Clean Power, Dirty Boots: Top 5 Learnings From the Business of Nuclear Summit
From Theory to Practice: Bringing Nuclear Energy into the Real World
Despite decades of promise, rebuilding America’s nuclear energy backbone in the U.S. has remained mostly theoretical: admired on whiteboards, stalled in real-world execution. This year’s Business of Nuclear Summit — hosted by Alumni Ventures, 8VC, Founders Fund, and Idaho National Laboratory — gathered policymakers, builders, utilities, investors, and federal labs to explore one big question:
What will it take to turn promising nuclear technologies into grid-connected, revenue-generating assets—on timelines that matter?
Here’s what we learned from those in the trenches.
See video policy below.
1. BE HONEST ABOUT READINESS
The “downfall” of projects like Vogtle wasn’t just technical, it was cultural. Teams overpromised and underdelivered. Designs weren’t mature. Schedules weren’t real. And the market lost trust. In a sector where the bar is perfection, credibility is currency.
Builders need to get serious about design maturity before the first dollar is raised or the first pour of concrete. In other infrastructure-heavy sectors — like aerospace or defense — first builds happen at smaller scale, with iteration, quality control, and design loops baked in.
We should apply the same rigor in nuclear.
Takeaway: Break large projects into manageable, verifiable phases. Build engineering muscle at each step. Don’t sell a future you haven’t built yet.
2. YES, WE CAN BUILD FAST
It’s a myth that nuclear construction has to take a decade. Execution speed exists; it’s just trapped in silos.
- Consider this: Utilities like Constellation have replaced steam generators at operating nuclear plants — essentially nuclear open-heart surgery — in under 30 days. Why can’t we bring that same urgency and operational excellence to new builds?
- The answer: We haven’t aligned incentives around speed. Utilities still get paid for CAPEX. Regulators still default to risk aversion.
But new nuclear doesn’t have the luxury of time. Data centers, industrials, and state decarbonization mandates are asking for reliable, carbon-free power now.
Takeaway: Speed isn’t foreign, it’s just underutilized. Treat nuclear construction like a mission-critical delivery, not a science fair project. Lock in timelines and hire experienced EPCs. Let urgency drive execution.
3. FIRST-OF-A-KIND FINANCING NEEDS A BRIDGE
Everyone wants to see new nuclear get built, but no one wants to be first.
FOAK (first-of-a-kind) projects face a brutal finance gap. They’re too risky for pure private equity, too slow for most venture investors, and too new for traditional project finance. The only way through is with a capital stack that blends tax credits (e.g., 45U, 48E), anchor offtake agreements, federal support, and skin-in-the-game from customers.
But it’s not just about money; it’s about confidence. “Spare me the TED Talk. Bring me a term sheet.” Buyers want schedule certainty, tested technology, and operational readiness.
Takeaway: Successful projects will go beyond raising capital — they’ll choreograph it. Bring DOE guarantees, customer commitments, EPCs, and permitting pathways to the table early. Capital moves when risks are known and shared.
4. IT’S ABOUT SYSTEMS, NOT JUST SCIENCE
The Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) is not religion. Some customers don’t just want energy but assets, reliability, or specific capabilities.
Shine Technologies (an Alumni Ventures portfolio company) is a perfect example. They’re using neutrons to create high-value medical isotopes in a business model built around value conversion, not kilowatt-hours.
For other buyers — like hyperscalers — speed, resilience, and uptime matter more than the marginal price per MWh. Microsoft is reportedly paying 12 cents/kWh for firm, 24/7 nuclear power from Constellation. Why? Because delay costs more than price.
Some developers are flipping the model. Instead of selling electrons, they are selling a modular energy system or micro-reactor unit with optionality.
Takeaway: Know your buyer. Beyond clean energy, pitch uptime, independence, and strategic value. Flexible business models unlock new buyers.
