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.

Dr. Hash Hashemian has been an inspiring leader in the nuclear industry for half a century. He was recently inaugurated as the President of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) after serving for a year as the Vice President/President Elect.

His company, AMS Corporation, provides key services and products to nearly every nuclear power plant in the United States and a growing portion of those located outside of the United States. He founded AMS with a partner in 1977 and became the sole owner in 1986. Even though it is a relatively small company with an average head count of 100 people, AMS maintains a strong research and development organization. AMS employees, including Dr. Hashemian, have published hundreds of papers in academic journals and produced a significant body of original research.

Hash is a nuclear energy industry expert with an enormous breadth and depth of experience.

On this episode of the Atomic Show, we skimmed over a sampling of his knowledge of the industry. We talked about his visions and plans for the next year as the President of ANS, his view of the future of nuclear energy and our slightly differing views of the role that the government should play in getting a nuclear power plant building effort off of the ground.

We discussed Dr. Hashemian’s successful, inspiring effort to obtain not one, not two, but three PhD’s over a 10 year period while running a business and raising a family. Besides his incredible work ethic, he shared another tactic – he devoted the hours of 9:00 pm to 2:00 am to study each day during that decade.

Dr. Hashemian is a proud graduate of the University of Tennessee. His business is headquartered in Knoxville, not far from Oak Ridge. He is an active member of the East Tennessee nuclear industry, which currently includes 156 companies. We talked about Tennessee’s leadership within the industry, the investments that the state is making in maintaining its leadership and the special advantages of having Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12 and legacy defense-related nuclear sites that are being cleaned and leveled. These sites provide large tracts of land that are available to nuclear-focused companies at attractive prices.

Colleges and universities in East Tennessee, including the University of Tennessee, Tennessee Tech and Roane State Community College are academic assets that are training engineers and technicians in fields relevant to the nuclear industry.

Dr. Hashemian reminded us that states like Texas and Virginia are also racing to be nuclear industry leaders.

We took advantage of Dr. Hashemian’s special knowledge of nuclear power plant instrumentation and control systems to discuss the reasons why the U.S. nuclear power plant fleet almost exclusively still uses analog protection and alarm systems.

We talked about some of the changing I & C needs for advanced reactors and the usefulness of a wide variety of sizes and configurations for nuclear energy facilities. Dr. Hashemian is a believer in an “all of the nuclear plant sizes above” catalog.

Dr. Hashemian also shared his nuclear energy origin story. Like several other prominent nuclear industry leaders, he grew up in Iran during the period when it was still ruled by the Shah of Iran. Throughout almost all of the 1970s, the Shah was pursuing a plan to build 20 large nuclear power plants to provide electricity to his rapidly modernizing country.

That plan was openly aimed at reducing Iran’s domestic oil and gas consumption so that more of those valuable products could be exported into the world market.

Aside: As Atomic Insights has said many times, nuclear fission heat can replace other sources of thermal energy including oil, gas and coal. That gives those whose wealth and power is sourced from combustion fuels a powerful incentive to shape public and political attitudes about their most capable competitive technology. End Aside.

The Shah’s government supported thousands of students – including Hash Hashemian – in programs to study nuclear science and engineering and other related fields in some of the best universities in the world. The expectation was that those student would return to Iran and help develop the Shah’s expansive nuclear power program.

After the Shah was overthrown, some of the students returned to Iran, but many – like Dr. Hashemian – chose to remain in the United States and build their lives and careers here.

Those enterprising, hard-working immigrants – first generation Americans – continue to play an important role in nuclear energy development. The second generation is also contributing their skills, work ethic and intellect.

You’ll enjoy this show. We’re sure of it.

Now a word from our sponsor.

As you’ll hear during the show, there is an intensifying interest in building new nuclear power plants in the U.S. and around the world. Customers are clamoring for power sources that are clean, abundant, reliable and affordable. Only nuclear energy has the potential to meet those criteria without regard to prevailing weather or geography.

The challenging, but addressable criteria is “affordable”. Some customers have needs that are so immediate, they are willing to pay a premium and even invest in product development.

Nucleation Capital, the sponsor of this show, is also investing in emerging companies – aka entrepreneurial ventures – that are developing technologies, processes and supporting systems designed to lower cost and reduce schedules. Nucleation Capital Fund I is structured to allow accredited investors – people with either $1 M of investable assets or $200 K in annual income – to become limited partners (LPs) and invest a portion of their portfolio in advanced nuclear energy ventures. The general partners in the fund invest alongside the LPs, giving them a strong vested interest in picking winners from a growing list of exciting customers.

