US startup aims for shipyard SMR construction

The demand for clean, reliable electricity has been emphasised by the AI data centre and manufacturing boom, and the global energy generation mix must include more nuclear power if it is to decarbonise while meeting growing demand affordably and securely, the company says. But new nuclear construction projects face “multi-year delays and exorbitant costs”.

Reactors make up less than 10% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, with most of the cost coming from “construction and regulatory challenges in the rest of the plant”, the company says. Blue Energy’s innovation is a modular, reactor-agnostic power plant architecture to house the next generation of nuclear reactors using centralised manufacturing at existing shipyards, which it says can reduce the capital costs from USD10,000 per kW to USD2000 per kW and build times from 10 years to 2 years.

Partnering with reactor vendors and designing modular power plants to house them means that Blue Energy can leverage existing regulatory progress to further accelerate the time to market for their modular nuclear power plant, Blue Energy said. It said it had signed a letter of intent with a data centre and cloud provider to serve as the off-taker for the first plant.

Stemming from MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, the company founded by Jake Jurewicz and Matt Slotkin in 2023 has now “emerged from stealth”.

“Blue Energy is addressing the biggest obstacles to wide adoption of nuclear power: cost and build time. 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,” Jurewicz said. “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.”