5. WHAT BUYERS ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT
If you want to sell nuclear, skip the buzzwords. Buyers — especially utilities and data center operators — care about the following:
- LCOE realism: What is the true cost of delivered power over 40 years — including O&M, refueling, waste, and decommissioning?
- Schedule certainty: Commercial Operation Date (COD) must be fixed, credible, and enforceable. Delays kill deals.
- Capital stack clarity: Where’s the equity? The debt? Is the DOE backing it? Are tax credits structured in?
- Permitting and siting: What’s your plan to get through local, state, and NRC approval? Is the community onboard?
- Operational model: Who’s owning and running this for the next 50 years? Do they have experience?
- Risk-sharing: What if you’re late? What if the tech underperforms? Contracts need contingencies.
If you can answer these questions with confidence, you’re in business. If you can’t, you’re not ready.
Takeaway: The buyer is your customer but also your partner. Treat them like investors. Build trust with clear answers and shared incentives.
FINAL WORD
This isn’t a science experiment anymore. It’s a procurement process.
Nuclear must earn its place in the real world, going beyond elegant physics to operational discipline, contracting acumen, and an unshakable bias toward execution.
We don’t need more whitepapers. We need reactors online.
Less vision, more builders. Let’s get to work.
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Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ
Speaker 1:
Did you miss this year’s Business of Nuclear Summit? Don’t worry. AV’s U.S. Strategic Tech Fund team sat down to unpack all the most compelling insights from builders, policymakers, and investors driving nuclear innovation. Let’s take a look.
Hey everyone, it’s Laura Rippy. I’m managing partner at Alumni Ventures and pulling on a thread that I have about nuclear. So for those of you who’ve been watching the news, it’s a burgeoning area for venture investments, and we’ve been digging in here at Alumni Ventures. Now I’m interviewing Pete Mathias and Drew Wandzilak, who just put on a conference called The Business of Nuclear. It’s the third in a series that the team has put on with founders and investors in this space. It is fascinating. So we’re going to dig in, but for those of you who are new to Alumni Ventures, just want to share—we are the largest firm for individual accredited investors to invest in venture.
And this is what we do every day. We open up opportunities for you with relatively small investment checks that come and join us for a fund, and you get exposure to some of the companies that are cutting edge and creating the world. And in this case, in creating the next new chapter in climate and the next new chapter in energy independence around nuclear. So let’s kind of dig in. So guys, this is a pretty sexy topic, the business of nuclear. What was the mood at the event? If you can set the stage—and maybe Pete, if you kick us off—and Drew, what you felt there, and was it tailwinds or headwinds in terms of this particular moment in time?
Speaker 2:
The room was overwhelming optimism grounded in pragmatism. Why grounded in pragmatism? Well, bringing nuclear into the real world—we call this the practical realm—requires adjustments. It requires very granular thinking, specifically around buying, financing, and the nitty-gritty of building. In other words, we can go from an intellectual level—we need nuclear—but getting into the practical, grid-connected level requires a level of sophistication, granularity that has actually been previously absent from most of the nuclear conversations. And so that was really the goal. We don’t want a TED Talk—spare us. Bring me a PPA (power purchase agreement) or a term sheet or some type of actual capitalization visualization. Drew, what would you add?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I actually want to take a brief step back just because nuclear is such an interesting place to be in terms of new technology, new opportunity—it’s been around. When we think about nuclear fission—for 70-plus years—this is not, at its core, new technology. And so there’s always a really interesting, I think, dialogue and vibe to these events where we’re talking about Gen IV, Gen III, advanced reactors. How can we have safer reactors, better fuel? But this is a technology that is powering 20% of the U.S. electric grid today, right? I live here in Illinois. Almost 40% of our grid is powered by nuclear power. And so we’re trying to, in a way, square the circle of how do we bring more nuclear online? How do we learn from the successes that we’ve had previously with this—kind of to Pete’s point—very pragmatic and practical lens? And then also how do we bring new technology to the table that’s more efficient, that’s safer, that has different capabilities than the nuclear of old?
