Shine Technologies is a unique nuclear fusion company.

The conventional path for nuclear fusion projects is to raise and spend billions of dollars and decades of research and development in efforts to successfully find a path over, around or through the technical barriers that have prevented nuclear fusion from becoming a large scale energy production source.

Until relatively recently, that path was almost completely dependent on government grants. In cases like the ITER – International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – the effort has involved tens of billions of dollars (current estimate is $25 B), thousands of scientists, engineers, constructors and technicians and a construction schedule that stretches out over 29 years. The funding partnership includes six individual countries plus the European Union, which is supplying approximately 45% of the budget. Parts and materials for the project are being supplied by 35 different countries.

Greg Piefer, Shine Technologies CEO and Founder, chose a different path. He is a technical expert and fusion researcher who was inspired by the same dreams of unlimited fusion energy that drive others to study and work in the field, but he also has a commercial side that knows that investors, even governments, do not have the patience and the depth of resources needed to undertake and successfully complete projects whose characteristics are similar to ITER and don’t produce profits along the way.

He knew several known ways to stimulate and control a nuclear fusion reaction. The equipment used to produce those reactions doesn’t work fast enough to produce the energy needed to sustain the reaction and have enough left over to capture and sell to a commercial energy market. They are useful devices for teaching researchers about fusion and they are precise and reliable neutron generators for valuable tasks like remote logging of the materials in oil and gas wells.

Piefer’s valuable insight was that neutrons from fusion had special characteristics that could produce commercial value long before the equipment could produce energy at a competitive cost. He and the team that he inspired became convinced that they could create a sustainable path to commercial fusion energy by building, using and refining equipment and techniques that use fusion to produce neutrons for successively larger markets that require ever lower unit costs.

They established a four phase development program that remains their guiding development strategy. The first phase sells precise testing and measuring services that use Shine neutron generators where the neutrons supply their material penetrating power. Unlike the gamma rays used in conventional radiography – X-rays for materials and equipment – neutrons penetrate dense materials and are scattered by light elements. The critical nature of the components that benefit from neutron imaging leads customers to pay extraordinary prices for Shine’s specialized services. The neutrons produced by Shine’s imaging fusion devices sell for $100,000 – $1,000,000 per kilowatt-hour of energy released – which is a calculated metric derived from fusion reactions per second per dollar. (Those numbers do not have any misplaced zeros.)

The second phase, with a far larger Total Addressable Market (TAM), is medical radioisotope production. Using a process of continuous refinement and practice, Shine has been able to improve its devices to the point where they can profitably enter the market with neutrons that cost the equivalent of $100 per kWh (a factor of 1000 improvement over the first phase) that can be reduced to $20/kWh as the process is scaled up using their NRC licensed Chrysalis facility. That facility, located in Janesville, WI, was carefully sited next door to a regional airport that enables Shine’s medical isotopes to be rapidly delivered throughout the United States and competitively delivered almost anywhere.

Chrysalis is expected to be completed within the next two years. As Piefer describes during our conversation, it will be the highest capacity isotope production facility in the world. Piefer also described the invested effort that gives Shine the ability to produce isotopes that meet the stringent purity requirements for medical applications. The company’s radio chemistry skills are being exercised every day as they are already shipping isotopes created in a smaller facility.

The third step, which is still in the R&D phase is to use more capable Shine fusion devices that can produce neutrons for about $1/kWh to help recycle used nuclear fuel. During the conversation, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how this application will work. There are some nuances that are worth hearing.

The fourth step in the plan is to produce clean energy with a target price for neutrons of about $0.01-$0.02/kWh. That is the dream and the application that unlocks a TAM measured in the trillions of dollars.

Here is the company’s distillation of their four phase plan:

The framework: value per kilowatt-hour of fusion output
SHINE force-ranks fusion markets by unit economics, not market size — starting with the customers who pay the most per unit of fusion output, and using each market as commercial practice to drive costs down for the next. The metric: fusion reactions per second per dollar, a proxy for cost per kilowatt-hour.
The cost curve, by the numbers

Disclosure: Nucleation Capital, the sponsor of Atomic Insights, is an investor in Shine Technologies. We believe their vision and their execution elevates their commercial prospects above a number of companies whose primary selling point is an attractive, but distant dream.

Deployable Energy is a young company with a guiding principle. They believe that nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Founded in 2025 after a period of intensive study and design work, the company has developed a product branded as the Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB).

