the IMSR plant's nuclear systems operate with a high energy density, enabling the design to capture the benefits of modular construction that are not possible with other Generation IV reactor technologies. This facilitates the powerful efficiencies of factory production of modular components for SWIFT on-site assembly. However, our differentiation does not stop here. Referring now to slide 11. The heart of our plant is a nuclear technology that offers a triple operating advantage. for economic performance and capital efficiency that we seek to deliver. IMSR Plant supplies thermal energy at a best-in-class temperature of 585 degrees Celsius. Its nuclear systems operate at low pressure and with a high level of inherent safety that can only be delivered using molten salt reactor technology. is a powerful economic virtues that must not be ignored. This triple operating advantage differentiates our reactor technology and nuclear tech sector. Together, these five factors are what allow us to achieve our mission and bring to the market the most capital-efficient plant in the SMR sector, and with our fuel supply strategy to do it quickly and at scale, as shown on slide 12. To close, in March we set guidance for the year and across the three pillars of business plan execution. We're pleased with our progress this quarter against our benchmark. We have observed high sector and factor volatility in equity markets over recent months. However, our experiences are that the structural bull market for nuclear power with SMR innovations is solid, secular, and is growing. this demand, we'll be deploying the most capital efficient plant in the SMR sector today. We recognize that the road ahead is one of program execution and traveled through the development of competitive skills and capabilities. Referring now to slide 14, during the quarter we continue to expand our organization. On the 29th of July, we announced the addition of Pam Cohen as Executive Vice President of Engineering. Pam joined us with more than 35 years experience in the commercial nuclear sector, including senior leadership positions at Westinghouse and Holtec. concurrently Kathy McCarthy joined our board of directors Kathy has a career in major projects in nuclear technology development at Idaho National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, and other world-leading national labs. Most recently, she was Associate Lab Director of Fusion and Fission Energy at Ickridge. And currently, she is responsible for the overall management of the United States participation in ITER. 27 nation international and benchmark fusion reactor project in France. We're pleased to be reporting this progress over the quarter and to be providing these updates. With that, I will turn the call over to Brian Thrasher, our Chief Financial Officer, to review our financial results.

Thank you, Simon, and good morning, everyone. Turning to the financials, and consistent with last quarter, I will present on a sequential basis comparing comparing to the first quarter of 2026, as this comparison is more informative given the transformation in the business in 2025. The theme this quarter continues to be discipline, spend, align to our programs, and a clean balance sheet. As summarized on slide 16, at quarter end, we have total cash, cash equivalents, and short and long-term investments of $283.4 million. This compares to $289.9 million at the end of the first quarter. Cash burned for the quarter was $6.4 million, or approximately $2.2 million per month. This compares the cash burn of $7.9 million for the first quarter of 2026, approximately $2.6 million per month. The decline largely reflects a shift in the timing of some testing activities, and I will provide additional color during my update. will increase during the second half of the year. Our agreement with Texas A&M for the RELLIS land leases has allowed us to work on the final stages of site analysis and characterization work. And that spend is now underway. This is consistent with the guidance we gave in the first quarter. Cash burn would increase through calendar 2026 as we scale testing programs, project activities and expand our organizational capabilities. I'll now turn to operating expenses. Research and development expenses were down approximately $1.1 million quarter on quarter This is related to timing and scope variances on some key tests, notably the addition of three graphite irradiation cycles at the NRG Pedden test reactor. We have also elected to build a greater irradiation and materials knowledge base in-house, which contributed to the decreased spending sequentially. General and administrative expenses were up approximately $700,000 quarter on quarter. The majority of this increase was from stock-based compensation, which increased by $500,000. These increases were driven by headcount growth as we scale organizational capacity to support our programs. Turning to our capitalization table as shown on slide 17. The issued and outstanding share count was unchanged during the second quarter of 2026. The fully diluted share count increased modestly by approximately 300,000 shares in the quarter due to stock option grants I previously mentioned. In summary, cash, cash equivalents, and cash investments make up the vast majority of our assets. we have modest current liabilities and lease obligations combined with no debts. Our balance sheet remains simple and clean. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. And our first question will come from Jeff Gramp with Northland Capital Markets.

Hey, good morning, guys. Simon, I wanted to spend a minute here on the change in the economics, the increase there. I know you covered it a bit in the prepared remarks, but I want to make sure I understood that. Is that more of a function of, I guess, shall we say, fine-tuning some of the estimates? Has anything fundamentally changed about the approach, your scope, or any other details we should be aware of?.

to better contextualize that. Thanks. Well, good question, Jeff. Well, from this model perspective, nothing has changed. It is an iteration in our estimates of unit economics. And the catalyst here has been the engineering work that we've undertaken over the last 18 months. And in particular, the engineering work that's going into TEFLA, which is the fuel line pilot. Perhaps that's the catalyst and the trigger for us to do a, to reissue the entire set of Union's economics. It's also an opportunity for us to talk further about our principal businesses and why we believe that they are attractive businesses and will provide the drivers of value creation going forward.