And so I felt the room was optimistic. We bring together people that are all in this category of nuclear energy and really this lens of: now how do we actually go build more reactors?
Speaker 1:
And I know the topic is about the business of nuclear, but any kind of teasers on the companies—as you’re thinking about this 21st-century nuclear—what does this new nuclear represent? I think of portfolio companies that we have—Radiant, where it’s small nuclear reactors. Are there, for people who are new to what this chapter is in new nuclear, any kind of sound bites on companies? And I mean, obviously the ones that we know the best are great, but the ones that presented here—I mean, I’m curious about any little soundbites from them.
Speaker 2:
Traditional nuclear is big nuclear. I’ll give a personal anecdote—that a lot of my family grew up right next to the power plant in Palisades Park, Michigan. This is a big nuclear plant. It literally takes up a shoreline and sort of has this menacing presence. It’s big. It looks big. It is big. Powers about a million homes.
So big nuclear: it powers a million people or so and takes up a shoreline of space, takes up a big footprint. New nuclear or advanced nuclear has a smaller footprint requirement. So we think of it as there’s really two, maybe even three camps of new nuclear. There’s the small modular nuclear, there’s the micro reactors, and then there’s actually nano reactors as well. But there’s an entire new innovation paradigm happening in this smaller-footprint nuclear.
So the big nuclear plant requires a shoreline, and powers a million homes. Small modular nuclear power requires a parking lot of space, and powers about 100,000 homes. The micro nuclear reactors can power about 1,000 homes, and they can fit in the back of a semi-truck, in the tail of an airplane, the back of an airplane. So think footprint, think energy capacity. But overall, it’s a pivot towards smaller reactor designs.
And this has different implications on fuel. It has different implications on safety. It has different implications that speak to a lot of the challenges of big nuclear. But the conversation didn’t steer away from big nuclear at all. In fact—Drew, maybe you even want to give a little bit of a teaser in what we talked about around Vogtle, because there were some really important learnings from that—Vogtle 3 and 4—that just reached completion.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. And I even want to split this up one more time. So Pete talks about SMRs, micros, even nano reactors—and that’s typically the things that we’re looking at and investing in, right? Completely new technologies in nuclear that are using the learnings of the past few decades. But it is a new process. It is a new form. It is a new function. It has different capabilities.
Then there’s this other piece of nuclear where, if at your core you’re like, “I want more nuclear powering the world, I want more nuclear powering America”—we have reactors that are operating today. These typically—large, to Pete’s point—and Palisades, large light water reactors that have more capacity that we could almost retrofit or refurbish some of these.
So if you want to think about bringing more nuclear online, there’s a whole pathway of technologies. And we had someone who’s working at a company doing exactly this—of, can we get more gigawatts of power out of our existing reactor fleet? And that’s a different thread and criteria than completely new, first-of-a-kind designs—but the same solution nonetheless of: how do we get more nuclear powering this clean, firm, baseload power, powering this massive rise in energy demand?
Speaker 1:
Right. Okay. Let’s shift a little bit to the buyers. And a huge unlock of why people are focused on nuclear right now is the energy demand of AI. Microsoft obviously has gotten a lot of headlines. Did that come up at the conference? What do the buyers care about?
Speaker 3:
I’ll jump in here and say—the buyers are so important because they’re very different. And so typically a buyer of energy is going to be a utility, a regulated utility. And we had some utilities at the conference and heard their perspective, and they’re very price-sensitive because at the end of the day, they’re representing people, right? The general public. If you are a public utility in Michigan, it is Michigan taxpayers essentially that are your customers. And so your goal is: I need to get them power cheaply, right? That’s where it hits them—on their electric bill every single month. Is it great if it’s clean? Yes. Is it great if it has some other added benefits? Of course. But they are incredibly price-sensitive.
