Isabelle Boemeke is a successful fashion model who chose an avocation that still confuses many of her friends and colleagues. She became an early pronuclear influencer. If you ask Google AI “who is the first pronuclear influencer” the answer will be Isabelle Boemeke.



Among her communications tools is a popular Tic-Toc account loaded with video clips explaining various aspects of nuclear energy. She is also an active contributor on X and Instagram. Most of her pronuclear communications channels are posted under the identity of an avatar called Isodope.



In September 2022, she stepped onto the TED Talk stage to give a talk titled Nuclear Power Is Our Best Hope To Ditch Fossil Fuels.



Isabelle has now added a book titled Rad Future (Published by Penguin Books) to her communications arsenal.






She visited the Atomic Show to talk about her journey from a small rural village in southern Brazil to the developed world as a fashion model. Following success in that field, she blazed her own path to become a strong, public advocate for the increased use of nuclear energy.



We spoke about her first hand experiences living with unreliable, expensive and limited source of energy and electricity and the wonder that she experienced when first moving to the United States.



She explained how she became so enamored with nuclear energy and with its potential. She gave Nick Touran of WhatIsNuclear credit for most of her early lessons and for being a continuing resource who provides guidance and technical reviews whenever asked.



We spoke about her frustration with people whose solution to energy scarcity and climate change is to dramatically reduce – degrow – modern society’s energy consumption. She falls solidly into the abundance camp, with the firm belief that nuclear power provides a path that will provide humans the capacity to use more energy to do more productive work while also reducing the material intensity of our lives.



Not surprisingly, she is not just a “more work” advocate; she also likes the fact that getting more energy from less material gives us the opportunity to have more fun.



Isabelle considers nuclear energy’s concentrated generation and relatively small impact on land use to be a major plus. It allows agricultural land to be used to grow food or to be rewilded instead being occupied with ever expanding diffuse energy sources like biomass, wind and solar.



She’s strongly in favor of solar when it is added on the rooftops of already occupied land. In fact, we talked extensively about the use of appropriate resources in various locations. Solar is a great resource in sunny, dry, mid latitude places like much of Australia and California while it’s a far less capable source in damp, chilly, high latitude places like Sweden, Germany or Canada.



As a Brazilian native, Isabelle is a fan of hydroelectric power, but also reminds us that periods of drought can have a hugely negative impact if there is too much dependence on that resource.



The topics we discussed during our Atomic Show conversation and more are covered in well organized-detail in Rad Future.

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 m...

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.



TRISO particles with hand to show scale


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 asso...

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 ra...

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 USN...

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:




* Fleet-Scale Deployment: We are building at fleet scale, not project scale, enabling us to capture significant efficiency gains and cost savings, and enabling the reshoring of American industry. 



* Broad Industry Coalition: Fleet scale requires a broad coalition of industry partners for successful project planning and execution. We build that coalition to scale.



* Comprehensive Program Management: We synergy-capture program management applicable across existing and new deployments.



* Public-Private Partnerships: We leverage federal, state, and local government engagement and support along with industry to re-establish a US commercial nuclear leadership position. 





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 contributin...

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.

Aalo Atomics is a two year old micro reactor company founded by Matt Loszak, a serial entrepreneur, and Yasir Arafat, a skilled nuclear engineer who previously lead the DOE’s MARVEL advanced micro-reactor demonstration project.



Note: At Nucleation Capital, we were impressed enough with the company and the team to add it to our growing portfolio of advanced nuclear energy companies.



Matt Loszak, Aalo’s CEO, visited the Atomic Show to discuss his company’s current plans, its evolved power plant design, its progress towards becoming a reactor manufacturing company and the process by which it selected its initial target customer base and devised a product aimed directly at serving their needs.



The initial Aalo plan was to scale up and commercialize the MARVEL reactor concept, taking advantage of its rapid progress and projected early operation. A variety of circumstances have combined to delay the MARVEL project by at least 1-2 years. With that delay, the idea of using MARVEL data as part of the licensing basis for Aalo became less viable.



As a result of additional market and supply chain influences, Aalo has made significant changes to the original, MARVEL-based design.