It’s a 1 MWe (3 MWth) micro reactor whose general features arise from a unique combination of nuclear fuel, reactor coolant and neutron moderator. The choices the company made arise from a desire to move fast using materials that are affordable and available for use today. That criteria requires the materials to be in commercial service from suppliers that can provide a price list or firm quote given delivery terms and conditions. Where appropriate, it also means that the materials are qualified for use in nuclear reactors and for exposure to neutron and gamma flux.

UNB designers determined that they would use regular fuel – uranium enriched to < 5% U-235 and in the form of uranium dioxide (UO2) in sintered pellets mass manufactured by an established vendor. Zirconium alloy tubes separate the fuel from the coolant and moderator and retain fission products that might be released by the ceramic UO2 pellets during and after operation. The heat transfer fluid, more frequently referred to as reactor coolant, is inert helium gas that is blown through the core at high velocity and a pressure of approximately 50 bar (~725 psi). The neutron moderator is water at atmospheric pressure and a temperature that is roughly equal to residential hot water.

The reactor vessel that is needed to contain the chosen combination of functional core materials is small enough and light enough to be transported in the back of a short-bed American pick-up truck with a crew cab.

A full nuclear heat source system with transportation level shielding will fit into a 20 foot shipping container with a mass of about 20 tons. The additional shielding and physical protection layers added on site will add another 40 tons to the nuclear heat source portion of the system.

The system will be shielded with sufficient materials to reduce neutron and gamma radiation to below regulatory standards both during and after operation.

The pressurized helium will transfer the heat generated in the reactor to heat exchanger(s) where either water or supercritical CO2 will pick up the helium’s heat for either steam or hot sCO2 production. Steam or sCO2 will go to the balance of plant, which will be housed in a 40 foot transportation container. Depending on application, hot fluids can be used in industrial applications or used to turn turbine generators. The ultimate heat sink is the atmosphere with air coolers mounted on top of the balance of plant container. Many of Deployable Energy’s target customers and applications value low water use.

Knowing that permissions required for construction, manufacturing, transportation and operating are key milestones, Deployable Energy began its pre-application engagement with the NRC in October 2025, within months of its corporate founding.

The company also began engaging with the Department of Energy regarding its initial demonstration unit. It wasn’t ready to compete for the Reactor Pilot Program, but it was one of four companies selected for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, which is the DOE’s follow-on to the foundational Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program. Deployable Energy plans to catch up to the Reactor Pilot Program participants and achieve initial criticality by July 4, 2026.

To learn more about Deployable Energy and their Unity Nuclear Battery, I talked with Bobby Gallagher, Deployable Energy’s CEO and Chief Technical Officer. Bobby’s background in the Australian military, oil and gas, shipbuilding, offshore development and successful technology start-up founder might seem to be a rather odd path towards designing a product using a nuclear fission heat source, but he explains how he arrived at his current position rather well.

During our discussion, Bobby described the decision criteria and process used to determine the UNB’s final combination of fuel, heat transfer fluid and moderator. He provided some of the historical background from other nuclear reactor designs that inspired the decisions.

But more of our conversation’s content was on the company’s choices related to manufacturing and deployment. We talked about Deployable Energy’s choice to put the center of its operations in Houston, Texas where the local manufacturing base for vessels, tanks, valves, tubes, skids, and other key components is well established and has been honed and expanded during the past several decades of world-leading “unconventional” oil and gas development.

Houston is an energy town with a deep understanding of the value and risks associated with providing power to the population. The city’s residents know how to manufacture, build and heavy equipment and they know how to create and finance innovative companies.

We had a fascinating conversation. I’m confident that you will learn something by listening to the show at least once. We no longer accept comments here for a number of reasons, but you can ask questions and make comments to @atomicrod on X.

There are few industries in the world that have a greater need for skilled communications than the nuclear industry. It’s a challenging technology to understand and to explain to those who are not really interested in the nitty gritty details. There is a significant portion of the industry that believes in silently going about its tasks, partly because there are so many parts of the field that are classified. The influence of the Silent Service is deep and wide within the nuclear sector.

There is a growing group that has a different point of view. They bring originality and experiences from outside of nuclear and are not constrained by the traditional tactics. Those newcomers aren’t starting from scratch, however. There are some experienced communicators who also have valuable thoughts and ideas that they are willing to share.