If you’re interested in joining the journey, seizing the opportunity for strong returns and helping nuclear energy to develop, please visit the Nucleation Capital web site or contact us directly.

Blue Wave AI Labs has been creating and supplying artificial intelligence tools – mainly in the form of machine learning – to operating nuclear power plants since 2016. Their initial set of tools focused on improving boiling water reactor core reload designs.

The company was formed to address the chosen problem because it was a time consuming – aka expensive – data-driven task with a large number of variables, each with a significant amount of uncertainty that was mitigated by inserting large margins. Though operating with those large margins provided safety and operational reliability, the extra margins led to increased costs/reduced revenues in the form of higher than necessary enrichments, shorter refueling cycles and/or operating at a lower than rated power.

Jonathan Nistor is Blue Wave AI’s chief operating officer and one of its early employees. During his visit to the Atomic Show he provided a lot of deep technical details about addressing the challenges of designing BWR core reloads and also provided some insights into new directions that AI (artificial intelligence, not to be confused with Atomic Insights) can take to improve the operating efficiency of nuclear power plants.

We also talked extensively about the potential for AI to address difficult and time consuming documentation and review tasks that require reliable access to cited reference material, a comprehensive understanding of plant license basis and the requirements associated with license applications for both changes to operating reactors and initial license applications for new, advanced reactors.

We talked about the way that suppliers like Blue Wave AI meet the requirements for cyber security and how they protect their clients’s data for both security and proprietary reasons.

We also discussed the current state of acceptance for AI tools from the point of view of nuclear licensees and the regulators that oversee the industry.

This episode is a bit more technical than usual, so it should appeal to the hardcore geeks in the audience. But it’s also accessible to anyone who wants to gain some understanding of the challenges facing the operating fleet and the assistance that the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence can provide.

It’s important to point out that the nuclear industry is interested in AI tools that help humans do their job better, not in tools that result in machines driven by codes to make decisions that humans should be making.

Enjoy the show.

Standard Nuclear emerged from the start-up stealth mode in early June 2025 with the announcement of successfully raising $42 million from a group of venture capitalist led by  Decisive Point with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Washington Harbour Partners, Welara, Fundomo and Crucible Capital.

Though Standard Nuclear is young enough to have a single page web site, it owns and operates the largest TRISO – tristructural isotopic – fuel production facility in the world outside of China. That facility was purchased during the Chapter 11 reorganization of Ultra Safe Nuclear (USNC), a formerly sprawling advanced nuclear company that outran its financing. Along with the facility, its equipment, land and operating procedures, Standard Nuclear acquired a fully functioning, dedicated team of TRISO nuclear fuel specialists.

As described in a June 11, 2025 article in the Wall Street Journal, the fuel manufacturing team at Standard Nuclear was so committed to the vision of becoming a globally important fuel supplier to the advanced nuclear sector that many of them worked for months without pay to keep their facility operational and sale-ready during the USNC bankruptcy proceedings.

Dr. Kurt Terrani, CEO of Standard Nuclear, is our guest for Atomic Show #333. We discuss his personal trajectory in becoming one of the world’s leading technical experts on TRISO fuel production and then becoming the corporate leader of one of the world’s leading TRISO fuel manufacturing companies.

Kurt told us how the Standard Nuclear team began working together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) program (funded by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.) The fuel development segment of that program both preceded and superseded the larger AGR program. In a rare example of long term, consistent planning supported by reasonably consistent funding, the TRISO fuel development and testing program was sustained through completion for nearly 20 years (2002-2021).

One output of the program was NREG-2246 – Fuel Qualification for Advanced Reactors – that provides license applicants that use TRISO in their design a standard path to analyze the fuel form to prove it meets radioactive retention barrier requirements for their particular design under projected operating and accident conditions.

We talked about the paradigm-shifting nature of building nuclear power systems where the radioactive material is retained in the fuel material at all anticipated reactor temperatures during normal operation or accident conditions. When license applicants earn NRC approval using NUREG-2246, their reactors are viewed as achieving functional containment that greatly lessens the boundary and safety system requirements for their complete nuclear heat source system.

With expensive fuel and reduced capital investment, nuclear cost accounts might shift to be something closer to those more commonly associated with natural gas fired turbines (either Rankine steam cycles or Brayton gas cycles). For TRISO reactors, nuclear becomes a fuel-dominated business. Nuclear energy designers recognize this shift and have been developing power systems that can economically respond to load changes to reduce fuel consumption during low demand/low price periods.