Aalo’s has designed a sodium cooled thermal reactor with both a primary and a secondary sodium loop. The reactor fuel is uranium dioxide with enrichment of 5-10%, putting it into the category of LEU+. The fuel form will be as close to available commercial reactor fuel as possible.



The secondary sodium loop will include a double tube heat steam generator that will produce steam at approximately 500℃. The optimized power plant design for Aalo’s initial customer base of large data centers is called the Aalo Pod. It will include 5 reactor steam generating systems each capable of supplying about 25 MWth. The output of all five steam supply systems will be combined to supply a single 50 MWe steam turbine.



Activity inside Aalo’s Austin, TX factory (Mar 2025)


The steam turbine selected for the system will be one that has a reasonably flat operating curve over a range of steam flows so that it can efficiently supply electricity even if one or more of the reactors is shutdown for maintenance/refueling.



The company has focused on designing its system to be readily manufactured and efficiently assembled. Aalo moved into a 40,000 ft² industrial building in Austin, Texas in August of 2024 and it is now outfitting that building to be a pilot line manufacturing facility for its initial units. The company has scheduled a grand opening ceremony for the factory in early April 2025. Moving fast is a core part of its commercialization roadmap.



Aalo has purchased a plot of land in or near Austin and plans to build a non-nuclear heated prototype facility where it can perform a number of sodium and heat transfer tests.



It has obtained permission to follow a DOE authorization path to obtain permission to build and operate its nuclear prototype reactor on a site at the Idaho National Laboratory near the facilities that once were home to the Experimental Breeder Reactor II and are now the DOE’s DOME (Demonstration of Microreactors Experiments) test site.



It is one of four reactor vendors (along with Terrestrial Energy, Natura and Kairos) selected to build a small and micro reactor hub on the Rellis Campus of Texas A&M. Eventually, the site owners envision that the total power generating capacity at the site will be approximately 1 GWe from a significant number of nuclear power plants.

Deep Isolation is one of Nucleation Capital’s more impactful portfolio companies because its technology can enable greater success for most of the rest of the companies – and for the entire nuclear energy sector.



The company has been developing, testing and refining its systematic approach to nuclear waste disposal for a decade. Despite the fact that it is addressing one of the few remaining items that limits the acceptance of nuclear energy and its ability to rapidly expand to supply the clean firm power that our industrial society needs to thrive, few people have heard of the company. Even fewer include its technology in the discussions surrounding the inevitable question in nuclear energy discussions “What do we do with the waste?”



Deep Isolation is founded on a brilliant technical inspiration by Dr. Richard Muller. Recognized the commercial potential of the invention Muller teamed up with his daughter, Elizabeth Muller to transform the idea into a venture . They realized that deep geologic disposal is a nearly universally accepted – among scientific and technical experts – method to permanently dispose of high level radioactive materials.



Muller recognized that one significant challenge was the difficulty of siting and building conventional mined repositories. These repositories would need to meet completely different criteria that those that governed traditional materials and fuels mines, making reuse of existing mines difficult, if not impossible. Specially created mines producing no commercially valuable materials would be extraordinarily expensive to develop.



The cost of creating mined repositories stimulated most nations to plan for one or very few repositories, adding to the political cost and the transportation cost associated with siting and operating the repository.



Muller’s brilliant solution to these challenges was to take advantage of the fact that tens of thousands of very deep holes were being drilled every year by the established oil and gas industry. Not only were those holes being bored several thousand feet deep – well below all existing aquifers, but also the drillers had invented and refined techniques for gradually bending the holes into a horizontal direction.



These horizontal borings – often called “laterals” – are used in the hydrocarbon extraction business to gain access to far more extensive volumes of fuel-containing rock. For purposes of radioactive waste disposal, the laterals provide a large volume into which containers of high level waste – in a variety of forms – can be placed and isolated for millions of years.



