As the grid strains under the weight of electrification and AI data centers, tech companies and utilities have been evaluating whether nuclear power can help with the burden. After the two most recent reactors built in the U.S. went over budget and past schedule, they aren’t keen to repeat the past.
But Jake Jurewicz, co-founder and CEO startup Blue Energy, believes the answer to faster, cheaper buildouts can actually be found in the industry’s early history.
Blue Energy wants to build nuclear reactors in shipyards because these locations can handle large amounts of steel and can be easily shipped to the project site once completed.
“The nuclear power technology that is most common — light water reactors — was originally invented for nuclear submarines,” Jurewicz told TechCrunch. “There has actually always been a history of basically pre-fabbing it and looking at it in a shipyard context.”
To kickstart development on its first power plant — a 1.5 gigawatt project slated to begin construction later this year in Texas — Blue Energy has raised $380 million in financing split between equity and debt. The round was led by VXI Capital with participation from At One Ventures, Engine Ventures, and Tamarack Global.
Unlike many nuclear startups, Blue Energy is not designing a new reactor, and instead rethinking how reactors and power plants are built. Jurewicz was inspired by the process Venture Global uses to build export terminals for liquified natural gas. One of his friends works at the company, and when Jurewicz heard more about its approach to building LNG projects, he said it “really clicked.”
“They cut the schedule in half doing this, which was very disruptive,” he said.
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By moving the bulk of specialized construction to a shipyard, Blue Energy hopes the more controlled environment will eventually pave at the way to automation and greater cost savings.
“It really minimizes the amount of construction on site, and it moves pretty much everything into a manufacturing environment. Then once you’ve centralized all that work, you can start moving away from manual welding,” he said.
Once the reactor and other parts are completed in the shipyard, the company plans to move them to the installation site via barge. Though that limits the total number of sites Blue Energy can address, the company can still use rivers to reach deep into the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia.
“The majority of our population and the majority of our load growth is happening around waterways,” Jurewicz said.
Blue Energy says its approach has been attracting interest from project financiers.
“We’ve been engaged for a long time with a number of large infrastructure funds and banks, including three major project financing banks who have responded to our RFP, which is a strong indicator that they feel what we’re proposing is as project financeable,” he said.
The key to such financing, Jurewicz added, is the company’s plan to bring down construction costs, which have skyrocketed for nuclear power in recent decades.
“This is the crux of the issue with nuclear. It’s not the technology, it is how do we get the construction costs and the construction schedule down and to a place where it’s predictable,” he said.