Terrani provides insights on TRISO fuel construction and on the processes required to produce the fuel to meet the stringent requirements. He describes the modular nature of the fabrication line and the methods used to maximize productive capacity for each line and the way that enterprise capacity is expanded to meet customer demand. We talk about the coating improvement paths and TRISO’s ability to use a variety of enrichments and fissile materials in the coated particles.

We discuss how the nearly infinite variations can introduce market and engineering challenges.

Terrani uses the analogy of automobiles and gasoline to illustrate his vision of many different brands of TRISO-based reactors using a limited menu of interchangeable fuel particles. Standard Nuclear”s name calls back to the time when John D. Rockefeller recognized that oil products would find larger markets if they were standardized so that equipment manufacturers could focus on their equipment with the confidence that there was a reliable supply of fuel with predictable characteristics.

That doesn’t mean that Standard Nuclear intends to produce only one kind of fuel, but it does mean that the company is working with as many developers as possible to create standards and prevent a high cost situation where every reactor line needs its own unique fuel. With standardization, TRISO fuels become a commodity whose costs steadily decline as billions to trillions of particles are produced.

If you are interested in the current state of TRISO manufacturing development and in the story of a dedicated team with a vision, you will enjoy this show.

Copenhagen Atomics is an ambitious Danish company with a bold, potentially world-changing vision. They’re driven by a goal of manufacturing one reactor per day from a high quality, certified factory. If they achieve that goal, they would be adding an additional 37 GW/year of heat to the global energy supply. They want to help make affordable, reliable, clean and abundant energy available to everyone on the planet.

Thomas Jam Pedersen is a co-founder and the CEO of Copenhagen Atomics. He recently visited the Atomic Show to describe his company, its history, its vision and its technology. He provided a wealth of information during a lengthy conversation and also shared a brief about the company, its facilities, its potential markets and the physical fabrication and testing units.

The company was founded by a group of four Danish engineers and businessmen with a complimentary set of valuable skills and experience. They were each “bitten by the thorium bug” through individual research starting in the late 2000s. They came to the decision to start a company about ten years ago through a series of meetings at Copenhagen bars and restaurants.

Copenhagen Atomics is developing a molten salt reactor that uses a kickstarter actinide fuel (U-233, U-235 or Pu-239) along with a thorium blanket and heavy water moderator to produce 100 MW of heat. The nuclear heat source system – including pumps, tanks, pipes, valves and the proprietary “onion core” reactor – fits into a standard shipping container. After 5 years of operation, the molten salt contains almost as much fissile material as it did when it was initially loaded into the fuel.

In the future, the fissile material inventory at the end of 5 years will be equal to, or slightly greater than it was at the beginning. The Waste Burner reactor will eventually become a thermal spectrum breeder reactor that adds to the world’s fissile material inventory.

The container and its included systems would be fully manufactured and tested at the factory, but it would be shipped to its destination with no loaded fuel using conventional shipping methods. The destination facility could use heat for a conventional steam power plant or it could use the heat for an application like manufacturing fertilizer or desalinating water.

In the current business model, the receiving facility would be erected by a customer that had contracted to purchase heat coming from the pre-fabricated reactor furnished by Copenhagen Atomics. The power plant design and construction would include a series of shielded “cocoons”, each with two meter thick walls and enough internal space for the container and a number of tanks and connections.

Each reactor would be inserted into a cocoon, loaded with fuel from tanks in the cocoon and connected to the receiving heat system using welded connections. The welding would be done by an automated system that is already under development and testing at Copenhagen Atomics’s 9,000 m² fabrication and testing facility in Copenhagen. (See photos in the company presentation.)

The containers and their included mechanical systems are fabricated out of conventional stainless steel and designed to be affordably replaced every five years. At the end of this operating life, they would be defueled and replaced with the fuel salt put into the new reactor. The old reactor would be stacked into a pre-existing storage facility at the power plant where it would remain for several decades to allow radioactive isotopes to decay.

After the containers have sufficiently cooled – from a radioactivity perspective – they could be recycled into materials for new reactors or compacted for storage at low level waste facilities.

Though Denmark does not allow the government to invest in nuclear power facilities, it has a respected regulator with many decades worth of experience in regulating radioactive materials and nuclear research facilities that include reactors. But Copenhagen Atomics’s current development path includes construction of an initial fissioning test reactor at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. That facility is currently planned to be completed in 2028, but that date can vary depending on a number of factors, including the time required to arrange appropriate financing.

