Green Giants – Episode 122

Wes Ashworth (02:11)

Yeah, it’s incredible and you know, really does put the current nuclear moment into perspective. It’s like the idea itself is much older than the excitement around it. but you eventually sort of put the reactor ambition on hold and you know, spent more than 15 years building advanced accelerator applications using these advanced or radioactive isotopes to diagnose and treat disease before the Novartis acquisition, which I noted there in the intro. But was that detour like actually the thing that made newcleo possible? Or I guess what did it teach you now that applies to nuclear energy?

Stefano Buono (02:42)

Exactly that. Actually the first part of my life was more on the academic side because many institutions were considering launching this technology but then I realized that Public institutions don’t have the same impulse that a private venture can have. I was still young and had no experience with serious companies. So I had the idea to use one of our patents that had an application of nuclear medicine. So I started the case always with the idea to use nuclear medicine to get the money to develop the nuclear energy. So with this in mind, I founded newcleo.

was the time where there were… the need for FDG for the oxy glucose. It was a complex injectable to deposit remission tomography that was done using particle accelerators that were also a bit of my speciality. So I started to do this with the idea to make money and to fund our research. The first years, the company actually did the two things together. But then the nuclear medicine part became to be very, important. So that’s why I lost sight with the company of the energy, but I always followed the project I was working on in the 90s and the progress of this project. I always hoped that somebody would have realized that. And when I realized that it was not the case in 2018, then I thought I could accept the offer to buy the company because I wanted to do the energy and I could dedicate 100% of my time to this mission.

Wes Ashworth (04:16)

I love that. It makes the two chapters feel much more connected than they might appear from the outside. And you know, I think sometimes the experience you need to solve one problem comes from building something completely different at first, and those two things just intertwined and it really helped.

Stefano Buono (04:28)

I see many nuclear companies today that are trying also to go through radioisotope production, fission companies, but also fusion companies. So there is a strong relationship and it’s good to have experience in both.

Wes Ashworth (04:41)

Yeah, I agree completely. you know, and I think the timing wise, how well it’s lining up now is just, you know, 30 years ago the science was there, the ambition was there, but the world around it maybe was not ready yet. And so the next part of the story is what changed enough to sort of make this possible now and today? So what changed in the world, not in the physics, that makes this approach investable now when maybe it wasn’t 20 years ago?

Stefano Buono (05:04)

Well, I see from my European perspective, because I always lived in Europe in the first part of this project, so what changed is that the young generation started to be considering nuclear because of the fact that nuclear could address the decarbonization target that we have for the planet. So this mode change made

Europe change and the sentiment against nuclear energy to moderate. So that was the very big change. happened with COP21, if I remember well. That was in UK at that time. So from there, I saw a real change in Europe.

Only in 2021, when I founded the company, only UK had plans to expand their nuclear energy. And today there are 15 countries in Europe that have plans to expand their nuclear energy. are part of a nuclear alliance. They are really promoting this. So everything has changed in that. The second thing that became very important a couple of years ago was the need of energy independence. So the crisis… created first with the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made people understand that we don’t only need more energy, that, and decarbonize, but also not affected by the geopolitical tensions. And nuclear can be a stronger way to have nuclear energy independence.

Wes Ashworth (06:27)

Yeah, it’s that distinction between technical readiness and market readiness is really important. And it’s always interesting how, you know, policy, capital, demand, energy security, energy independence, as you shared, just can completely change the opportunity around, you know, existing science. and everybody’s sort of talking right now about this nuclear renaissance. You know, that’s the words being thrown around. And I’d agree. I think there’s a lot of validity to that. But what part of that story is genuinely different this time from maybe previous cycles of times and you know, what part maybe is still a little hype.

Stefano Buono (06:56)

Well, before we were living in a global world, so there was no concept that we needed to have resources that were more localized even in its own country. So that’s already, I would say, a very big change. And then if you think about the markets, the raise of electricity needs sometimes has been, especially in European countries, a little bit stagnant.

While today with the fact that there is a serious willingness to decarbonize, but also because of the AI explosion, the needs for electricity is going to grow a lot. So renewables will be not enough to address these needs. And that’s why nuclear now has the possibility of having a true renaissance.