Now to Laura, to your point—we’re seeing this rise in private sector demand for massive amounts of energy. When we looked at data centers two decades ago, they were not demanding almost a city’s worth of power and needing that capability right next to them. And these private companies—like the Microsofts, like the Amazons, the Googles of the world—need a lot of energy to power the data centers. And they need a capability, right? Of course, they want to make good business decisions on cost, and it needs to be a reasonable price for that power. But they’re almost willing to pay—at least from early indications—pay a little bit more for the capability and the reliability and the efficiency of that power.
And what that’s done is it’s opened up kind of an entirely new pathway for nuclear companies because the equation changes. It’s not centralized, massive plants, massive reactors of, “How can I get under 7 or 6 cents a kilowatt-hour?” It’s: “Can I provide you with reliable power that meets the demand that you need if we’re going to win this broader AI race?” And that’s what they’re focused on. They’re willing to pay a little bit of a premium, which you can imagine opens up a lot of opportunities.
Speaker 2:
There’s also an advantage that the hyperscalers have over the utilities—and that’s cash balance sheet. I mean, getting into the capital mechanics of these companies—you have in some cases companies like Microsoft, which have tens of billions of dollars in cash.
And what does this mean for nuclear? Well, nuclear is probably the only thing that could truly bankrupt a utility. And if you were to look at Seabrook, New Hampshire—that debt overrun in the ’80s or so bankrupted the state utility. Vogtle—the $20 billion cost overrun—nearly bankrupted the utility.
So what the hyperscalers have is a little bit more—one, cash position to stomach a billion-dollar cost overrun or more, and two, certainly the ability to invest in small modular or micro reactors in a way that is not so obvious for the utility to do. The utilities have pressure from the state, in some cases punitive measures, if they can’t deliver certain cost parameters.
So the entrance—stage left, stage right, now center stage—of big tech into new nuclear changes not just the types of companies that are attractive, but actually changes the entire capital cadence that you might actually see.
Speaker 1:
I want to go back to the term you used—hyperscalers—to make sure that folks who are new to nuclear understand what you mean by that. Can you just give us a quick soundbite definition? What do you mean by hyperscalers?
Speaker 2:
Hyperscalers is the nickname that we give to the big tech giants—Google, Amazon, Meta—and overall, the subset of tech companies.
Speaker 1:
So hyperscalers finding a way to power their data centers through new ideas—whether it’s SMRs, such as small modular reactors, or stacking those up, or whether there’s a way to unlock, as Drew said, past investments in nuclear and see if we can unlock more energy there.
The place that we haven’t gone yet is fusion. And so I’m curious—if some of our favorite portfolio companies—were they speaking about the business of nuclear related to fusion or not? And maybe if that is a bridge to some of the new financing methodologies that are happening. Not to lead the witness, but I’m curious if that came up in this conference. And I know it was under a cone of confidentiality, and everybody’s being super careful at this conference, but is there anything you guys can tease on that front?
Speaker 3:
I thought there was a really—I know what company you’re referring to, Laura, I’ll save that for Pete—I thought there was actually another interesting perspective on the fusion side. When we think about the business of nuclear, we think of nuclear energy. And so it’s like, how do we sell electrons on the grid? And we think about things in terms of price per megawatt, price per kilowatt-hour.
There are other opportunities within nuclear to generate revenue. And we have a company—SHINE Technologies—
Speaker 1:
Sure.
Speaker 3:
Exactly this, right? They’re on this long pathway toward fusion energy. But on the way there, they realize the technology that we have to build to achieve nuclear fusion is actually really in demand. If we can change—it’s almost alchemy in a way, right? It’s like, if we can change one element to a high-value element—these are revenue-generating opportunities, and we’re not even selling electrons on the grid.
And so I’m glad you brought up fusion, because it was not just a conference or a summit on: how do we sell power to utilities or how do we sell power to tech giants? It’s: how can you make money with nuclear energy? And with fusion especially, there are so many components of that system that can turn lower-value assets into higher-value assets—that you could have a really powerful, revenue-generating business and you never sell power.
