Table of Contents
Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares, breaks down why nuclear energy is having its biggest moment in decades, how micro reactors could power everything from military bases to space weapons, and what it really takes to build hard tech in an era of software thinking.
Key Takeaways
- America built around 100 nuclear reactors between 1950-1970, then only three more in the following 50+ years due to regulatory changes and funding cuts
- Four major drivers are fueling nuclear's comeback: climate goals, AI data center demands, national security needs, and space weaponization
- Micro reactors (under 20 MW) can be factory-manufactured and truck-delivered, offering resilient power for specialized applications willing to pay premium prices
- Defense applications represent the most immediate market, with thousands of potential installations across military bases and critical infrastructure
- Heat pipe cooling technology, originally invented for space nuclear applications, enables passive safety in small reactor designs
- LA's hard tech dominance stems from decades of aerospace workforce, industrial real estate, and manufacturing infrastructure dating back to WWII
- Building nuclear companies requires creating internal urgency since customers won't drive the pace like in consumer software
The Great Nuclear Pause: How America Went from Leader to Laggard
Here's a statistic that captures everything wrong with American nuclear policy over the past fifty years: we built around 100 nuclear reactors between 1950 and the early 1970s. Since then? We've built exactly three that actually came online.
"It was really around the 1970s that things slowed down," explains Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares, a company building truck-sized nuclear reactors. What happened wasn't just regulatory resistance or public fear—it was a perfect storm of institutional changes that killed the government-led innovation model that had created the nuclear industry in the first place.
The story starts with genuine American innovation. The first artificial nuclear reactor was the Chicago Pile, built in 1942 underneath the University of Chicago's football field. By 1945, we had plutonium-producing reactors at Savannah River and Hanford. Admiral Hyman Rickover launched the naval nuclear program that same year, leading to the USS Nautilus submarine in 1952.
What people don't realize is how wildly ambitious we were back then. We weren't just building power plants—we were testing nuclear thermal rockets that could get to Mars in half the time, nuclear-powered jet engines for planes that could stay airborne indefinitely, and space reactors that we actually launched into orbit. "If you adjust what we spent on nuclear thermal rockets back then to today's dollars, it would have been like $10 billion," Bramble notes.
Then came the 1970s fiscal crunch. Nixon took us off the gold standard, interest rates skyrocketed, and federal R&D spending dropped from 12-15% of the budget to around 3% today. The Atomic Energy Commission, which had been both regulator and builder, got split up. We created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an independent oversight body right as we were losing the government funding that had driven all nuclear innovation.
The result? We went from leading the world in nuclear technology to watching other countries eat our lunch. The Soviets launched 37-39 space reactors while we managed exactly one.
The Four Horsemen of Nuclear's Return
Fast forward to today, and nuclear energy is having its biggest moment since the 1960s. Bramble sees four distinct forces driving this renaissance, and they're all converging at once.
First is climate change. "We've gone far enough down that path that we've realized net zero is probably not possible without significantly more nuclear energy," he explains. Fusion gets the headlines, but fission is here now and can deliver carbon-free baseload power at scale.
Second is the AI infrastructure boom. Data centers need massive amounts of reliable power, and the energy density requirements make nuclear increasingly attractive. "We're not going to do it with solar and wind because the energy density is just not high enough to support that level of infrastructure." Meta, Amazon, and Google all have internal teams now focused on how to partner with nuclear companies.
Third is national security. With China as the pacing threat and cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure a real possibility, military bases need power sources that can operate independently. "All of our targeting and command and control run on compute facilities that have to be able to operate even if there's no commercial power."
Fourth is space weaponization. This one might surprise people, but the military is now openly discussing putting weapons in space—lasers, particle beams, high-powered microwaves. "Physics will tell us that once we are doing that, the way that you gain a competitive edge is to have more powerful beams, and the way you do that is you generate more power."