Wes Ashworth (07:41)

it’s all those pieces of the puzzle, right? Like finally aligning and coming together and it’s really cool to see. and so you’ve spent a career kind of inside European science and entrepreneurship that you just shared there, but now you are major making a major push into the United States. Like what does America understand about scaling innovation that maybe Europe still gets a little wrong?

Stefano Buono (08:00)

Well, innovation, would say, the birth of innovation is very strong in Europe as well. So there is a lot of academic research, people is inventive, industry is very strong. But I would say what changes a lot is the access to capital and the perception of the investors of the risk that is associated to… to innovation. So in Europe this perception is very high and has prevented very much venture capital to thrive. Venture capital is the first really building block of innovation I would say. And then also if in Europe venture capital is doubling every year essentially we are still very very far away from the numbers of US.

But we have other problems. We don’t have growth capital, for example. So all of the financial system for innovation is very limited with respect to US. Sometimes I speak about the factor of 100 and I am a believer for that.

Wes Ashworth (08:58)

Yeah, absolutely. And you said like a lot of that capital related, but you know, obviously regulation, willingness to take risks can dramatically change how quick technology moves. But it’s interesting to kind of compare those two landscapes. you know, obviously the opportunity is much better than it was 20 years ago, but it only matters if the technology itself offers something meaningfully different. And so I want to move from the kind of the market back to the machine and make the reactor easy to understand from the ground up. So at the simplest level.

A nuclear power plant splits atoms to create heat, uses that heat to make steam and uses the steam to generate electricity. What is fundamentally different about the reactor newcleo is building?

Stefano Buono (09:35)

A bit the use of technology that were developed in the past and that were almost forgotten for many reasons. Think about the closure of the fuel cycle. That means recycling the spent fuel. At the very beginning of the nuclear era, enrichment of uranium was very complicated and very costly. So from the time of Fermi, Incredibly, 80 years ago, the nuclear industry has always fought to reuse the uranium and the products that are generated into a nuclear reactor and recycle them. So the so-called breeder reactor were developed, reactors that could create fissile material like plutonium to feed the next reactors. What changed was essentially the cost.

They were slightly or significantly more expensive than other reactors. And they didn’t develop because the industry stopped to grow. That’s the reason. So at the beginning we thought a nuclear would have been growing much faster.

But when there was a stop after Chernobyl or after even Trinit Island in US, there was enough uranium and there was no need to make investment in reprocessing, so everything stopped. Just a few countries had maintained this know-how because they done already significant investment and thanks to that today we can use again this… this option for nuclear industry. And also the same applies to the fast reactors. Today we have different technologies that make use of fast reactors that were forgotten in the past because developing a new reactor was an investment that people didn’t have the, you know, the economical push to do this kind of innovation for, I would say, 40 years.

Wes Ashworth (11:24)

Yeah. Yeah. Great context and a really useful baseline and kind of understanding that and the evolution of it. and I know so most nuclear reactors use water as a coolant, you know, meaning the fluid that carries heat away from the reactor core. Yours uses liquid lead. so tell us about that. Like why make that change? What does it allow you to do differently? And what new engineering problems maybe does lead create, if any?

Stefano Buono (11:45)

Yes, with pleasure. You know, with Carnot cycle, you need to work at high temperature to obtain a good conversion of electricity from the heat. And to achieve this with water, which is the simplest element you can use, you have to pressurize everything in the system. So because water is boiled at 100 degrees, So liquid lead boil is 1,700 degrees. So certainly you don’t need to pressurize anything. And this is already the very first advantage. And essentially this opens possibilities that are not easily viable with systems that works at their very limits. Because we can go.

our lead reactor could go for a few days up 100, 200 degrees and it would not change anything, steels would not be affected and etc. But these, so even in the events of accidents or incidents, these increasing temperatures may create physical phenomena that make your reactor… switch off automatically. And there so many physical phenomena that can help to do this. So you reach that concept of passive and intrinsic safety that makes your reactor much safer or help to reach the highest level of safety with very reduced cost. So that’s the big thing of lead. Nothing comes for free.