Jarret Adams, the founder of Full On Communications, has been professionally explaining the nuclear industry for more than 

He started his career as a business journalist. He learned about the nuclear industry during a stint with the Nuclear Energy Institute. While there, he learned the value and the promise of nuclear energy and chose to realign his career to support and defend what was, at the time, a bruised sector with exciting potential for growth and for making positive contributions to humanity.

He took advantage of his facility with the French language as he moved over to Areva, which had ambitious plans for international growth during the first phase of the nuclear renaissance that continues today.

As prospects for immediate growth diminished as an extended period of low cost natural gas was combined with strongly negative public perceptions caused by the widely publicized damage at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Jarret departed from Areva to become the Communications Director in the UAE for an international public relations firm. He was part of the program that enabled the UAE to expeditiously create a capable nuclear industry where there wasn’t one before.

Following his time in the UAE, Jarret founded Full On Communications to provide services to a broader and more diverse set of customers in the nuclear industry.

We discussed the importance of story telling, the value of purchased media time to enable companies to tell their own stories and the importance of techniques like press releases to keep the public, the press and investors informed about both progress and hurdles.

Full On Communications recently celebrated its 10th Anniversary. Jarret and his team have contributed to many of the initiatives and actions that have combined to dramatically change the future prospects for nuclear energy development. They look forward to many more years of growth as the next stage of the nuclear renaissance continues to emerge.

Aalo Atomics is a three year old company that is focused on designing, manufacturing and deploying nuclear reactors. Their stated goal is to achieve an electricity production cost of less than $0.03 (3 cents) per kilowatt hour.

It’s moving fast. It built a 40,000 ft² pilot scale manufacturing plant in Austin, TX in just one year.

It plans to achieve initial criticality for Aalo-X, its first commercial scale reactor, in July 2026. That’s less than four months from now. The facility at the Idaho National Laboratory is completed, the reactor and primary systems have been installed. The reactor fuel is being manufactured by Global Nuclear Fuels in Wilmington, NC.

The few remaining steps include the Department of Energy’s issuance of the final Documented Safety Analysis, fuel receipt and fuel loading.

For many inside and outside the nuclear industry, Aalo’s pace seems to be almost impossible. Even for those who believe it is possible for nuclear systems to be designed, reviewed, licensed and constructed far faster than ever before, the accomplishments approach the incredible stage.

For Atomic Show #343, Yasir Arafat, Aalo’s co-founder and Chief Technical Officer enthusiastically shares his company’s story. He tells us how the company and its products were designed and manufactured with efficiency, ease and availability at the center of decision making.

The company also decided at a very early stage that it would do everything in its power to manufacture and assemble its machines, taking control of its own destiny wherever possible. He bragged – rightfully so – about the company’s ability to attract exceptional employees, stating their belief that a superstar can be as much as 10 times more productive than an average employee.

He described how the company has avoided adding management layers, saying that the team they have assembled does not need anyone to manage their performance.

He emphasized that Aalo had assembled a strong network of suppliers with shared motives that help to make the vision achievable. Raw materials, sensors, wiring harnesses and many other parts that aren’t at the top of mind are best purchased rather than built in house.

During the discussion, Yasir told stories from his 15-year career as a reactor design engineer at Westinghouse and Idaho National Laboratory that helped to shape his technical and managerial decision making. It’s evident that he has done a lot of personal “lesson learning” and is now applying those learnings with a high performing team.

Aalo’s inspiring vision and milestone execution track record have attracted a strong and growing number of risk-accepting investors. Nucleation Capital, the parent company of Atomic Insights and the Atomic Show podcast, has been one of those investors from a very early stage in the company.

LIS Technologies (LIST) is a young company with deep historical roots. CRISLA (Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation), its laser isotope separation concept was developed and tested during the late 1980s and early 1990s under the leadership of Dr. Jeff Eerkens. Unfortunately, the path towards commercializing the technology hit a multi-decade detour as the result of terrible timing and a slow analytical process.

At the same time that the CRISLA development effort began producing intriguing results, there was a major effort to consume excess enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons complex. The solution was to convert that material into fuel so that it could be consumed in U.S. nuclear power plants.

The enriched uranium consumption program, known as “Megatons to Megawatts“, arguably made the world safer and provided significant benefits to American electricity consumers. Megatons to Megawatts also flooded the world’s enriched uranium market and eliminated investor interest in improving existing processes.

