E4: Fission Founders, Part 1: Manufacturing Nuclear

What if we treated building nuclear more like a manufacturing challenge than a construction challenge? How could nuclear benefit from the tried-and-true methodologies of other large industrial industries like ship-building and oil and gas to make nuclear as cheap as solar and wind to produce? In this episode – the first of two with leading nuclear fission startup founders – Packy and Julia talk to a new crop of nuclear entrepreneurs who are focused on manufacturing small modular reactors at scale. Drawing on best practices from very different industries like building reactors in shipyards or adapting the methods of offshore oil and gas rigs, these founders are taking a radically different approach from the incumbents in nuclear power plant construction. They’re focused on bringing the experience curves for building nuclear way down But how will it actually work in practice? How do they balance pleasing regulators with innovating on new designs for more efficiency and manufacturability? How do they finance these businesses? What is the plan for connecting these power sources to the grid – or finding other “behind the meter” use cases? Tune in to go deep with the people turning theories about nuclear manufacturing into reality. Thank you to this episode’s guests: Matt Slotkin, Nick Touran, Bret Kugelmass, Katherine Boyle, Josh Wolfe, and Jake DeWitte SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS AND BIASES | GIVEWELL | ANROK Imagine total control over your company's spending with Rippling Spend, the all-in-one platform for expense reports, corporate cards, and bill pay. Visit for a free demo and one month free trial. Advanced training for building production-ready RAG applications. Learn from experts to overcome LLM challenges, evaluate systematically, and integrate advanced features. Includes free Cohere credits. Visit to start the RAG++ course today. GiveWell spends 50,000 hours every year doing deep-dives into different charitable programs to try to find the ways to do the most good for your dollar. Visit to find out more or make a donation. Select PODCAST and enter Econ 102 at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Anrok is the enterprise-grade solution that automates sales tax compliance worldwide. Visit to claim your free nexus study and take control of your SaaS tax strategy. – A huge thank you to our presenting sponsors for Season 1: Range Fund Holdings: Visit or contact your financial advisor to learn more about the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF and start investing in the future of energy. Secureframe: Get 10% off your first year of Secureframe: Pilot.com: Get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months, go to Clean Air Task Force For the full list of resources referenced in this show:

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E4: Fission Founders, Part 1: Manufacturing Nuclear is an episode from Not Boring by Packy McCormick.

This episode is 56:53 long.

This episode was published on Nov 10, 2023.

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