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 Secr…

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 …

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 th…

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 memb…

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…

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 …

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 c…

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…

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 reac…

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 lo…

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 agr…

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 f…

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…

Emmet Penney is an unlikely, but effective pronuclear advocate. He earned his degrees in fine arts and great books and worked for several years as a professional poet – along with working in a bookstore as a way to keep paying the bills. He gradually transitioned from poetry into writing thoughtful essays on a variety of topics. One of those pieces…

Doug Sandridge is a lifelong oil and gas guy whose father was a geological engineer. While he was growing up, Doug lived a significant portion of his life overseas as his father’s job took the family to several different locations. When it was time to go to college, Doug returned to the United State to attend the University of Oklahoma. He took a b…

James Krellenstein is a physicist, consultant and nuclear energy historian. He is currently employed as a senior advisor to Global Health Strategies. He started up their decarbonization practice with an emphasis on nuclear energy along with renewables. He was the lead author on GEH’s report on ways to reduce global dependence on Russia for necessar…

Stefano Buono is a physicist and the successful founder of Advanced Accelerator Applications, a multibillion dollar company that pioneered the use of several therapeutic medical isotopes. After making several people very rich, including himself, he sold the medical isotope business and returned to his early 1990s field of study – nuclear fission re…