The CRISLA project was halted.

Just before the project was abruptly cancelled, the development team conducted several test runs and sent the produced samples out to be tested. The team was disbanded before the results came back. When they were finally available, they were filed in a place that wasn’t accessible to the development team. More than 20 years after the 1993 tests were conducted Jeff Eerkens, the team leader, learned that the technology that he and his team had built worked far better than they realized.

Christo Liebenberg, the current LIST President, visited the Atomic Show to share a more complete version of the above story. He tells us just how much better the enrichment results were compared to all other alternatives. He helps explain the importance and implications if successful commercial development can be achieved.

He explains how the equipment from the 1990s test was stored and recovered and he describes the success efforts to restore and improve the low pressure CO lasers at the heart of the system. He explains how LIST was formed and how it attracted the attention of Jay Yu, its Chairman, CEO, co-founder and initial investor.

Christo’s resume seems to have been designed to prepare him for the role of leading a laser isotope separation company. This is quoted from the LIST web site team page.

Mr Liebenberg started his career in the 1980’s at the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa where he later spearheaded the optimization of enrichment parameters of the Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (MLIS) process. By the end of the 1990’s his journey led him to Australia where he later joined Silex Systems Ltd as their Laser Manager, and continued this role at Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) in Wilmington, NC where he played a key role in the architecture of the Test Loop Facility. In 2012 he joined the research team at ASML where he was intricately involved with the R&D of state-of-the-art CO2 laser systems to generate EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet), used today to manufacture modern semiconductor chips.

We talked about the changes in the enrichment market and its growing need for both technological improvement and additional production capacity. The situation is far different today compared to what existed at the time CRISLA was initially shelved.

We ended our conversation with a personal inspiration story about Jeff Eerkens, the father of laser isotope enrichment. The great news is that he has lived long enough to participate in the process of developing his inventions.

I have no doubt that you will find this show to be informative and entertaining.

Ho Nieh, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, visited the Atomic Show for a wide ranging discussion about the agency, its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy, the importance of its mission to the energy future of the United States, the benefits of having organization led by a five person commission of decision makers and the ways in which the NRC is evolving to better serve the needs of the United States in an era of rapid technological change.

Chairman Nieh’s father worked as a nuclear qualified welder. His experiences during spring and fall outages were part of the inspiration for Nieh’s decision to pursue a career in nuclear engineering. He studied marine engineering at the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy. That major was the closest thing to a nuclear engineering program available at the sometimes overlooked 5th service academy.

Aside: (Everyone remembers the Military Academy, the Naval Academy (my personal favorite) and the Air Force Academy. Many know about the Coast Guard Academy. It’s less common to recall that the Merchant Marines play a vital role in the defense establishment and that they have their own service academy. End Aside.

Chairman Nieh told us about how he started his nuclear career as an instructor/operator at the S8G prototype at the Navy’s prototype site in West Milton, NY. He spent more than 4 years as a shift worker at the facility, likely having contact with 16 or more classes of trainees in the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program. After four plus years on rotating shifts, he was open to a suggestion from a former colleague to apply for a job as a resident inspector with the NRC. (Chairman Nieh is the first NRC Commissioner to have served as a resident inspector.)

At his service academy, Nieh was trained to seek roles of increasing responsibility where he could put his leadership training to its most effective use. His career on the NRC staff contains abundant evidence of choices made to deepen and broaden his capabilities as a leader in a complex and vital field.

Chairman Nieh described his appreciation of the skills, work ethic and depth of experience of his four fellow commissioners. It’s almost de rigueur for NRC commissioners to praise the collegiality of their Commission, but it sounded like he was describing an especially useful version of that descriptor is applicable to the current group.

We spoke about the agency’s evolving understanding of its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy and its growing understanding that the guiding language on that topic has always been included in Article 1 of the Atomic Energy Act. He acknowledged that there have been past leaders on the Commission and on the staff who felt that enabling was too “promotional” and wasn’t part of the NRC’s mission.

We spoke about the NRC’s very recent release of 10 CFR Part 53, the long-anticipated, new licensing framework whose creation was directed by the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act of 2019. Though analysis of the final, 701-page rule is still in progress, the early returns show that it has generally succeeded in becoming a risk-informed, performance-based, technology-inclusive framework for designing and licensing new nuclear reactors.