Speaker 1:
But isn’t it with SHINE, they’re actually creating the pellets—sort of the input, the fuel, if you will—that was one of their products on the way to their overall vision. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:
It is generally correct, right? So they’re focused on the neutrons, which is what you would need to actually create in a fusion reactor. But those neutrons are powerful and valuable kind of on their own—things like x-ray imaging, medical isotopes—where the cost per gram on some of these materials, like the size of a sugar packet, is over a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:
And that’s a business of today. They’re making money—that business of today.
Speaker 3:
Today. Exactly.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So throwing this back to Pete—any of our other company stories that really spoke to the narration here of the business of nuclear for any of our teams that folks might particularly know about?
Speaker 2:
Look, I mean, we had in attendance some absolute stars of stars—founders across nuclear fusion and fission—and we definitely had some representation from some star companies. We had Thea Energy in the house. They’re actually building just outside of New York City, a facility for them to bring fusion into the real world.
So I think that the headlines there—look, none of these are paper reactors. These are all very real teams building real products that have in some cases already found real markets on their way to the grid. They’re not just selling power; they’re selling independence, resilience—all things that are, in some ways, priced at the intangible level.
Speaker 1:
Right? Fascinating. So this was the third in the series of events that you guys hosted. So is there a fourth in the works?
Speaker 2:
Well, we are on a shared mission with our founders. Our founders are building—not with a moment in time, with a quarter in play. We are building in lockstep with our founders a community—not just capital, but a community of believers in nuclear. And that’s, of course, something that’s going to continue.
I just spoke at Columbia University on Friday. They thought it was just going to be about climate. I basically just talked about nuclear the whole time. And so we’re going to continue to support that community—whether it’s helping people find jobs in nuclear. We’ve got a lot of folks that want internships at nuclear companies. That’s going to be the next step—helping them get placed.
But look—we are in this, just as our founders are, for the entire journey.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely.
Speaker 3:
I will say—so just to give everyone kind of a perspective on what we’ve done and a little bit of the why—is exactly Pete’s point. We are in service to our founders. We also want to bring community, bring engagement around this mission that we feel is really important.
And so the first kind of iteration of this was really focused on the technology. The second was focused on demand—so actually thinking about less of how do we finance these reactors, but who is in the market for nuclear energy? And then, as we’ve been talking about today, the actual financing and the business side of nuclear.
I won’t name it, but if you think about nuclear energy, there’s probably a fourth leg to the stool that is really important when you think about this industry. And so—nothing announced yet—but I will leave with that teaser there.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic. I love that.
Okay, so I want to wrap up here and speak to everyone who is fascinated by this and wants to be a part of it. If you are a founder, if you are a venture investor—you’ve probably already connected with us. And if not, please do. If you’re building something in the nuclear space, I think that is the important piece—for founders and for venture investors who are collaborators of ours.
But also for the individuals—for someone with a portfolio who says, “This is the future. How do I invest in the future of nuclear—in new nuclear?”
And we have a pretty easy way to do that at Alumni Ventures. You can join us as an investor. The minimum commitment is as low as $10,000. You join one of our funds. The funds are diversified, so you’ll get nuclear. If you join, for instance, the U.S. Strategic Tech Fund, you might get some cybersecurity, you might get some space, you might get some other areas that are protecting the grid or other ways of homeland security.
But really, most of our funds at Alumni Ventures are getting exposure to new nuclear. For instance, the Yard Fund and the Green D Fund for Harvard and for Dartmouth investors also invest in this category—as do the rest of our Alumni Ventures funds.
So if you haven’t yet invested in venture, come in and explore what we do and see if this might be the way that you get your stake in the future of energy in the U.S. and the world—by investing in new nuclear. We invite you to join us at Alumni Ventures. Our URL is av.vc, and we hope that this has piqued your interest and you dig in and learn more. So thanks, everybody.