So if you go higher in temperature corrosion starts to be a problem with anything, not only with lead. what we did in the past 30 years actually was to try to validate materials that could withstand the higher and higher temperature. We are very satisfied and We think we have validated the material that can allow us to use a reactor up to a temperature of 500 degrees. So we are already much higher than a PWR reactor that normally works at 330. So we are really happy. But of course, the higher we go, the more possibilities we have to provide high quality heat to the industry, for example. So we are in a constant search for improving.

these materials. I think we can, these reactors can already reasonably go easily up to 600 degrees. And indeed, one of the countries that are developing… liquid-lead reactor like Russia that have more experience because they designed liquid-lead reactor during the Cold War and they put it into submarines. They’re already building reactors that go up to 600 degrees and more. So, I mean, the problem is there, but there are so many, really a lot of solutions and we know many of them. So we’re just qualifying those solutions in order to be able to use them in the future.

Wes Ashworth (14:39)

Absolutely. I like that a lot. And I like looking both at both sides of that trade-off, because there’s no, you know, magic material in engineering, but clear advantages there. And you can see and you’ve used that phrase intrinsic safety, meaning you’re trying to make certain dangerous scenarios physically impossible or self-limiting rather than depending only on pumps, backup power, or human intervention. tell us a bit more about that. Like what does that mean in practice and what risks still remain?

Stefano Buono (15:04)

You know, to reach criticality you have to have your fuel concentrated, for example. So if you let your core expand easily, if it goes up in temperature, you obtain the possibility to shut down your reactor naturally. And even the less density that you have when you have a higher temperature in a liquid.

help, not speaking about the cross-section of your fissile material that also benefits from the material you use, benefits from stopping the reactor. So you have so many physical phenomena that you can use and you have to design your reactor to make this phenomena happen easily.

Then our decay heat removal system, we have designed all of them to make use of natural convection. So if you don’t have pumps in your, the need for pumps in your safety systems, this make them even more safe. So it’s really a lot of a small solution that you need to validate and implement to make your reactor really passively safe.

And it is possible with our technology, maybe possible also with other technologies. I mean, I think it’s a design culture that the nuclear… industry needs to embrace because if you want to be close to population with smaller reactor, if you want to be close to the industry attached to other kind of industries, we need to have zero meters of exclusion zone around the reactors and this can be achievable only if you use intrinsic safety as your design basis.

Wes Ashworth (16:44)

it makes a lot of sense. And the idea of designing a problem out rather than simply managing it is really compelling. You know, while still acknowledging what can still go wrong and I think makes the safety discussion much more credible. but once you understand the reactor, the more unusual part of newcleo’s strategy starts to come into focus. And so that real differentiator may not be just be how the reactor is cooled or designed, but what you can do with the nuclear material inside it. And I think that’s where the fuel story becomes central.

And so before we get into recycling, help us understand the starting point. A conventional reactor eventually removes its used fuel, even though a great deal of potential energy remains in it. Why is so much energy left behind?

Stefano Buono (17:23)

It’s incredible, but we use only 05% of the energy that is extracted and is contained into the uranium. First, you have to enrich the uranium so you left over a lot of depleted uranium. And when you burn your fuel, you only use 5% of the potential of this energy. But in any systems, you build up fissile materials that if they are reconfigured in a new fuel they can provide this energy. So to make it simple when you make a fission you create two fission fragments. From there you cannot really extract any more energy and maybe in five of our reactors you create a ton per year of this fission fragment.

But you only create more or less a ton per year of plutonium. And plutonium is like uranium-235. I mean, it’s a fissile material, and you can enrich other fuel. So the trick is only to get out the plutonium and use it in your fuel and to take out the fission fragments and store them.

I say store them because they can have even some useful material inside that can be used in batteries, in medical applications. There are a lot of use for this material. And you understand one ton every gigawatt per year of materials is less than a cubic meter. It’s really not a lot of material. So this is dramatic change.

And then you might say yes, but you don’t not only create plutonium but also heavier elements. Actually everything can burn into a nuclear reactor. So you can address the problem of transuranic elements with different strategies, but they all come to the same concept. Let’s forget about elements that are heavier than uranium because these are the ones that you need to store underground in geological repository because these are the elements that have up to 250,000 years of life before coming back to the radio toxicity of the mined uranium, essentially. So that’s the trick. It’s using… extracting much more energy and transforming reliability, the one of the spent fuel, into an asset. That is what we are doing.