Though the rule is still under review and the draft has not yet been made public, the Chairman Nieh described how NRC is close to completing another assigned task, this one directed by Executive Order 14300. The Commission is reconsidering the use of the linear, no threshold (LNT) radiation protection model and the associated regulatory requirement to take action to keep radiation doses as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), even when the doses involved are already many multiples below the regulatory limit.

Chairman Nieh emphasized that the agency is maintaining its historic independence and that there are no external forces that are going to detract it from its role in maintaining safety. He also describes how keeping reactors safe does not mean preventing them from being built and operated. The nation needs abundant, affordable, reliable, clean power. It needs nuclear plants that can be built on time and within budget and a regulator that will not inhibit the accomplishment of the goal for safe and abundant nuclear energy.

I think you will enjoy the show.

Energy is Life begins with an alternative timeline – Zion Lights describes what her life would be like if her parents had not made the decision to emigrate from their village in India to become factor workers in the burgeoning Manchester manufacturing area before she was born.

It’s a sobering and enlightening depiction of the daily struggle for sustenance and survival in a place that is plagued with dire energy poverty.

During her education and early career, Zion was deeply embedded in the environmental movement and accepted many of its tenants. But as she repeatedly heard her colleagues and associates idealize simple existence and express a desire to return to the land and the traditional ways, she began to ask hard questions. Did they have any idea what it was like for those people who were still living on the land using traditional, primitive technologies?

Her path of asking hard questions and looking for the best scientifically supportable answers to those questions soon led her to become a closeted nuclear energy supporter. She learned how useful the technology was, especially as a way to provide abundant energy while virtually eliminating immediately harmful air pollution and climate changing emissions. But she still traveled in the environmental circles and was sure that she would be ostracized if she openly expressed her conclusions.

She tested that thesis several times and received the response that she expected. One of her colleagues once asked “you aren’t pro-nuclear are you?”

At a key point in her journey of discovery she was employed as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, an aggressive antinuclear NGO taking direct action to capture the public’s attention. Its illogical but unfortunately common position was to be both opposed to emission-free nuclear energy while also focused on fighting climate change. After finding herself in situations where her choice was to speak truthfully or to do her assigned job, she left the antinuclear group to become a pronuclear advocate, speaker and author.

We talked about her life trajectory, her recent book, and her pursuit of an abundant future where all people have access to the energy resources that give them agency and enable them to flourish.

I expect that you will enjoy this episode.

Abandoned uranium mine waste has been a big deal for decades, but almost no one had an inkling about what we should do to solve the problem. The scale of the challenge is huge, with various estimates ranging between 1 and 8 billion tons of uranium mining waste rock spread over more than 10,000 sites, nearly all of which are in western states and Native American sovereign nations. The Navajo Nation is the jurisdiction with the biggest burden – a substantial portion of the waste is on Navajo lands and spread over 500 or more sites.

Some have dismissed or minimized the problem by pointing to the relatively low material concentrations and the low radiation doses emitted. But low concentrations multiplied by tens of millions of tons and thousands of sites calculates to distressingly large numbers. It’s also important to remember that the contaminating minerals of concern are heavy metals that might be lightly radioactive, but they also have a level of chemical toxicity that also causes negative health impacts on humans and animals.

Though billions of dollars have been allocated for cleaning up the waste piles, there hasn’t been much progress because the available solution set has been limited to on-site burial in engineered landfills or moving the material “somewhere else.”

The landfill option doesn’t remove the potential threat to groundwater and the barriers are designed to last about 100 years. The vast majority of the contaminating minerals will still be there after the designed barriers have deteriorated. There has been little or no success in finding suitable or agreeable places to take the waste and even if there were, the mass of material means that most of the available clean up funds would be consumed in transportation.

Not surprisingly, there has not been a shortage of large established contracting companies willing to be paid tens of millions of dollars to study the issue and move some dirt around.

Enter John Lee and Greyson Buckingham, a pair of innovative entrepreneurs. They recognized the scale of the problem and the importance of effective solutions. They developed a patented technology called High Pressure Slurry Ablation that separates the contaminating minerals – mostly uranium and radium 226 – from sand and rock and concentrates those minerals into about 20% of the mass of the input stream. The clean fraction can meet stringent NRC unrestricted release criteria while the fraction containing the minerals will have a high enough concentration to turn a pile of contaminated material into valuable ore.