Copenhagen Atomics is a company founded by practical engineers that know that real products require a vast amount of physical testing. They build parts – including tanks, pipes, valves, sensors and pumps – and assemble them into both partial and complete systems that allow them to test materials and performance at operating conditions. They started with non radioactive salts and are progressing to tests and demonstrations using non-fissile actinides and then to the actual fuel materials that will be used in commercial facilities.

So far, the company has accumulated 100,000 hours of actual system testing. They have developed refined test loops that are good enough to have been sold to other researchers working on molten salts. They have developed large scale salt production systems and gradually increased their production rates.

If all continues to progress, Copenhagen Atomics expects that its first commercial reactor unit will be operating in about 5 years. But Thomas Jam is a practical and patient man who realizes that there are lot of obstacles left to overcome.

Disclosure – Nucleation Capital is an investor in Copenhagen Atomics. We believe that the company’s vision is important, visionary and potentially valuable. We appreciate the iterative approach to design and manufacture; it is vital for teams designing something new to build, test, redesign and rebuilt as often as needed to produce refined products.

We think you will appreciate the opportunity to learn more about Copenhagen Atomics in a discussion that delves into some deeply technical issues.

The University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne (UIUC) is planning to build a uniquely capable micro reactor project on its campus. For decades, the university hosted a traditional research reactor that supported important research projects and provided operating experience. But, like the majority of university research reactors, it did not produce any useful heat or electricity.

Kronos MMR has a different focus. In its FAQ on the project, UIUC describes the purpose of the project as follows:

[The project will] shape the future of nuclear research, move [our] campus to a cleaner energy future, create unique educational opportunities for our students, and develop a skilled workforce ready to address the urgent need for carbon-free energy technologies across our country and beyond.

Caleb Brooks is an associate professor in the Grainger College of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also the Kronos MMR Project Lead. He visited the Atomic Show to describe the project, its goals and the impact that it is and will have on the campus and nearby communities.

The Kronos MMR is a full scale, but power-derated, version of Nano Nuclear Energy’s high temperature gas cooled reactor. In commercial use, the reactor will be able to produce 45 MW of thermal power (~15 MWe). As a campus-based research reactor, Kronos MMR will be limited to operating at 10 MW thermal, a little less than 25% of what the reactor core will be able to handle. That limit is based on the current power cap placed on reactors licensed by the NRC using the class 104(c) process.

The lower power will, logically enough, mean that the reactor core can run 4.5 times as long before needing to be refueled. If it is operated at the somewhat lower capacity factor expected in an academic environment compared to a commercial environment, the time between refuelings will be extended even further.

Dr. Brooks explained how the research reactor classification was chosen to help the Kronos project move faster than it would otherwise move under a class 103 commercial license process. The University began its official engagement with the NRC in May 2021.

Though we did not get into details about the business partner situation during the discussion, some readers might recall that the UIUC micro reactor program began as a partnership with the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. That entity ran into financial difficulties and declared bankruptcy in 2024, after it had done a substantial amount of engineering and design work for its 45 MWth high temperature gas cooled reactor that it called MMR®.

Nano Nuclear Energy purchased the designs and other intellectual property associated with USNC’s MMR, including the projects that the company had begun. Nuclear News published an article in April 2025 titled UIUC and NANO Nuclear reboot plans for a FOAK research reactor that provides more details about the transition and the plans to move the project towards completion.

During our conversation, Caleb indicated that the transition had gone reasonable well, but that the uncertainty during the period leading up to and immediately following USNC’s collapse had added about 18 months to the initially envisioned project schedule.

One of the primary topics of our conversation was the effort that the University has undertaken to build public support for the project. Given the campus location, this will be a pioneering effort showing how small and micro reactor projects can be accepted and located very close to customers, including residential communities.

You will enjoy this show. I promise.

The Nuclear Company (TNC) describes itself as “a fleet-scale American nuclear deployment company.”

TNC is a young, visionary company driven by what business author Jim Collins describes as a BHAG – “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” – in his best-selling book titled Built To Last. TNC’s intermediate goal is to deploy 6 large nuclear reactors in the U.S. while developing a complete platform that enables repeated projects using a design once, build many approach.

For a company that was just formed in 2023, that qualifies as an enormously audacious goal.