Wes Ashworth (19:44)

Absolutely. It’s probably surprising to a lot of people as you started there with some of some of those stats of that the 5% and things like that. you know, spent fuel sounds like something that’s been completely used up, but obviously not the case. And I think once you understand that useful energy remains, that waste discussion starts to look very different. And so you mentioned this earlier, but your design is what’s called a fast reactor. You know, fast refers to the neutrons inside the reactor, not how quickly the plant operates, but what is using fast?

Fast neutrons change what you can do with the used nuclear fuel.

Stefano Buono (20:15)

The fact that you can essentially fission all of these heavy elements inside the reactor, while if you use a thermal reactor, at the end you accumulate a lot of elements that don’t fission anymore in the thermal spectrum. That is why you have a clear advantage.

you have many more nutrients as well in a fission reaction so you can use those additional nutrients to even make your breathing process enhanced and maybe one day to burn a battery of fuel. So rather than using 5% maybe get into 10%, maybe get into 20% to reduce the cycles as much as we can.

There is a very good start that we can have with existing technologies, but we can work a lot to further improve this existing technology and make our reactor industry much more competitive than what it looks today.

Wes Ashworth (21:20)

Absolutely appreciate the definition and context. I think it helps us, you know, fast reactor is an easy term to misunderstand if you don’t have some additional insight there. so as we’re breaking this down, so the recycled fuel you want to use is called MOX, short for mixed oxide fuel, which combines uranium and plutonium. If conventional uranium fuel becomes cheaper and easier to supply.

Does recycling still make economic sense?

Stefano Buono (21:42)

In principle not. What happened a few years ago when we started our idea to use plutonium

Certainly, the MOX was more expensive than traditional uranium, at least 5% of the uranium that is used into PWR. Because our MOX are used already also in PWR, 10% of the fuel used by EDF in France is MOX. They decided to use MOX because France has never renounced the idea of closing the fuel cycle. So they wanted to keep this technology alive even if it was a bit more expensive. Maybe in the case of France it was not very expensive because they have already invested into recycling and MOX facilities. So potentially they could really still profit from this investment. Anyway, today the situation is different because many small modular reactors need highly enriched fuel.

20% enrichment. The bigger producer of enriched uranium, Russia, has disappeared from the market. So there is a price escalation that is already significant and already makes our MOX fuel more competitive than HALEU-based fuels.

So it is kind of happening already, these disadvantages. it will depend, of course, on the future prices of uranium. But many projections are even giving higher prices for uranium in the future, because there is a huge expansion. China is soon becoming the higher.

user of uranium. So depending on the geopolitical situation, on the new mines that are going to be discovered, on the investment that countries or companies are going to do into the enrichment and many other things that we need, the next conversion and deconversion facility and so on. there might be another equilibrium. Of course, we could use 20% enriched uranium rather than MOX. So at certain moment, maybe our reactors could go with a more traditional uranium fuel. But we believe that for many years we’re going to play a role that is fundamental. And if you integrate the cost of disposal of the spent fuel, because these price differences have never considered.

the cost of disposal. But if you put that, I believe that we can be competitive with almost any kind of fuel.

Wes Ashworth (24:18)

Yeah, really helpful. And especially you kind of look at that whole picture, you know, and really helps you understand the value and all those different pieces that come into play there. it’s so also the United States has tried to build a major MOX fuel program before. for anybody that is thinking that or that knows that already, but the Savannah River project was canceled after severe costs and schedule problems. why should anyone sort of believe the economics and execution can be really be different this time?

Stefano Buono (24:41)

Because in that case, There was no market for MOX. The MOX was a way to dispose of the surplus plutonium. Nobody would have bought MOX, so it was not a facility that had a commercial purpose. So once the facility became too expensive, it was stopped just for budget reasons. Now it’s completely different.

We have a market, we have a means, and we also made lot of experience out of the French commercial manufacturing facilities. So we have the possibility to design a MOX factory that is more optimized, also in terms of cost, and become much more competitive. But essentially, for the MFFF facility in Savannah River, there was no market.

So it’s very difficult to compare.

