NUCLEAR NOW

“Nobody believes it until it finally happens,” says Ajay Royan, managing partner of Mithril Capital, which invests billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s money. Back in 2014, Mithril put about $1 million into Everett, Washington– based Helion Energy, one of a handful of companies now getting closer to the decades-old dream of generating energy through nuclear fusion. (That’s the process of knocking hydrogen atoms together into helium—it’s what takes place in the core of the sun.) Helion counts Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskowitz and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman among its investors and recently raised $500 million at a $3 billion valuation.

Also in the fusion race is Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Commonwealth Fusion Systems. It has raised $1.8 billion from another crowd of billionaires including Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, John Doerr, George Soros and John Arnold. The CEOs of both Helion and Commonwealth predict nuclear fusion will be producing commercial energy within a decade.

Along with these moonshot efforts, billionaires are also pouring money into newer, safer designs for nuclear fission reactors as a nuclear renaissance looks ever more likely.

That’s significant because despite all the attention paid to alternatives, fossil fuels—gas, oil and coal—still make up 80% of all energy used worldwide, not much less than two decades ago. One reason is that nuclear power as a share of world energy has not only stopped growing but has actually shrunk—from 7% to 5%—over that period. After the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan and Germany mothballed nuclear reactors, offsetting nuclear growth in China. In the U.S., new nuclear plants have been largely stalled since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

The political winds are shifting. California is debating whether to save the Diablo Canyon reactor, slated for decommissioning in 2025 despite having decades of life left. Japan is slowly bringing some of its reactors back online. France, with the most nuclear capacity in Western Europe, is moving to reinvigorate its industry—a fifth of its 56 reactors are currently offline.

Gates is a nuclear power booster— he describes it as the only carbon-free energy source that can work almost anywhere 24 hours a day. In 2008 he cofounded TerraPower, which has developed (in concert with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy) the Natrium reactor—a fast reactor fueled with lowenriched uranium that sits in a melt

down-proof pond of molten salt, which doubles as long-term energy storage. In 2018, amid rising tensions with China, the U.S. government scuttled TerraPower’s plan to build its first Natrium reactor in China. But now the Department of Energy has agreed to provide up to $2 billion—roughly half the cost—to build the first commercial-scale Natrium reactor in Wyoming at the site of a retiring coal-fired generator owned by a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Others share Gates’ enthusiasm. In 2018, Brookfield Business Partners, run by billionaire Canadian asset manager Bruce Flatt, paid $4.6 billion for Toshiba’s worldwide nuclear operations, including the then-bankrupt Westinghouse Electric Company. Westinghouse is now completing two new AP1000 reactors for Atlantabased Southern Company in Georgia and has four on order from China (it has already built four there), plus a six-reactor deal in Poland.

The AP1000 is a pressurized water reactor, similar to the almost 100 reactors currently operating in the United States, but it’s considered safer because it has a simpler design and more fail-safe systems. It relies on gravity and water (not backup electric power) to contain and cool a meltdown, which should make it an easier sell to nervous politicians and voters.