John Lee, with deep experience and education in mining and materials processing, developed the initial idea for HPSA. Greyson Buckingham added his legal training, business acumen and political experience. They formed a company called Disa Technologies in 2018 and patiently began the process of refining their ideas into useful and reliable machinery. Additionally, they entered into a plodding process of obtaining permission to deploy their problem-solving technology in an environmentally beneficial and cost effective manner.

Starting with a state regulatory engagement in 2018, Disa Technologies was recently – September 30, 2025 – awarded a service provider’s license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That license comes with a significant, but reasonably achievable condition to demonstrate HPSA on a commercial scale before entering into wide deployment of multiple units. Though it took about half a decade of staff engagement and Commission decision-making to determine the proper licensing framework, the NRC was able to review Disa’s service provider license application in six months (March–September 2025).

During the regulatory engagement process, Disa Technologies developed strong alliances with political representatives from affected states, with leaders among the Native American nations and with communities that have been seeking solutions to the waste issue for decades. They also produced solid scientific evidence of the efficacy of their inventions and demonstrated it to the satisfaction of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The saga is fascinating. For Atomic Show #339, I spoke with Greyson Buckingham about his company, its technology, the importance of cleaning up abandoned uranium mine (AUM) waste, the utility of HPSA in processing other critical mineral ores, the sometimes frustrating interactions with the NRC during period from 2020-2024 and the refreshingly competent and mission-oriented NRC that has been evolving during the past year.

Neither I nor Nucleation Capital, the sponsor of the Atomic Show and Atomic Insights, have any financial interest in Disa as of January 5, 2025, the date that this post and the associated audio recording are released.

Oklo is rapidly becoming a household name, at least among households with members who pay attention to energy industry developments and/or the headliners in the financial press.

Oklo is in the process of designing and permitting a family of small modular reactors that it plans to own and operate to produce electricity, heat and isotopes that it will sell to its end customers under long term power purchase agreements (PPA).

The specific type of SMR that Oklo has chosen as the one with the best chance to economically meet its needs as a power and heat producer – over the long haul – is a liquid sodium cooled, fast neutron reactor designed to closely match the features and performance of the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II). That impressively successful demonstration reactor, which produced about 20 MWe, ran reliably for 30 years (1964-1994).

Oklo has stated that it intends to produce 15, 50 and 75 MWe versions of the system in order to best meet the needs of the customers it is aiming to serve.

An integral part of the Oklo vision is to recycle used nuclear fuel, the material that is often referred to as spent nuclear fuel or even “nuclear waste.” The fact that the material still contains about 90-95% of its initial potential energy is finally becoming common knowledge. Oklo believes that fast spectrum reactors are the technology that is best suited for converting used fuel materials into useful energy, and it also believes that affordably recycling fuel is essential to meeting its long term economic projections.

Part of Oklo’s business model is focusing on community acceptance for its powerhouses. They are designed to be aesthetically pleasing to the point where Oklo powerhouse images are often used to illustrate articles about advanced nuclear energy that focus on other companies. The company has talked about designing the stations to be community gathering places and also talked about beneficially using waste heat for purposes like heating swimming pools or district heating systems.

For Atomic Show #338, I spoke with Craig Bealmear, Oklo’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Craig described his 30-year background in the energy industry, mostly working in finance and accounting for BP. He spent most of his career in their marketing arm selling gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to large customers, but also ran several commercial enterprises within the company.

We discussed Oklo’s experience as one of three publicly traded pure plays in advanced nuclear energy during a period when excitement about nuclear energy hit an inflection point and dramatically increased demand for a commodity in very short supply. (Note: The supply of publicly traded pure plays in nuclear has recently doubled, creating a situation that is testing the strength of the demand for those companies.)

We spoke about the company’s vision, its business model and the way that its business model drove the selection of liquid metal fast spectrum reactors. Oklo’s founders – Jake and Caroline DeWitt – were attracted to their ability to operate at near atmospheric pressure while achieving high enough temperatures to create steam at the conditions used by modern Rankine Cycle steam plants. They believed that characteristic, along with the impressive results of EBR-II passive safety tests, will allow them to reduce the portion of their systems that are classified as safety-related. Sodium has been proven to be chemically compatible with stainless steel over a long period of high temperature operation, a characteristic with cost reduction potential.

