In this episode of our Venture Capital Horizon series with Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs Research, we dive into clean energy and advances in nuclear power technology.
While nuclear energy has been around for quite some time, it’s had a complicated history. On the one hand, it’s a true zero-carbon energy solution, but concerns around reactor safety as well as reactor waste has slowed—and in some cases, reversed—its adoption. That doesn’t mean, however, that innovation in nuclear power has stalled. Terry and his team have been following some of the smartest venture investing in this space, and that has led them to Oklo, an early advanced-fission company developing small-scale nuclear power plants. Terry spoke to Oklo’s co-founder, Jacob DeWitte, to learn more about how the company is approaching nuclear power sustainably. “We think going smaller and simplifying things is really one of the key factors here to realizing the promise that we have in the atom,” says DeWitte. “The need for power is only going to increase across the world—especially when you think about the fact that there’s about a billion people who don’t really have access,” he says. “Fission is going to have to be one of the heavy lifters here.”
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