As a result of drilling tens of thousands of wells in a highly competitive business, the drilling industry has become very skilled at creating high-quality, cost-effective tools and efficiently employing them. The resulting technology ecosystem can be efficiently used in a modular, distributed fashion, enabling multiple, strategically sited repositories. That allows waste to be permanently stored near where it was generated. This concept will lower transportation costs while addressing several legitimate political objections.



Rod Baltzer, the CEO of Deep Isolation, visited the Atomic Show for episode #327. We discussed the above in even greater detail. I believe you will find the show to be valuable and informative. Please use the comment section to ask questions or engage in discussion. Comments will close in 2 weeks.

Jigar Shah has had a lengthy career as an energy industry entrepreneur and strategic thinker. He founded Sun Edison and helped to create a new model for deploying solar power systems. He was part of the Carbon War Room and then founded Generate Capital to provide loans to proven technologies that had not yet achieved commercial scale. He was a member of the Energy Gang during its formative years as a podcast with a formidable listener base.



Following his success in the commercial sector, Jigar was appointed to be the Director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (LPO). He started at LPO in March of 2021, soon after the start of the Biden Administration, and served until January of 2025. During those years, the loan granting capacity of the LPO grew from $40 B to $400 B, primarily as a result of provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act.



During our conversation, we focused on the efforts that the LPO made to improve the nuclear industry’s capability to develop and complete large, complex projects involving both public and private financing. We discussed how America seemed to have lost its ability to build big things and what could be done to regain that ability.



We talked about the DOE liftoff reports and other efforts to guide the nuclear industry towards a more sustainable and successful development model. We discussed the various sizes of reactors being developed and the ways that a variety of sizes can open new markets and also provide vital practice in building successful nuclear projects.



You’ll want to listen to the whole show if you are curious about Jigar’s next endeavors. An early reveal is that he has returned to podcasting at Open Circuit, joining Katherine Hamilton and Stephen Lacey, his former colleagues on The Energy Gang.

After many years as an independent journalist with an antinuclear bent, Marco Visscher began questioning his long-held beliefs. He realized that the accepted alternatives to fossil fuel were not actually reducing fossil fuel use so much as they were limiting the rate at which it was increasing. He began acknowledging that nuclear energy was a large source of CO2-free power that was worth a deeper look than he had been giving it.



As he moved past the information sources that had provided his animosity towards nuclear, he found out that there was a deeper, more interesting story to tell about the power source and its history.



He decided there was a book in what he was learning. That book, initially published in Dutch in 2022, is called The Power of Nuclear; The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source. In late 2024, the book was published in English. As longtime readers might imagine, my favorite part of that subtile is the “Return” part.



Aside: Encouraging and participating in the return of nuclear energy growth is the focus of my professional life, both at Atomic Insights and in my role as a managing partner at Nucleation Capital. End Aside.



In some ways, the arc of Visscher’s book reminds me of the narrative arc of Oliver Stone’s Nuclear Now. It starts with the history of radiation and the development of the atomic bomb and ends in the modern era with the recognition that nuclear energy offers a clean and capable new energy source that might gradually displace fossil fuels and their dominance in our society.



During our discussion we talked about nuclear energy opposition, the role of nuclear fear, the inability of the nuclear industry to effectively communicate its positive story, other energy alternatives and the potential to achieve the tripling of nuclear capacity that has been envisioned by a growing group of countries led by the U.S. the UK, France, South Korea and Japan..



Aside: After reviewing the show, I realized that I should apologize to both listeners and to Mr. Visscher. I spent way too much time talking about the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in creating the basis for the “no safe dose” of radiation model and its effect on public fears. It’s an interesting part of nuclear energy’s history, but there are many other important stories worth telling. End Aside.

Jay Hakes, an accomplished author and historian, visited the Atomic Show to talk about his recently published book, Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush. Sometimes referred to as “the untold story of climate change,” Hake’s book is an enlightening jaunt through a history discovered during long days in archives and Presidential libraries.



Though some of the most vocal proponents of climate change action tell a history story about a public and political understanding that begins sometime during the 1980s, with the actions of people like James Hansen, the truth that Hakes discovered was that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter and their staffs knew there was a growing body of science indicating that increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 was a significant problem.



