By Valerie Gardner, Managing Partner

UC Berkeley students' annual Energy Summit addresses the world's energy and resource challenges. This year's conference included a panel titled "Nuclear Energy: Now or Never." Valerie Gardner, Nucleation Capital's managing partner, participated on the panel, bringing her bullish outlook on the prospects for innovation in nuclear to have a significant impact on the world's ability to decarbonize. 

BERC's Nuclear Energy: Now or Never

This year's Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative (BERC) Energy Summit included a panel called "Nuclear Energy: Now or Never." There to discuss this topic were UC Berkeley professors, Dan Kamen and Per Peterson, who is also Chief Nuclear Officer at Kairos Power; former Berkeley Ph.D. student, Jessica Lovering, currently the Executive Director of Good Energy Collective; and myself, founder and managing partner of Nucleation Capital. This was, as it turned out, a lively conversation about nuclear power and its prospects in front of a diverse audience of mostly undergrad, graduate students and young professionals.

I'm always happy to talk to students. They are generally well-informed about what's happening with climate change and the risks that it poses to their future. This makes them concerned, distressed but also particularly open-minded. As a climate investor, I spend quite a bit of time reading the science and evaluating a wide range of potential solutions. It is easy to get frustrated and even discouraged by how little progress we are making. I can only imagine how they may feel having to face this crisis.

We're less than six years from 2030, when we are supposed to have achieved a 50% reduction in global emissions. Some countries, including the U.S. have made progress, but we've been unable to move the needle on a global scale, largely because the demand for energy keeps growing, especially in places where they don't have enough even now. But, as it turns out, demand for electricity is growing in the U.S., propelled by the growth of online services, vehicle electrification and technologies like AI and cryptocurrencies.

Unfortunately, even in the U.S. the majority of our power comes from coal and gas, which we cannot afford to continue using they way we have.  According to the latest reporting from Dr. James Hansen, we are already exceeding the "safe" limits of global warming, which was to limit heating to less than 1.5° Celsius of warming (equivalent to an increase of 2.7° Fahrenheit). Because of the scale of the "global warming in the pipeline," we've committed the planet to exceeding those limits and face an exceptionally difficult time securing a "propitious climate" for future generations. This should be a big wake up moment for everyone. It certainly makes me want to shake people out of complacency.

Places like California and Germany, which have leaned in to decarbonization and invested billions into wind and solar, are struggling to keep their grids reliable. While they should have focused on shutting down coal and gas, for mostly political reasons, nuclear was already in the crosshairs. This was a big mistake. Germany, against all climate reason, went ahead with a scheduled shut down of its nuclear power and is paying a huge price, having had to re-open coal plants after Russia invaded Ukraine, a far worse climate, health and energy outcome. California was also planning to shut down its remaining nuclear power plant. Fortunately,  it became clear that the state needed its nuclear plant to avoid blackouts—and, in doing so, could save $21 billion in decarbonization costs while helping it with its climate goals.

Increasingly, results like these establish that nuclear is a central part of a more effective clean energy solution set. Nuclear power, which uses the smallest land footprint, the least amount of material per kilowatt and which has the highest capacity factor, has an "energy return on energy invested" (EROEI) more than 3X that of fossil fuels and more 20X that of wind or solar. It stands alone with the greatest potential to leverage 21st century innovation to produce a new set of truly paradigm-shifting energy solutions. 

Which is what makes nuclear, despite all of its idiosyncratic risks, a compelling investment proposition. The threat to our societies by our continued use of fossil fuels vastly outweigh the risks of expanding the use of nuclear—especially when an advanced generation of designs promise enhanced capabilities, improved safety, boosted fuel efficiency and manufacturing cost-economies.

So, sharing my excitement for the potential of innovative nuclear energy solutions together with some those who are also working on bringing these advanced solutions to market, like Dr. Peterson and his team at Kairos and Dr. Lovering and her team at Good Energy Collective—was a way to help point students towards a future that may well include dozens of new types of energy—spanning fission, fusion and other technologies.

After the panel, a number of students thanked me for my comments, expressed both renewed optimism and an interest in learning more about nuclear. Hopefully, a few of those attending will be inspired to further explore opportunities in the industry.