The Standard Oil of nuclear
Our 50-year wait ends
In today’s Diary:
We buried a miracle in paperwork
The zero banana rule
The “Standard Oil” of nuclear
Why microreactors love TRISO
Return to Atomic City
Dear Rational Optimist,
A single uranium pellet the size of a gummy bear contains as much energy as 140 barrels of oil. It’s the cleanest, safest energy source known to man.
No one who knows what they’re talking about disputes this.
So why don’t we have nuclear-powered everything?
In short: We buried a miracle in paperwork. Since the 1970s building a new reactor has effectively been illegal in America. It required $30 billion and 15+ years in regulatory hell.
I bring good news. On my recent travels through Austin and Detroit I met the world’s best nuclear entrepreneurs. I’ve now known many of these guys for a while and have become friends with them. This was the first time they’ve ever said the following to me (and they all agreed):
“Regulation is finally becoming a solved problem.”
One founder said his microreactor (a small nuclear reactor, or “SMR”) could be up and running next year.
This is huge! We are working on an ROS Deep Dive about SMRs and the dozen or so startups sprinting to release one. More on that soon.
Today, let’s talk about the “problems” remaining with nuclear. What do we do with the waste? And how do we get fuel? We’ll meet the entrepreneurs coming to the rescue on both.
First, let’s quickly look at the big regulatory changes.
In 1974, a bureaucratic monster called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was born. Guess how many new reactor designs it’s greenlit since?
Zero!
Only two reactors have started commercial operation on the NRC’s watch, compared to 133 before it.
We’re finally righting this wrong. The President has signed four executive orders to turbocharge nuclear. These orders trigger five big changes:
Change 1: They set a goal of quadrupling the size of America’s nuclear fleet by 2050.
Change 2. They speed up the development of “advanced nuclear” (read: small modular reactors, or “SMRs”) through pilot programs and streamlined environmental reviews. They order the NRC to license new reactors within 18 months.
Change 3. They order the Department of Energy (DoE) to approve at least three reactors by mid-2026. Basically, Trump wants three SMRs up and running for America’s 250th birthday.
Change 4. They designate nuclear plants that power AI facilities as “defense-critical infrastructure.” Building nuclear-powered data centers on military bases is a genius loophole. It potentially allows projects to avoid lengthy NRC reviews.
Change 5. This is the most important change in my view: They ask the NRC to reconsider its “As Low as Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) regulation. You receive more radiation from eating a single banana than you would from living next to a nuclear power plant for a year. Yet under the ALARA rule, even that isn’t safe enough!
This “zero banana rule” has effectively made it illegal to build nuclear plants in America. I think the President should have ordered the NRC to eliminate the rule altogether. But this is progress.
Nuclear entrepreneurs have been waiting their whole lives for this moment.
As Matt Loszak, founder of Aalo Atomics said, “We just have to wait for the executive orders to be implemented and we’re off to the races.”
In Detroit, Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor said…
"The problem is no longer in the policy side. It's now in the engineering side.”
One of those engineering challenges is fuel.
Getting fuel was top of mind for many of the entrepreneurs I met. Even if they were ready to power up their microreactors tomorrow, many wouldn’t be able to. They lack the fuel.
How is that possible? Because America regulated its domestic nuclear fuel industry to death, handing control of the supply chain to Russia and China. If that sounds familiar, it’s because a similar thing happened with drones.
Getting uranium from the ground to a reactor has four basic steps:
Mining. Companies like Cameco (Canada) dig up uranium in places like Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia. Over 85% of the world’s uranium comes from these 6 countries. The raw ore is then processed into a powder called yellowcake.
Conversion. Yellowcake is milled and converted into uranium hexafluoride (UF6) so it can be turned into gas for enrichment. Orano (France) and Rosatom (Russia) control over 50% of the market.
Enrichment. The nuclear “gas” is enriched by spinning it in centrifuges. Three companies, Urenco (European consortium), Orano, and Rosatom dominate the enrichment market.
Fuel fabrication. Companies like Westinghouse (US) and Framatome (France) press and bake the enriched uranium powder into hard ceramic pellets.
America has plenty of uranium in the ground. But thanks to overregulation, it has minimal capacity to process it.
As of 2023, 99% of the fuel used in US reactors was imported – much of it from Russia.
Meet the innovators solving this crisis…
Scott Nolan, a partner at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund, was one of the earliest investors in Radiant Nuclear, a startup building portable microreactors. But Radiant hit a giant snag: It had no fuel.
Specifically, no access to high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU), the high-octane uranium best for powering most microreactors.
Only Russia and China produce HALEU at scale. However, the US is set to ban imports of Russian uranium starting in 2028. Which leaves us with China – an unreliable trading partner.
Accessing HALEU in the US today is like standing in a Soviet bread line. The DoE holds a limited stockpile. Founders must fill out forms, wait months, and hope for a ration – just to test their prototypes. “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Scott Nolan founded General Matter to produce HALEU fuel and revive America’s enrichment industry.
When I met Scott at the Reindustrialize summit in Detroit, he said “I spent over a year at Founders Fund searching for an American enrichment company to invest in, only to find there wasn’t one. So, we built our own.”
General Matter assembled a top-tier team from places like SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and several of America’s national nuclear labs. It was one of four companies selected by the DoE to kickstart American HALEU production.
If General Matter succeeds, it will do for uranium enrichment what SpaceX did for rockets: put America back in the race.
J.D. Rockefeller built an all-time fortune with Standard Oil.
Not by drilling for oil. But by owning the most valuable part of the supply chain: turning crude into fuel.
Standard Nuclear plans to do the same for nuclear. Its goal is to become a scalable, affordable, all-American nuclear fuel supplier – the Standard Oil of nuclear.