Why Small Is Actually the Original Big
The nuclear industry's answer to these new demands isn't building bigger plants—it's going radically smaller. Antares builds micro reactors that produce 200-300 kilowatts and fit on a truck bed. That might sound tiny compared to gigawatt-scale plants, but it's actually a return to nuclear's roots.
"One thing I would highlight is the small concept is actually how we originally built reactors when we first started," Bramble points out. The first naval reactors were small by necessity, and they worked brilliantly. The USS Nautilus and Seawolf both ran for about five years on their original cores.
The economics are completely different when you go this small. Instead of massive construction projects with billion-dollar cost overruns, micro reactors can be factory-manufactured like cars and shipped to sites with minimal preparation. "You could fit it on a truck bed versus two to three football fields of solar" to get the same power output.
The trade-off is cost per kilowatt-hour. In grid-scale reactors, fuel costs are a single-digit percentage of total plant costs. In micro reactors, fuel represents 40-50% of costs. But here's the key insight: "There's actually a very large market for expensive power to do things that you can only do with nuclear."
The Defense Market: Thousands of Opportunities Hidden in Plain Sight
This is where Antares found their initial market. Instead of trying to compete in commodity electricity markets, they focused on applications where nuclear's unique advantages—reliability, security, independence from grid infrastructure—justify premium pricing.
Military bases turn out to be perfect customers. "A lot of the mission critical facilities or critical assets on our military installations are actually kilowatt scale, or you need megawatts of power but it's distributed in some way." Vandenberg Air Force Base, which hosts our ground-based missile interceptors, needs to be able to launch regardless of whether commercial power is available. Arctic radar installations currently run on diesel that costs 60-80 cents per kilowatt-hour to deliver.
The scale of opportunity surprised even them. "When we really indexed as many of these different assets as we could find in the DoD, there's really an opportunity to build thousands of these one day."
Working with defense customers requires a completely different approach than selling software. "There literally is not one customer persona," Bramble explains. "There's an end user who benefits from your product, but they're not the person who buys it. Someone else is responsible for buying it. And there's probably people in the Pentagon that have policy or regulatory oversight."
The key is developing what he calls an "information edge"—understanding how budgets will evolve years before markets become obvious. "You develop a product before the market is really there, rather than showing up with the best product in the world and spending years trying to get someone to buy it."
Heat Pipes: The Forgotten Technology Powering the Future
The technical breakthrough enabling these small reactors is actually a 60-year-old technology: heat pipes. Invented at Los Alamos in 1958 specifically for space nuclear applications, heat pipes are elegantly simple. A sealed pipe contains a working fluid (sodium, in Antares' case) and an internal wick structure. When one end heats up, the fluid vaporizes and travels to the cool end, where it condenses and gets pulled back by capillary action.
"There's no pumping, no active mechanism," Bramble explains. "It's fascinatingly simple technology, yet the physics is complicated." The same technology cooling your laptop enables passive safety in nuclear reactors.
The beauty is in the constraints. Heat pipes work brilliantly for small reactors but become inefficient as you scale up—too much metal eating neutrons. This natural limitation actually helps define the optimal size for micro reactors and prevents the "bigger is better" thinking that plagued the industry for decades.
LA's Hard Tech Advantage: More Than Just SpaceX
Antares is based in Los Angeles, part of a broader trend of hard tech companies choosing LA over Silicon Valley. The reasons go deeper than just SpaceX creating a talent exodus.
"Go back further—why was SpaceX there?" Bramble asks. "Hughes Aircraft was started there. The South Bay of LA has always been a hub of Boeing, aerospace and defense." The workforce was already there, along with industrial real estate zoned for manufacturing and suppliers who understand how to build physical things.
The infrastructure advantages are subtle but crucial. "Even the roadways and interstate highways are just better for trucking than doing it in San Francisco." The Port of Long Beach lets companies ship rockets to the Cape via the Panama Canal. And there's decades of nuclear history—the NERVA nuclear thermal rockets were built by Aerojet in the LA suburbs, and the SNAP space reactor was built in the Santa Susanna Hills.