Of course, we also had to talk about the design and operating provisions needed to mitigate and minimize the impact of sodium’s well known chemical reactions with water and moist air. That characteristic requires almost as much attention to keeping the primary coolant system leak tight and reliably separated from the clean steam site of the plant as has always been invested in pressurized water reactors. Low pressures make fabrication of the primary coolant pressure boundary for sodium cooled reactors a little less challenging than it is for very high pressure water.

Early in its development, Oklo invested a substantial amount of time recovering data from the EBR-II and the Fast Flux Test Facility. Craig and I talked about the value that quality testing and design data and how Oklo’s investment in organizing, understanding and using that data gives it a valuable head start compared to others who also have access to the government’s results.

During its decade+ period of operation, Oklo has developed strong relations with the Department of Energy and its national labs. It has recently announced several partnerships with others that are interested in fuel recycling, uranium enrichment and fast spectrum/liquid metal cooled reactors. It is interested in the potential for supplying – or buying – materials and components when it is mutually beneficial.

As the CFO, Craig is working to mitigate some of the concerns he has with the “asset-intensive” nature of Oklo’s build, own and operate business model. We talked about several paths that Oklo might pursue to reduce the capital requirements.

Though Oklo has been interacting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 2016, it is planning to take advantage of a recently reinvigorated capability for the Department of Energy to authorize the construction, operation and testing of pilot reactors. We spoke about DOE authorization as an interim step that can speed the process while enabling a later relicensing by the NRC for commercial operation. Oklo’s long term plan is to use repeated COLs under Part 52 with reactors manufactured under a manufacturing license.

We also talked about Atomic Alchemy and how the acquisition of that company fits Oklo’s future plans.

Counting Atomic Alchemy’s VIPER reactor, Oklo has three reactors in the DOE’s recently announced Reactor Pilot Program. The other two are Aurora-INL and Pluto. Aurora-INL is a 15 MWe version of Oklo’s powerhouse design while VIPER is a reactor that is optimized to produce high-demand isotopes. Very little information has been released about Pluto, but the project name offers a hint about one of its major design characteristics.

The company is actively pursuing all three reactor projects, but they intend to push hardest on one of the three to achieve critical operations by July 4, 2026. Kiewit is serving as the engineering, procurement and construction contractor for the Aurora-INL project.

One of the final topics we discussed was the company’s employee base. Oklo employs more than 200 people and has 45 openings listed on its job board. Either Jake or Caroline interviews every potential hire before they are added to the team.

We ran out of time before we could discuss topics like the manufacturing facility plans, the current progress of recycling efforts or the politics involved in moving the US away from the 50-year old de facto policy of avoiding fuel recycling.

Disclosure: My wife and I have a small position in Oklo. As Nov 19, 2025, It represents less than 1% of our net worth.

NexGen Energy is a uranium mining company that is nearing the end of a long transition from a successful exploration entity to a uranium producing company.

The company is in the final stages of hearings and approvals needed from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to allow it to begin constructing the mine infrastructure for its Rook 1 project. In a term that might be familiar to petroleum energy geologists, Rook 1 is a supergiant resource.

Aside: In the petroleum business, a supergiant field is one that contains at least 5 billion barrels of oil. There are more than 250 million pounds of uranium in the measured and indicated mineral resources in the Rook 1 project. Google’s Gemini says that one million pounds of natural uranium contains 31 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE). It follows that 250 million pounds contains more than 7.5 billion BOE. End Aside.

The ore in the Arrow deposit part of Rook 1 has an exceedingly rare uranium concentration that is as high as 69% uranium oxide. On average, the deposit measures out at well over 3%.

Leigh Curyer, NexGen’s founder and CEO, visited the Atomic Show to talk about his company’s successful and continuing exploration program. We talked about the growing need for uranium fuel as the nuclear energy market expands, the tightness in the current supply chain and the impacts of a new production source that is planning to supply between 22% and 25% of the current annual uranium supply.

Curyer spoke about NexGen’s investments in planning and engineering a mine that balances the needs for profitable extraction, minimum environmental impacts and maximum community benefits. He described the company’s strategy of remediating impacts as the mining continues so that there is less to do once the mine closes.

If you are interested in uranium mining or if you are concerned about the sustainability of nuclear energy in terms of ensuring an adequate fuel supply, you will find this to be a fascinating conversation.