Hakes and I talk about the period when scientists were actively trying to determine if the atmosphere was warming or cooling and the long term confusion, some of it purposeful, that has resulted from a debate that was generally resolved by the end of the 1970s.



We spoke about the odd period during the Carter Administration when there was both significant concern about the risks of atmospheric CO2 and an active program to increase coal consumption while slowing nuclear energy development to a crawl. Interestingly, Carter gave the power generation industry a chance to defend nuclear power before he produced his energy plan, but there is no evidence that the industry even mentioned nuclear’s lack of air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.



Hakes’s research showed that much of the early science and political communications about climate change originated from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). His research also showed that the AEC involvement led to a lengthy period when groups that classified themselves as part of the Environmental Movement took little or no interest in effectively addressing climate change. They believed it was something that only nuclear cheerleaders cared about.



Sadly, we now face a bit of an opposite problem. Some vocal nuclear proponents have come to the conclusion that climate change can’t be much of a problem since so many of its activists remain adamantly opposed to using nuclear energy as a powerful tool in the effort to limit the impact of climate change.



Like many nuclear energy supporters, I believe we lost a lot of time and added a much larger quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere than we would have if we had continued deploying nuclear power systems. The solution to that lost time, however, is to press forward.

Julie Kozeracki was the lead author for a U.S. Department of Energy strategy document titled Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear published in September 2024. The document was the result of a multi-agency, multi-lab effort to update a previously issued report.



During our conversation, Kozeracki described how the report was informed by changes in the market, by a study of experiences from other countries and other industries, and by a growing recognition of the importance of design completion in enabling cost and schedule adherence.



We talked about the utility of an expanding catalog of nuclear fission power systems that can meet the needs of a more diverse customer base and also the relatively new trend of increasing electricity demand led most prominently by data center expansion but also by electrification efforts for heating, transportation and industrial uses.



As others have noted, this edition of the advanced nuclear liftoff report makes a clear and compelling case for including large modern light water reactors – including, but not limited to the AP1000 – in the definition of “advanced nuclear”. But clear and compelling does not equal exclusive; the report also makes a good case for the fact that the market has room for a variety of reactor sizes and capabilities to meet the wide range of power demands of a diverse universe of customers.



Note for readers: We are breaking a long tradition at Atomic Insights. Bot activity has convinced us to disable comments.

Westinghouse’s eVinci is a 15 MWth, 5 MWe micro reactor. Westinghouse often refers to it as a nuclear battery.



Unlike conventional nuclear power plants, eVinci uses no water and doesn’t produce steam. The eVinci is not “just another way to boil water.”



There are no pumps in the system that moves heat out of the reactor. Instead, the system uses ~24′ long heat pipes to transfer fission heat to a heat exchanger.



That device serves the same function as a combustor (burner) in a fossil fuel heated Brayton cycle gas turbine. Atmospheric air is compressed and sent through the heat exchanger where it gets hotter and more energetic. That hot, compressed gas gets expanded through a turbine, causing it to rotate. The rotating turbine is connected to a generator that produces electricity with an efficiency of about 33%.



An eVinci will use an open air Brayton cycle gas turbine like those that are in a wide range of commercial applications. Gas turbines are not only well-understood devices, but they have a diverse supply chain and an experienced workforce with tens of thousands of builders, operators and maintainers. They are often manufactured by the thousands.



In another departure from the conventional way of doing things, eVinci uses rotating control drums instead of insertable control rods to adjust core reactivity and operating temperature. Shutdown rods are used during transport and to provide a secondary means of shutdown.



The fuel is TRISO coated particle fuel with high assay, low enriched uranium in the particles. The reactor operates in the thermal neutron spectrum with graphite as the moderator. The core isn’t in a pressurized fluid.



With its simple controls, small size and passive safety case, the eVinci is designed to be able to operate autonomously. Each core will last eight years or more.



Leah Crider, Westinghouse’s Vice President of Commercial Operations to the eVinci micro reactor, visited the Atomic Show to provide a system overview and to answer questions about the reactor, its history, its future, its applications and its potential impact on the energy market.