Wes Ashworth (25:29)

Yeah, absolutely. I again glad to put that out there. I think the history matters, but yet to your point, difficult to compare. It’s just completely different circumstances in today’s world versus what was then. so we know too, like the US government is now exploring, whether nearly twenty metric tons of surplus plutonium can be turned into advanced nuclear fuel or used for reactor research. the DOE selected Oklo for advanced negotiations. And Oklo said newcleo would bring fuel cycle expertise and potential.

Project capital. what exactly would newcleo do if that effort does move forward?

Stefano Buono (26:00)

I think the DOE has done a very bold move because there is a significant investment to do that interests, of course, ourself, our investor and other parties. But this access to plutonium is always a question mark. so 20 tons are a lot. And it’s a quantity that… made us really choose to come to the US and establish our first manufacturing facility there. Maybe we will not have all of it, but certainly we will work to have enough material and enough perspective in the future to access more material if you are successful to motivate us to come. What we offer to Oklo was certainly the fact that we have a facility that is already completely designed. And we have designed this facility in France, we have gone through licensing in France, we already got a positive opinion on our safety of the CSO. So in France now it’s only question to deposit our construction permit.

So all these experiences, with all these experiences, we arrive in the US with a… very different background which is very important because there is no experience in the US. It’s incredible. So I think that our discussions with the parties give you comforts on the fact that we know how to receive, transport, handle this material and transform this material into fuel.

So we really hope to be able to build our first MOX facility in the Savannah River site in partnership with Oklo.

Wes Ashworth (27:40)

absolutely. I think the clarity is important. You know, there’s several different companies and different responsibilities involved there. For somebody new to this subject, or maybe even not new but they’re thinking it, so proliferation, meaning the risk that nuclear material or technology can be diverted towards weapons. what is the strongest security argument against recycling plutonium? And how do you answer it without minimizing the risk?

Stefano Buono (28:01)

Well, first, we have decided to build a reactor that consumes plutonium. So actually, we are contributing to lowering the risk of proliferation because we want to use this material and consume it. So we are not creating, it’s not a breeder, our reactor. So we are not creating more plutonium than what we use.

We do want and we think it’s very, very important to work in collaboration with the DOE and the government. We have offered complete transparency to our operation and complete access to our operations.

And this is clear, for example, for the fact that we are willing to do our first facility inside the fence of the Savannah Riverside. So in a very secure environment where this control can be exerted very easily by the authorities. So I think that for reprocessing that we are not doing because we want to receive the material but we are not involved into reprocessing.

And for fewer fabrication we have to work together with the authorities.

Wes Ashworth (29:08)

Yeah, absolutely. Great context there and really helpful. I know some of those questions go through and there’s you know, it’s at times misinformation or just concerns that are, you know, just a bit unfounded So I always like addressing those as well.

Stefano Buono (29:18)

The plutonium that is within the spent fuel has not the quality to be used by the military industry. It’s much easier to produce plutonium in any reactor for that purpose for a country rather than recycling from the waste. So this makes also our cycle pretty safe from this point of view.

And then, course, at the moment, MOX and recycle are done in Russia, in China, in India, of course, in Japan and in France, in many, many countries. So it would not make sense for US not to use this resource and not to control what’s happening in US and around the world.

Wes Ashworth (30:01)

Great additional context as well, just to fully understand that. And I think as we talk through sort of gets us to the point where the physics, economics, and security questions all collide. And even if the reactor works and the fuel strategy works, someone still has to manufacture it, license it, finance it, sell it. So now the question shifts from whether the technology can work to whether newcleo can actually really build the company required to deliver it. And so rather than design a reactor and rely on other companies for everything else, newcleo is trying to control much more the chain itself, you know, including the fuel, engineering, manufacturing. why is that necessary and where can it become you know too expensive or complex?

Stefano Buono (30:37)

Well, the first motivation is that we didn’t want to create any stop gaps. We are not creating a huge innovation, as I said. We are re-industrializing all the technologies that were almost forgotten. But per se, this industrialization is a novelty in many components, materials, and so on. And also the industry is booming, so we might not obtain or have delays from a certain critical component. So whatever we think we have a criticality in the component, we have tried to develop our own manufacturing. With this in mind, we have acquired already three companies.

A fourth company is underway as well. have announced the acquisition.

let’s say the closing subject to, of course, the last 30 days that we are doing. And all these companies will contribute to our supply chain, but also to our capacity to be EPC contractor for our clients somehow. So we are developing or reviving a technology.

