About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges of financing nuclear projects and how Blue Energy is innovating to address these issues.

Why nuclear has never been project financed and how that might finally be about to change. Every nuclear plant ever built has ultimately been backstopped by taxpayers or ratepayers. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because nobody has ever cracked the construction cost and schedule problem well enough to convince a bank to finance it without government support. Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Jake Jurewicz, Co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, to explore why that has been so hard and what a credible path to fixing it might actually look like. Jake walks through the root cause of nuclear's cost overrun problem and it is not the reactor. The reactor equipment itself represents around 7% of total project costs. The real problem is what Jake calls nuclear construction overhead: the cost of mobilizing, training, and retaining the 10,000 or so skilled workers needed to build these plants in the field, the way we have been building them for 70 years, essentially the same way you would build a castle. The episode then turns to what Blue Energy is doing differently. By intentionally selecting sites accessible by barge and contracting existing oil and gas fabrication yards and…

People in this episode

Host: Bridget van Dorsten

Guest: Jake Jurewicz

Topics covered

• nuclear energy
• project financing
• construction costs
• SMRs
• hyperscalers
• workforce training

Keywords

• nuclear renaissance
• cost overrun
• fixed-price contracts
• construction overhead
• skilled workers

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Blue Energy

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