HALEU, the best fuel for next-gen reactors, is often packaged in ceramic armor called TRISO, which keeps the fuel dense and safe.
TRISO comes in indestructible snooker ball-sized pebbles. Each one stores enough power to run thousands of homes.
TRISO doesn’t melt. It doesn’t leak. It traps radioactivity inside, even in extreme accidents. That’s why the DoE calls it the most robust nuclear fuel on Earth. Even the NRC recognizes it as ‘functional containment.’
Here’s one entrepreneur on the magic of TRISO: “You know those giant concrete containment domes that surround old reactors in case something goes wrong? With TRISO, we’ve basically engineered the dome into every single fuel particle.”
TRISO gives microreactors clean, compact, constant power, with no meltdown risk, and no need for massive containment buildings.
China recently ran a safety test where they turned off a nuclear reactor’s coolant pumps. The reactor was running on TRISO, which absorbed the heat. The core cooled down naturally. No other nuclear fuel can pull off that magic trick.
In a familiar story, China is the only country making TRISO in any real volume.
Standard Nuclear will help America catch up.
Standard Nuclear is the real deal. The company emerged from the ashes of another company which went bankrupt when its main backer died. The team was working on commercializing TRISO, which had only been made in America’s national labs.
After the backer’s death, they believed in their work so strongly that more than 40 employees worked for about eight months with no pay. Some sold their homes or downsized to stay afloat.
Their grit paid off. In 2024, the company was reborn as Standard Nuclear with $42 million in funding.
Standard Nuclear operates out of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a place once called "Atomic City," where uranium for the Manhattan Project was enriched. It’s already the largest TRISO fabrication facility outside of China.
Standard Nuclear has recently booked $5 million in contracts and signed offtake agreements worth over $100 million with microreactor startups like Radiant, Antares and Nano Nuclear.
“ROS never addresses the problem of nuclear waste storage.”
ROS Member John D pointed this out. Let me rectify.
The thought of radioactive goo oozing out of rusty barrels is scary. The truth is nuclear waste is a solved problem. And innovators are turning it into another opportunity.
The basics: All the nuclear waste ever generated in America—60 years’ worth—could fit on a single football field, stacked less than 20 feet high.
Atomic leftovers have never harmed anyone in the US. Spent fuel is safely tucked away in sealed containers at over 60 locations across 34 states.
But why just store it? SMR startups are building reactors that run on waste. Oklo’s Aurora microreactor, small enough to fit in a large living room, can convert used fuel into new energy. Like a car that runs on exhaust fumes!
The most frustrating aspect of the nuclear waste “problem” is we’ve been sitting on the solution for 60 years. Argonne National Laboratory built reactors that could recycle nuclear waste into fuel in the 1960s!
Why don’t we recycle fuel already? Blame politics. President Carter halted reprocessing in the 1970s. Reagan lifted the ban, but by then companies had moved on.
Then there’s Deep Isolation. I recently chatted with its CEO Rod Baltzer. His company invented a way to permanently and safely isolate nuclear waste, deep underground, using directional drilling technology and its Universal Canister System.
Deep Isolation drills a tunnel about the width of a pizza box into solid rock, up to three miles below the surface. At the bottom, the tunnel curves and stretches out like an L-shaped straw. Then they slide in a sealed, corrosion-resistant canister filled with nuclear waste which can stay there for millennia.
Deep Isolation makes waste disappear safely, permanently and affordably.
The real killer isn’t nuclear waste. It’s the nuclear plants we don’t build, leaving us stuck with dirtier energy options. Innovators are turning a fake problem into real power.
Think ahead to July 4, 2026…
We’re celebrating America’s 250th birthday. The first three microreactors are humming on US soil. These man-made beauties are pumping out clean, safe, “always on” energy.
After meeting many of these nuclear entrepreneurs, I know they’re sprinting toward this goal. Teams are sleeping on factory floors. Engineers are working 18-hour days. Founders are pouring their lives into hitting that July 2026 milestone.
America’s bright requires a lot more energy, not less. Remember: There is no such thing as a rich, low-energy country.
In 1973 President Nixon proposed the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000. Better late than never.
With 1,000 microreactors dotted across the US we could desalinate seawater and turn barren deserts green. After hurricanes, portable reactors could roll in to power hospitals and water systems within hours.
Building that future comes down to towns and cities across America saying “yes” to nuclear.
That’s where you come in. Show friends and family nuclear is the cleanest, safest, energy source we have. Push back against misinformed NIMBYs.
Answer questions like this one we received: “What could a terrorist do if they got their hands on a microreactor?” Short answer: he’d have years of clean energy, but fears about a terrorist using it to build a bomb are unfounded.
Perhaps most importantly, share nuclear innovation stories with kids! The Second Nuclear Age will bring a talent crunch. It needs engineers, technicians, machinists, and policy advocates.
The #1 thing kids say they want to be when they grow up is… social media influencer. Ugh. Let’s change that to nuclear engineer!
Hop in dude, we’re going nuclear. And this time, we’re not stopping.
Now click those “Like” and “Restack” buttons below. And don’t forget to share this on social media.
—Stephen McBride
Stephen McBride is a co-founder of the Rational Optimist Society.
Keep up the good work Stephen; heaven knows we get enough negativity from what we laughingly call the news outlets.
I applaud Stephen’s research and I love the enthusiasm. What I would like to see is a bit more of the rational side of the optimism. For example, with the proliferation of nuclear materials what is to stop domestic and foreign terrorists from accessing the materials? We know that whenever there is extreme deregulation bad actors abuse the freedom. Think Enron, worldcom, Conseco etc. I’m excited for abundant clean energy but give us the downside too. There’s always a downside.