Why Nuclear's Moment Is Now: Stefano Buono, CEO of newcleo

So what changed in the world, not in the physics, that makes this approach investable now when maybe it wasn't 20 years ago?

Well, I see from my European perspective, because I always lived in Europe in the first part of this project.

So what changed is that the young generation started to be considering nuclear because of the fact that nuclear could address the decarbonization target that we have for the planet.

So this mood change made Europe change and the sentiment against nuclear energy to moderate.

So that was the very big change.

It happened with, you know, COP21, if I remember well, that was in UK at the time.

So from there, I saw a real change in Europe.

Only in 2021, when I founded the company, only UK had plans to expand their nuclear energy.

And today there are 15 countries in Europe that have plans to expand their nuclear energy.

They are part of a nuclear alliance.

They are really promoting this, so everything has changed since then.

The second thing that became very important a couple of years ago was the need of energy independence.

So the crisis created first with the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made people understand that we don't only need more energy, but that decarbonized but also not affected by the geopolitical tensions and nuclear can be a stronger way to to have nuclear in energy independence

yeah it's that distinction between technical readiness and market readiness is really important and it's always interesting how you know policy capital demand energy security and energy independence as you shared just can completely change the opportunity around existing science.

And everybody's sort of talking right now about this nuclear renaissance.

That's the words being thrown around.

And I'd agree.

I think there's a lot of validity to that.

But what part of that story is genuinely different this time from maybe previous cycles or times? And what part maybe is still a little hype?

Well, before we were living in a global world, so there was no concept that we needed to have resources that were more localized, even in its own country.

So that's already, I would say, a very big change.

And then, if you think about the markets, the race of electricity needs sometimes has been, especially in European countries, a little bit stagnant.

While today, with the fact that there is a series next to the carbon ice, but also because of the AI explosion, the needs for electricity is going to grow a lot.

So renewables will be not enough to address these needs.

And that's why nuclear now has the possibility of having a true renaissance.