Exclusive: New nuclear startup aims big

Zoom in: The firm, which currently has less than 50 employees, is in the midst of a capital raise in coordination with an investment bank.

• While chief development officer Juliann Edwards wouldn't disclose hard numbers, she said the bank handling the round has experience with large raises — a nod to the high costs involved in this energy arena.
• The firm plans to use proven nuclear technology, Edwards said in an interview, and it will pursue a "design-once, build many" approach using sites that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already evaluated and approved for reactor deployment.
• This would potentially avoid lengthy regulatory hurdles that can stymie new reactor projects for years.

The Nuclear Company aims to build its first fleet that would add up to 6 gigawatts. A gigawatt is typical average power for an industrial city of about 1 million.

• It hopes to be delivering electricity by the mid-2030s.

The intrigue: The firm differs from other nuclear companies based in the U.S. in that many of them are working on new reactor designs, such as advanced modular reactors.

• Historically, too, nuclear projects in the U.S. have been expensive one-offs. But the new company thinks that by standardizing processes and setting hard timelines, there could be drastic efficiency gains to deploy new plants quickly.
• Benefiting them may be the increasingly bipartisan support for the industry in Washington and the growing power demands in the U.S. and elsewhere, partly fueled by the AI industry.
• Other countries, particularly China, are on track to deploy far more nuclear power plants than the U.S., Edwards said, noting that The Nuclear Company is trying to change that.

What they're saying: "We're not going to focus on a single project, a single set of stakeholders, a single utility, a single piece of land," Edwards told Axios.

• "It will allow for both government, utilities and off-takers in the hyperscale industrials of the world to come together to form a meaningful pipeline of projects that will give folks certainty in the supply chain and workforce arena, but also the banks and the U.S. government."
• In a statement, The Nuclear Company claims that its group of utilities and independent power producers, nuclear technology suppliers, data centers and private equity help it manage risk, rather than asking an individual utility to take on all the risk for building a particular project.

What they're saying: "The success or failure of the U.S. economy will be determined by our ability to power its innovations. Nuclear power is the cornerstone of that endeavor," said The Nuclear Company co-founder and chair Patrick Maloney in a statement.

Yes, but: This new firm is aiming for a different business model in an area where many companies before it have bled cash trying to get projects off the ground, let alone fleets of reactors.