The Atomic Show

Abandoned uranium mine waste has been a big deal for decades, but almost no one had an inkling about what we should do to solve the problem. The scale of the challenge is huge, with about 75 million tons spread over more than 10,000 sites, nearly all of which are in western states and Native American sovereign nations. The Navaho Nation is the jurisdiction with the biggest burden – about 40% of the total mass of the waste (30 million tons) is on Navaho lands and spread over 500 or more sites.

Some have dismissed or minimized the problem by pointing to the re...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 sel...

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 comp...

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 Lo...

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...

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 H...

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...

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...

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...

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 1...

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 d...