“In Silicon Valley, a business plan sometimes is a napkin and a Sharpie and a lot of big smile. We have dozens of these new reactor companies that have now emerged. It seems like everybody's got a reactor company. Most of them will die. That's great. At some point we're going to need a few companies that are going to survive.”
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
Bryony Worthington asked how long investors' appetite for betting on promised futures in advanced nuclear can last. David Victor says the new small reactors carry little nuclear risk but heavy financial risk.
Transcript
…is not infinite. And that whole reckoning on the money side, and then also on the government skill side, we were talking about a little bit ago, that requires government. And that's the real work of governing. And I think we have for too long pushed that off. And now we have to reckon with it.
…not necessarily, well, Anthropic set-aside Anthropic, who does seem to be now revenue generating. A lot of this is all sold on the promise of the future. And it seems to sustain itself for quite a long time, right? This kind of, I don't know, you know, it's a bubble, but how long does it go for?
But Brianna, you live in Silicon Valley. That's the future. And that is one of the beauties of this kind of incessant optimism and willingness to take extraordinary risk and in particular financial risk. And so that's been, to me, what's really interesting about the new nuclear play, the so-called small module reactors, some of which are not that small, is They are being designed from physics principles to have low or essentially zero classic nuclear risk, but massive financial risk because you're doing something totally new and you're trying to figure out how to get a license and so on. All that said, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has completely reworked its procedures such that it now is able to issue construction licenses to these new reactors based on their assessment of the physics risks here. The TerraPower, which I mentioned, has its construction license that it got earlier this year. Any day now, literally any day now, we're going to see the one for Kairos and Kairos already has theirs. We're going to see the one for X Energy, which is a joint venture with Dow Chemicals where they're using high…
Can we just switch? Because I mean, I can hear Michael saying in his ear, in my ear, what are you doing talking about nuclear so much? It really wasn't on the ballot, right? And in a sense, that is good. Yeah,
nuclear wasn't on the ballot. Here's a reason to talk about nuclear. In a world where politics flips and flops, we had a huge flip on Tuesday to the blue direction. It will come back. In that world, success requires building and holding together a coalition of folks in the center. It requires when…
Yeah, no, no, I completely agree. And we've just in the UK just seen our government, arguably one of the most progressive governments on climate, not just energy, but climate too, saying they're going to pause auctions for clean electricity now and switch to focusing, I hope, on the lower hanging…
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