One of the examples Collins used for a BHAG was Boeing’s 1952 decision to build the 707 as one of the world’s first commercial jet aircraft. But at the time, Boeing was an established, profitable company whose head count had reached over 50,000 employees during WWII and that was still producing several different bombers for the Air Force, including the large, jet powered B52.

TNC’s leap seems to be substantially larger than the one that Boeing successfully made. But, with the right people forming the right teams and gathering the resources available, TNC’s goal might be possible. The Atomic Show first covered this intriguing company in August of 2024, about a month after the company exited a formative, quiet year, when Juliann Edwards, TNC’s Chief Development Officer, appeared as a guest on Atomic Show #319.

TNC summarizes its strategy as follows:

The Nuclear Company’s approach can be articulated through our four-pronged strategy:

For this episode of the Atomic Show, I spoke with Joe Klecha, TNC’s Chief Nuclear Officer (CNO), to learn more about how the company plans to achieve its initial BHAG while establishing the foundation for future growth.

Joe has a deep well of practical knowledge accumulated during a lengthy career as an on-site, walk-around manager. He told me how the most important job of management is to enable skilled subordinates to perform with as little friction as possible. (I’m paraphrasing here.). For a site-level, project manager that translates into ensuring that crafts people arrive on prepared work front with all of the necessary tools and documentation.

A key focus for The Nuclear Company is to avoid paper processing. Most listeners will be amazed to hear Joe talk about the wagon loads of paper that accompanied much of the work done at Vogtle 3 & 4.

We talked about the value of well crafted contracts that properly share risk among contributing entities while also establishing a system of progress payments and milestones that give all participants a shared goal. Joe told me about the exceptional team TNC is building and the way it is rapidly gathering interested and committed partners.

Joe displayed his broad reach of technical knowledge during our conversation, providing a point of view that is rarely found in audio commentary by people whose expertise is mostly based on academic research, computer aide design or computational model simulations. We talked about concrete, steel, rebar, interfaces, managing multiple work fronts, the importance of addressing worker density, ways to improve workforce productivity, evaluating sites, finding and incentivizing capable suppliers, and building contractor teams.

I’m still in the willing to be, but not yet convinced camp regarding TNC’s chances for success. Given where we are today, the chances are better than they were two years ago when the company founders were developing their BHAG. But they still have a very long road to travel and the competition is already heating up.

Avoiding ending on a down note, my conversation with Joe Klecha left me more enthusiastic than I was before about their progress and their opportunities.

Please listen to this show. It will provide a unique point of view regarding the lessons America has learned so far about building new nuclear plants in the 21st century.

The Honorable Dr. Kathryn Huff is an associate professor in the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the director of the Advanced Reactor Fuels laboratory and currently specializes in nuclear reactor core neutronics and multi-physics modeling.

She served as the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy from May of 2022 through May of 2024.

We talked about her tenure at the Department of Energy and the somewhat jarring transition from being a university professor with frequent contact with undergraduate students to running a bureaucratic agency inside the Washington beltway. We chatted about the Byzantine and somewhat plodding nature of the federal budgetary process and the reasons why the process was designed to insert a certain amount of deliberative reviews and second checks before making decisions, especially when they carried large monetary implications.

We paid a little extra attention to the process of implementing the Congressional appropriation of $2.72 B for the Domestic Low Enriched Uranium Supply Chain.

We discussed some of the more enjoyable aspects of her position, including the opportunities to teach both decision makers and staff members about the utility of nuclear energy and some of the reasons why it is such a fascinating and important scientific, technological and economic topic. We spoke about her visits to national labs, universities and international centers of nuclear energy research and development.

She mentioned that the opportunity to host students and other groups of young people was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of her job. She appreciated the opportunity to share some of her excitement about nuclear energy.

We also talked about several recent Executive Orders with the potential for significant impact on energy in general and nuclear energy more specifically.

One of the Executive Orders that we discussed does not include the word “energy” in its title or anywhere in its text, but it holds the potential to make an impact on the future of nuclear energy development. Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies addresses the independence of certain agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, within the Executive Branch of the federal government. The NRC’s independence has often been described as a major component of its effectiveness as a regulatory body.

Dr. Huff joined with two colleagues to publish a commentary in Scientific American about the possible implications of reducing the NRC’s independence. On the Atomic Show, she offered her perspective and provided some concerns worth thinking about.

I hope you enjoy this episode. Please participate in the comment discussion, but be aware that comments will be closed sometime after they’ve been open for two weeks.