It's network effects for hard tech. Just like Silicon Valley's software advantages compound over time, LA's aerospace and defense ecosystem creates advantages that are nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Building at the Speed of Atoms, Not Bits
The cultural challenges of building nuclear companies are the opposite of software startups. "If you work at a marketplace business like DoorDash, the pace of the company is largely dictated by the customer pulling you to move as fast as possible," Bramble observes. "Businesses like ours, the locus of control is much more internal. You set the pace."
This creates a dangerous trap. Defense moves slowly, nuclear moves slowly, and it would be easy to let external timelines dictate internal urgency. Instead, Antares has built a culture around their core value: "Just make it happen."
"We want to turn a reactor on by end of 2027," Bramble states. "We talk about that timeline every single day." They break technical development into smaller milestones to create constant urgency, recognizing that their speed of execution will ultimately create their market.
The interdisciplinary complexity makes this even harder. Building reactors requires nuclear engineering, materials science, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, structural engineering, and manufacturing expertise. "The reactor design that's best on paper from a nuclear engineering perspective is almost never the design that's most manufacturable."
Their solution is radical equality of voice. "There's no priest class—everybody has an equal voice. We let great ideas beat great arguments." In complex technical fields, the most persuasive person with a bad idea can be incredibly dangerous.
The Scaling Challenge: From Prototype to Production
Getting the first reactor working is just the beginning. The real challenge is scaling to hundreds of units per year while maintaining the 93% capacity factors that grid-scale nuclear achieves.
"They're not going to have that right off the bat," Bramble admits. "We're going to have to have iterative development cycles." But the small scale becomes an advantage here—they can build multiple test reactors with venture capital rather than needing billions for each iteration.
The manufacturing timeline is where nuclear's renaissance really gets tested. Software companies can scale users exponentially with the same codebase. Hardware companies need factories, supply chains, and quality control systems that work at volume. For nuclear, those manufacturing capabilities haven't existed in the US for decades.
But the mission keeps attracting talent anyway. "Can you name another technology that has great national security implications, will make us safer and more powerful, will be part of the solution to climate change, and will expand humanity's reach into space?" When the problem is that compelling, building the solution becomes almost inevitable.
Beyond Earth: Nuclear's Space Future
The space applications might be the most exciting long-term opportunity. With the Space Force openly discussing weapons in orbit, the power requirements are going beyond what solar can reasonably provide. "As you get to around 75 to 100 kilowatts, you end up with a spacecraft that's much more mass efficient than doing it with solar."
The International Space Station generates about 100 kilowatts with solar panels the size of a football field that had to be assembled in orbit. A nuclear reactor producing the same power would fit on a truck.
This isn't science fiction anymore. President Trump signed an executive order on what's now called Golden Dome—a space-based missile defense system. The technology for particle beams and lasers that was "infeasible in the 80s because we didn't have the launch capability" is now within reach. "If you shrink some of that down by like an order of magnitude, it could be viable in the near term as an anti-satellite capability."
What Nuclear's Return Really Means
The nuclear renaissance isn't just about clean energy or national security—it's about America reclaiming its position as a technological superpower. For fifty years, we've been coasting on innovations from the 1960s while other countries pushed forward.
The companies leading this comeback aren't trying to rebuild the old nuclear industry. They're creating something entirely new: small, factory-manufactured, passively safe reactors that can power everything from Arctic military bases to lunar colonies. The technology is proven, the market demand is real, and the talent is starting to concentrate in the right places.
"The speed at which we move is what is ultimately going to cultivate our market," Bramble concludes. In nuclear, as in so many hard tech fields, the winners won't be determined by who has the best technology on paper. They'll be determined by who can actually build and deploy that technology faster than anyone thought possible.
After decades of stagnation, American nuclear innovation is finally moving at startup speed. The question isn't whether this renaissance will happen—it's whether we'll lead it or watch other countries do what we should have been doing all along.