I think you’ll learn something from this show. Please participate in the comments and let us know what you think, especially if you have questions that were not addressed during the show.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a construction permit on September 16, 2024 to Abilene Christian University (ACU) to build a molten salt research reactor. This marked the first university research reactor approval in 30 years. It is the first liquid fuel reactor ever approved for construction by the NRC and only the second advanced reactor approved since the NRC was created in 1974.



Aside: The first advanced reactor construction permit was issued to Kairos for its Hermes in December 2023. End Aside



Natura Resources is the technology supplier for the important new facility. Andrew Harmon, Natura Resources Vice President of Operations and Business Development visited the Atomic Show to fill in some of the backstory about the project origins, the decision to pursue a research reactor as a step towards their ultimate goal of supplying a large number of factory-produced 100 MWe molten salt reactors, some of the major successes and challenges along the way and the level of community support that the project has attracted.



Developing a major new technology in a heavily regulated industry takes more time and resources than many might imagine. In this case, it involved a consortium that includes four major university partners, an enthusiastic group of local donors, a driven energy entrepreneur with a career spent moving expeditiously and safely, a supportive Department of Energy and a growing team of innovative engineers and developers. It also required significant cooperation and engagement with the NRC.



I’ll stop there and let Andrew fill in the details. I think you will enjoy this show. Please participate in the comment section. Respectful discussion and debate are welcome.

Urenco is one of the few companies in the world that enriches uranium. It’s one of an even smaller group of enrichers that aren’t owned by the Russian, Chinese or Iranian governments. It plays a key role in the western world’s nuclear fuel cycle.



That role became even more important after February, 2022.



With the increasingly firm prospects of a long term increase in demand for its foundational product of low enriched uranium (LEU) and a looming demand for new enrichment products like LEU+ (low enriched uranium that has greater than 5% and less than 10% U-235 content) and HALEU (high assay, low enriched uranium with U-236 concentration of 10-20%) Urenco has embarked on a program to expand its capacity.






Like most other nuclear industry participants, Urenco is a conservative company that carefully considers its investments before adding capacity that might not be needed. The nature of its production technology – incredibly sophisticated centrifuges that can spin continuously for decades if not excessively cycled – encourages even more caution in the direction of ensuring that there is demand before investing many millions into new production capacity.



Magnus Mori, Urenco’s head of marketing and technical sales, visited the Atomic Show to provide greater insights and details about Urenco’s history and unusual ownership structure, the factors that influence its investment decisions and the prospects that the company sees for future demand for its products. He explained the material flows into an out of an enrichment facility, including the actual compound that are handled at various stages of the process.



We spoke about the UK government’s support for new production capacity and its decision to invest in a new enrichment plant to produce HALEU. We even spoke about new businesses that use centrifuges to produce valuable medical, research and industrial materials that are not part of the nuclear energy fuel cycle.



I think you’ll enjoy this show. You might even learn some new details about the nuclear fuel cycle. Please participate in the comments.

The Nuclear Company exited a period of operating in “stealth mode” about a month ago. That exit was sufficiently well planned and executed that it is likely that Atomic Insights readers have already heard of the company.



The Nuclear Company was incorporated a year ago. Its founding team has been working diligently to build the relationships and agreements needed to accomplish their self-assigned task. The company has a goal to build an initial fleet of reactors with a capacity of 6 GWe. Those reactors will be built by a consistent team, financed using a structure whose outline will be disclosed in the coming months and using a design that has successfully completed an NRC design certification review AND has been built at least once somewhere in the world.






The company is also focused on sites that have already been through the early site permit process. Their project regulatory path is close to what was initially envisioned for an entity using the one-step Part 52 process. Choose a design that has been reviewed and approved, match it with a site that has been permitted and obtain a COL based on those two development steps.



The company also recognizes the acceleration opportunity associated with using existing COLs.



Juliann Edwards is the company’s chief development officer. She has extensive experience and contacts within the nuclear industry and currently serves as the US chairman for Women in Nuclear. I first met her when we were both working for B&W on the mPower reactor project more than a decade ago.



