Part 1 of 4 Parts
Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are investing significant money in nuclear energy for the first time. That is changing the pace of innovation in the nuclear industry. Ray Rothrock is a longtime venture capitalist who has personal investments in 10 nuclear startups. He said, “There has not been a resurgence of nuclear power, ever, since its heyday in the late 1970s. Now that is changing. I have never seen this kind of investment before. Ever.”
Jacob DeWitte is the CEO of the micro-reactor startup Oklo. He says that the landscape has changed dramatically since he began raising funds in 2014. At the time, he was a part of the Y Combinator startup incubator. He added, “More investors are interested, more investors are excited by the space, and they’re getting smarter to do the diligence and know what to do here — which is good.”
John Parsons is an economist and lecturer at MIT. He said, “I think having fresh perspectives is really good. Nuclear energy is a very complex science, and it’s been supported by the federal government and at these national labs. And so that’s a very small circle of people. And when you broaden that circle, you get a lot of new minds, different thinking, a variety of experiments.”
Parsons continued, “In any industry, there can be a ‘groupthink’ or ‘narrowness’ in the way things are done over time. With private investment in the space, there will be out-of-the-box thinking. Maybe that out-of-the-box thinking doesn’t produce anything useful. Maybe it turns out that the old designs are the best. But I think it’s really wonderful to have the variety of takes.”
In spite of the enthusiasm of the previous quotes, not everyone is so optimistic that the recent flow of venture dollars will actually lead to significant progress.
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She said, “Investors have often invested in stupid things that didn’t work. Because the reality is that in a 75-year history of this technology, it has never been profitable in a market-based system. If investors are putting money into nuclear now, that’s because they think they can make money, and I can only think they believe they will make money because they think that there’s a big opportunity to have the federal government pick up a big part of the tab.”
From 2015 to 2021, total venture capital deal flow in the U.S. has increases fifty-four percent in terms of deals actually closed and two hundred and ninety four percent by dollar value. This is according to data compiled by the private capital market research firm Pitchbook. In that same time period, climate investing deal flow in the U.S. rose by two hundred and fourteen percent in terms of volume and one thousand three hundred and forty-eight by dollar value. In the nuclear space, investments rose even faster by three hundred twenty five percent by volume and three thousand six hundred forty-two percent by dollar value.
Please read Part 2 next