We are expecting that we want to be the company, the engineering company that support our clients in building this reactor on time, on budget and without surprises. I think this is as important as having a good technology, having the possibility to respect a reasonable time for the deployment of this technology.

Wes Ashworth (32:11)

It makes a lot of strategic sense. Definitely, get it and why the advantages are there. and so I know part of that as well as you started to maybe get into there is you’ve announced these plans to enter the US public markets through a combination with NewHold, beyond the transaction itself, like what concrete milestone should investors judge newcleo on over the next 24 months?

Stefano Buono (32:30)

We are building a facility in Italy that is actually the industrial demonstration of our capability to design, build and operate a nuclear reactor. It’s a 10 megawatt electrical reactor, meaning that we don’t have nuclear… interaction, are heating roads with 10 MW of electricity to make the power. But everything else has the same complexity of a nuclear reactor because we have our own steam generator, our own pumps, the vessel design, the balance of plant and even power generation. And the turbine is actually the second item that we are not building ourselves.

together with the core simulator because we are the experts who are doing that for us in the past as well. and this is not even the last of, it’s not even the first facility that we are building, it’s potentially number 16. So we have built all of a complete system to validate our components, our choices, our instrumentation and… processes. So this facility is going to be finished by the end of the year. So this is certainly a milestone that is important for us because we gave ourselves only one year to build all of it and believe me it’s big as a significant SMR. So we even used an older reactor site to have enough space to do this. So certainly this is very important. Secondly, we are very happy to develop part of our strategy in the US and actually we have started the interaction with the NRC.

The interaction with the NRC will become more interesting when we can start officially a licensing process that today is in a pre-licensing mode. So today we don’t have the clock that is ticking on the 18 months that is the new target of the NRC for delivering a license, but the clock will start ticking when we have land. So certainly we need to acquire land.

discussing with the Savannah River site for our MOX factory and we believe since we are opening offices in ICAN in the area and hiring people in the area, we thought it was a good idea to have also our first commercial deployment on the same site. So we are discussing for both land for the reactor, commercial reactor and the MOX factory. So I think these are the targets for delivering in the next two months, identify this land, start the licensing and start, finish by the end of the year the facility, the reactor facility and start operating this facility next year.

Wes Ashworth (35:19)

Yeah, absolutely. it’s great to better understand those milestones, how that comes together. And as you outlined there, exciting days are ahead, right? as we shift a little bit, you know, with data centers getting most of the headlines, a nuclear reactor can also provide very high temperature and heat directly to industries, you know, such as steel and chemicals. where do you think the first truly bankable customers come from and why?

Stefano Buono (35:39)

Indeed, we come from Europe, so we suffered a very severe price crisis for energy.

So we started actually to work a lot with the industry. So we work with steel, concrete, paper, ceramics and chemical industry to try to provide electricity and heat, starting from an SMR to them.

So from this point of view, we have a clear advantage. In our pipeline, of the opportunities that we have, they come from the industry, so not for the data center. Of course, the data center boom is very strong in US, but we see… of course the effect also in Europe. So we also had, we’re studying the possibility to provide electricity to the data center in Europe. And when we decided to come only one year ago in US, we have actually started working on some opportunities that are only at the moment related to data center. But now that our presence is expanding, we want to work with the industry to understand if what we learned with our partners in Europe can be transferred in US. So we’d love to work with industrial offtakers, not only with data center.

Wes Ashworth (36:50)

Absolutely. I like widening the conversation beyond data centers and AI in general. Just, you know, reliable energy demand exists across the industrial economy and such a big opportunity as well for decarbonization as well in those industries too. So we’ve now talked about the vision, the technology, the fuel, the economics, and the customer. the cleanest way for me to bring this all together is just to ask what success should actually look like in the real world. You know, not another announcement or projection, but something tangible that people can really point to. So if you’re going out in the future and we look at, you know, five years even, 2031, I guess what should I be able to visit and see with my own eyes, both in your lead-cooled reactor program, your Mox Fuel program, that would just really prove nuclear has moved from developing technology to actually deploying it commercially.

