Everstar's founder argues the nuclear industry's core problem isn't the science, which is proven and safe. The real barrier is the "regulatory labyrinth" and millions of pages of documentation required for approval—a process problem that modern software can solve.

Startups can bypass the lengthy NRC process for initial reactor tests by using Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) pathways. The DOE, with national labs, can regulate test reactors for faster innovation. Crucially, the Army can now license its own reactors, creating a direct regulatory and commercial path to a key market.

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble argues the military is the best entry market for advanced nuclear. It offers a $2B budget, established regulatory pathways, and a pressing need for resilient, off-grid power, creating the perfect environment to mature the technology before commercial rollout to data centers.

The primary flaw in nuclear energy economics is that every plant is a unique, bespoke construction project, leading to massive cost overruns. The solution is to treat nuclear power plants as standardized, factory-produced products, much like cars, to achieve predictability, speed, and cost reduction through scale.

In aerospace and defense, the classic Silicon Valley motto is dangerous. Hardware failures can lead to physical harm and mission failure, unlike software bugs. This necessitates a rigorous testing and evaluation stack to prevent edge cases before deployment, making speed secondary to safety and reliability.

While current nuclear projects take 10-15 years in the US, the country used to build reactors in just three years. The goal is not just creating new technology, but streamlining paperwork and supply chains to restore past efficiency. The bottleneck is bureaucracy, not technical capability.

To ensure a smooth transition from development to production, an operations or manufacturing SME must be part of the design process from the start. Otherwise, products are developed without manufacturability in mind, leading to expensive, reactive fixes and subjective quality control during scale-up.

Most reactors marketed as SMRs are neither small enough for standard road transport nor truly modular. Their components, sourced from dozens of different factories, often fail to integrate on-site, leading to the same delays and cost overruns as large-scale projects. True modularity requires single-factory production.

Radiant founder Doug Bernauer was tasked with powering a Mars colony at SpaceX. After struggling with solar's limitations, Elon Musk suggested nuclear. This R&D directly led him to found Radiant, applying space-grade power concepts to terrestrial energy problems.