Juliann visited this show to tell us more about The Nuclear Company, focusing on its history, people, vision and accomplishments so far.



The vision and goals are aggressive and ambitious. But they don’t require any new scientific discoveries or technological inventions. That feature doesn’t guarantee success, but it makes it a little more achievable in a realistically chosen time frame. Sufficient resources – time, talent and treasure – must be invested, but the end result seems valuable enough to attract a starting critical mass.

Brian Gitt, the Business Development lead at Oklo, visited the Atomic Show to describe his employer’s business model and current prospects.



Oklo is an advanced fission and fuel recycling company with an expansive vision for becoming a competitive clean energy supplier. It plans to provide heat and/or electricity as a service from a fleet of small fission power plants that it owns, operates and maintains.



Oklo recently became a public company through a SPAC merger with AltC, a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, a venture capital investor and the founder and CEO at OpenAI.



Oklo was founded in 2013 by Jake DeWitt and Caroline Cochran, two MIT nuclear engineering graduates with a vision for building a company that could manufacture and operate smaller, simpler reactors.



Recognizing that nuclear engineering skills are not the only ingredient needed to build a company, Oklo founders made an early decision to participate in an entrepreneurial immersion training program at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator and seed stage venture capital funder.



Their unique business proposition for clean energy development was compelling enough to attract serious interest from Sam Altman, who was then serving as the president at Y Combinator. He became one of the company’s earliest investors and began serving as the company Chairman.



As Gitt describes, Oklo has spent the past decade preparing for the growth in clean energy demand that is coming from both the energy transition and the growing use of energy for applications like high performance data centers for applications like artificial intelligence (AI). The company also sees huge opportunities in clean energy for materials production, mining and increased manufacturing in places outside of China.



For more details, you’re going to have to listen to the show. Please participate in the comment section discussion. I expect that many listeners will find this to be a valuable use of their time.



Disclosure: I have a long position in Oklo’s publicly traded stock in my personal portfolio.

Atomic Canyon is a six month old company that is developing AI tools to improve the efficiency of routine tasks associated with developing, licensing, building, owning and operating nuclear plants. Their first product, called Neutron, uses AI to modernize searching the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 52 million page collection of publicly available documents that are currently accessible through the somewhat cumbersome Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS).



Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s founder, spent the first 15 years of his career in the digital medicine field. At an inflection point in his career, with the freedom to live anywhere, he created a decision matrix to help him and his wife choose a place to live and raise their two young sons. San Luis Obispo, CA earned the highest score, with an excellent public education system as one of the contributing factors.



After finding their home and moving towards closing the purchase, Trey and his wife learned via real estate disclosure documents that they would be living within 10 miles of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. As members of a generation who learned most of what they new about nuclear energy from The Simpsons, they were initially leery.



But they quickly realized that the plant’s skilled, dedicated and well compensated employees and its property tax payments were major reasons that the schools and other aspects of the community had earned such high scores on the “place to raise our children” decision matrix.



After becoming a member of the community and conversing with local nuclear professionals, Trey decided to learn as much as he could about nuclear energy and the nuclear industry. He recognized that he and his skilled colleagues could build tools that could address obstacles that slowed work and added costs.



Atomic Canyon has just announced a cooperative project with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that will train ORNL’s Frontier – currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of more than a quintillion calculations per second – how to understand nuclear terminology. The resulting model will not be trained on proprietary or safety related information on the design and operation of nuclear power, but it will help analyzing the deep library of regulatory guides, inspection reports, and other publicly available documents to assist in increasing safety and accountability.



The products (models) created by the partnership will be open source and available to become part of the toolbox for other developers.



Trey and I had a fascinating conversation. I think you will agree.



Left to right in photo: Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon CEO Kristian Kielhofner, Atomic Canyon CTO Richard Klafter, Atomic Canyon Lead AI Architect Tom Evans, ORNL Research Scientist Photo Credit: Genevieve Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory



Knox News provides a local perspective on Atomic Canyon’s project using Frontier: AI for nuclear plants? ORNL supercomputer’s new task is no sci-fi – it’s a clean energy win