Stefano Buono (37:33)

Well, certainly our target would be to have completed this facility in 31 and 32, but having many facilities being built. So our mission should be to understand that there is no technological risk in nuclear today. The risk is more on the execution, it’s more on the financial. So really if we can… reach the objective to build multiple opportunities for starting construction of these reactors in the markets that we are addressing, is primarily Europe and US. I mean, this is really what we consider a success.

to get project financing successful on this project. And I hope we’re not going to be the only one. We really hope that the industry can convince with, you know, many reactors could be launched because we need so much energy that in the next, I would say, at least 15 years, I don’t think we’ll be having any competition among the… producers of nuclear new small modular reactors.

Wes Ashworth (38:40)

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. and I like putting it in physical terms, it gives people a scoreboard to follow just beyond announcements, financing, projections, and kind of looking at what that’ll look like. I’ll switch gears a little bit and just thinking about those listening. So your own journey with this idea spans more than three decades. Like what would you tell a founder building something important that may take 10 or 20 years before the world is ready for it?

Stefano Buono (39:00)

It’s a tough job. Biotech suffers the same problem. Sometimes from pre-clinical to drug, it might take 10 years and a billion to develop. So all of this long innovation requires a lot of confidence.

What I can advise, never over-promise and always over-deliver because one day if we feel that we absolutely need the money to the next step and we over-promise, we will pay this. So that’s really something that with all my heart I really think it is very important as an advice.

Wes Ashworth (39:40)

Yeah, strong, strong wisdom there. And obviously that lesson reaches far beyond nuclear and can benefit a lot of people, you know, and something powerful about knowing when to keep pushing and when the surrounding market just simply needs time to catch up and what all goes into that. so let’s end with the upside. So if this next decade goes right, like what will surprise someone who knows almost nothing about nuclear today when they look at the industry in 2035 or even beyond?

Stefano Buono (40:04)

I hope that in 35, nuclear is going to be part of our normal life. But I think that nuclear can deliver still outstanding innovations. I think about nuclear batteries, for example. This is something that we hear.

very rarely into the press, but there is also potential for so many applications. Maybe nuclear will help us colonize the space. For sure, we need this kind of concentrated energy in the space because I don’t see the possibility of using only sun.

So there will be a lot of nuclear application, I see an enormous impulse into nuclear methane, enormous. There are so many drugs being developed. I always thought that treat what you see, as we used to say years ago, is really… an incredible advantage that can only be given by nuclear medicine. And now it looks like this advantage is being exploited. So I hope people will be also confident, more confident about nuclear because of the fact that nuclear is going to be saving so many lives also. That’s what I hope for 2035.

Wes Ashworth (41:21)

Yeah, it’s a strong vision. You know, great place to leave it because nuclear could look very different from the picture most people carry in their heads today. And it’ll be exciting to watch that unfold. a final question, if you have anything else you want to add, anything else you want to leave the audience with, final words of wisdom, anything you didn’t get to share that you’d like to, I’ll leave it open for you for a moment.

Stefano Buono (41:37)

Well, maybe something we didn’t speak about is the opportunity that given for nuclear in the maritime world. I think that maritime sector needs to improve their technology, to decarbonize. And so I also think that nuclear-powered ships are going to play a role in the future, but also floating platforms.

With floating platforms we can really achieve a perfect modularity because our designs always are different when you move them in different locations. While with a floating platform you can achieve really industries.

that can optimize cost and bring the cost down. So these are a couple of things that I would like to see evident in 2035 and I think where nuclear can play a great potential.

Wes Ashworth (42:29)

Yeah, I love it. I love seeing the potential, knowing what’s possible, and just starting to open our eyes to that as well, too. So it’ll be exciting to see that world, you know, as we look to the future. But Stefano, thank you. I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. Really just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. You know, we were able to start with the just the basics around nuclear energy and how it works and ended up somewhere much bigger in just how we think about fuel, waste, safety, cost, energy security, and whether technologies that have been discussed for decades can really finally become commercial realities. To everyone out there listening, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to Green Giants, Titans of Clean Energy, wherever you listen to podcasts, so you don’t miss what’s coming next. If the show is valuable to you, take a moment, leave us a rating, a review, check the show notes as well. This all genuinely helps more people discover these conversations. You can also follow us on socials for clips, insights, and highlights from the show.

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