Got it. I appreciate those details. For my follow-up, on the DOE projects, Tetra and Tefla, can you cover what kind of would be the near-medium-term milestones to just track progress towards any potential, I guess, initiation of construction activities or anything else we can be...

keeping an eye out for. Yes. We haven't provided further guidance on exactly what those future milestones are, but other than to say that we are continuing to execute on both projects. Both projects continue to be very important for us, not least because of the support of the DOE in Project X execution. TETRA deals with some of the data collection activities that we need to complete to support the license application, and TEFL, as I mentioned earlier, TEFL is the opportunity for us at pilot scale to define precisely the fuel production processes that we will be looking to scale up in into the commercial plant for IMSR fuel salt supply. But we haven't provided details on exactly what milestones, precisely when to expect those on Tetra and Tetla, simply to say that those projects continue to be very much the focus of attention on our end, important projects, and we're working on continuing to execute on them.

Understood. We'll stay tuned. Thanks, Simon. Thank you.

And as a reminder, that is star one if you would like to ask a question. We'll go next to Alex Furman with Lucid Capital Markets.

Hey guys, thanks very much for taking my question. I wanted to ask you about the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel. Can you tell us how long you expect your plants to be using that gas as a bridge fuel, and what do the unit economics of your plants look like during that interim period?.

Yes, so Alex, this is, I think, you're talking to, speaking to a thing of very interesting characteristic of our plant. So we can use natural gas in the back end because the back end of our plant sits outside, we believe to sit outside the nuclear regulatory envelope. You can do this with certain generation four systems. So, in terms of the use of natural gas, I've given guidance previously on what a typical SMR project would look like, which is five plus five years. We would expect to be able to, in that first five years, to put into production commercial operation the back end of our plant where the steam systems will be driven by natural gas combustion. Now this would be a capital efficient way of doing it. It wouldn't be a combined cycle plant. That would be an operationally very efficient way of using natural gas. This would be a capital efficient way of doing it. Namely, you'll be using all the capex you'd be deploying. The systems you'd be deploying would be dual purpose systems. They can be driven by natural gas, and they can be driven by thermal energy from nuclear systems. So you will see, if you're simply using natural gas to create steam, you'll see the type of thermal efficiency that you'll get with a coal plant. You wouldn't see the thermal efficiency you'll get with a combined cycle plant. But nonetheless, it is a category capital efficient way of building a dual fuel backend to our plants, dual fuel namely nuclear systems and natural gas systems. We would anticipate because the backend of that plant would consist of standard industrial equipment, being able to bring power online commercially within five years. And we believe that's deeply relevant to many, particularly in the AI data center sector, where you hear the, you know, the, you hear the requirements there end, speed to power. Namely, what is super important to them is get access to power quickly, and they're not, for the moment, price sensitive. Over the long run, I expect them to be deeply price sensitive, but perhaps not in the short run. So this allows us to, for a data center operator, industrial world as well, it's not just data centers. This allows us to say we're able to deliver your requirement tactically in the near term, which is power, and we're also able to deliver what you need strategically in the 2030s in the long run, where you have clean, firm, cost-competitive nuclear power, and that's the advantage of this dual-fuel.

approach. Okay, that's really helpful. Thanks. And then I appreciated the description of, you know, the various stages of the nuclear fuel supply chain. Can you just kind of summarize for us a little bit? Is the takeaway there that your design can run on fuel that is commercially available today, or are you depending on some...

some new fuel that's going to come online in the future? Well firstly the neutronic form of it is commercially available today, that's step one. Step two, we require a chemical form of our fuel which is uranium tetrafluoride. Now fluorination as a chemical process, both conversion and deconversion, has been baked into the nuclear supply chain for decades and decades. here is that we require uranium tetrafluoride at whether uranium is enriched to 5%. Uranium tetrafluoride typically exists in the nuclear fuel supply chain on the other side of the enrichment process, namely the tetrafluoride is using natural uranium. But nonetheless, fluorination is, the chemical process is very well understood. We're working with Westinghouse on uranium tetrafluoride supply and, you know, That's the piece that we need to work on from the supply chain perspective. But it's a, I think a much, much smaller, much, much more straightforward step compared to the various steps that need to be brought to the table if you're using HALU and using HALU in physical fuel form, namely maybe metallic uranium used in physical reactor assemblies or or a triso fuel. So we think it's a much, much simpler process. And it requires just one plant, namely a plant which will produce uranium tetrafluoride enriched to less than 5%. And our product from that plant will be the IMSR fuel salt, where we'll be taking uranium tetrafluoride enriched to no more than 5%. and in carrier sorts, which are stand industrial chemicals, fluoride form as well. The production process would be a production process with wood naturally because it's producing a nuclear regulated product fuel. That production process would have a very tight set of production requirements and would be regulated as such.