US nuclear start-up Blue Energy, spun out from MIT’s Nuclear Science & Engineering Department in 2023, has announced a $45m Series A fundraise. The funding is jointly led by Engine Ventures and At One Ventures, with investment from Angular Ventures, Tamarack Global, Propeller Ventures, Starlight Ventures, and Nucleation Capital.
Blue Energy also introduced a modular NPP that can be centrally manufactured in existing shipyards. Shipyard manufacturing reduces the cost and build time of deploying nuclear power safely, making nuclear power economically competitive with fossil fuels and renewables, the company said. The funding will be used to advance Blue Energy’s core engineering work and site development, and secure additional partners.
Blue Energy’s innovation is a modular, reactor-agnostic power plant architecture to house the next generation of nuclear reactors. Blue Energy’s power plants use of centralised shipyard manufacturing is expected to dramatically reduce the capital costs from $10K/kW to $2K/kW and shrink build times from 10 years to 2 years. By partnering with reactor vendors, Blue Energy can leverage existing regulatory progress to further accelerate the time to market for their modular nuclear power plant.
“Blue Energy is addressing the biggest obstacles to wide adoption of nuclear power: cost and build time,” said Jake Jurewicz, CEO and co-founder of Blue Energy. “Using the traditional approach, it takes thousands of workers several years to construct nuclear power plants on site. We’ve designed a modular plant that can be fully prefabricated centrally in shipyards and transported to its operating location. By moving nuclear power to preexisting assembly lines, Blue Energy is radically reducing build time and cost, making nuclear power cost competitive with fossil fuels and renewables.”
In an earlier interview with James Wise on Balderton Capital’s What’s Next platform, Jurewicz said the Blue Energy modular plants would use established pressurised water technology.
Michael Kearney, General Partner at Engine Ventures and a Blue Energy board member said the key challenge to expanding nuclear capacity over the last two decades has been one of cost, driven by on-site construction overhead and the long pre-revenue build times. “By integrating with established reactor vendors, and existing centralised manufacturing techniques, the Blue Energy development platform unlocks low-cost economics that can rapidly scale to serve the growing demand for clean, firm power,” he noted.
Tom Chi, General Partner at At One Ventures and also a Blue Energy board member, said decarbonised baseload is essential for a decarbonised grid and helps to address the capacity factor issues of solar and wind. “Blue Energy addresses the core of rising nuclear costs by dramatically simplifying the regulatory and operational path while making use of the ready-to-scale reactor technologies. The result will be impactful for addressing grid demand, optimising our renewables capacity, and providing high-reliability power to industry and to consumers.”
