Nuclear stocks have surged in 2025 as big tech companies look to alternative energy sources to power the AI revolution. The VANC uranium and nuclear ETF has climbed roughly 50% so far this year. And one high-flying name that has caught investors' attention is NANO Nuclear Energy. The New York-based company is focused on developing micro modular reactors as part of its portfolio of clean energy solutions. Since making its public debut in May 2024, NANO Nuclear Energy stock has skyrocketed 650%. Thanks to the bullish outlook for AI energy demand, but the company has yet to sell any of its finished products, and the material transition to nuclear power sources may be years away. So, how should investors view this emerging market opportunity? On this episode of Growth Stories, we talked to NANO Nuclear Energy CEO James Walker to learn about the company's quest to bring portable nuclear power to market.
James, thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, thank you very much for having me, Alexis.
Now, walk us through the business here. What are some of the use cases you see or perhaps what do you see as the investor thesis?
It's a good question because the sort of new area of nuclear, it caters towards a sort of a broader range of applications now. So you've seen big civil nuclear power plants powering cities, but now we're in a position where we can power smaller things: chemical plants, industrial centers, data centers, AI centers. And even if you go smaller, you can be looking at remote operations for things like mining sites, oil and gas, military bases, disaster relief areas, island communities. So it is a new wave of sort of nuclear energy and a new range of applications now it can cater for.
Your micro modular reactors have gotten a lot of attention. Can you tell us how they work and how maybe the deployment of those reactors differs versus a traditional nuclear facility?
Absolutely. So it's a good question. So fortunately, the fission, the key part of any nuclear reactor, I mean that is the same process that occurs in a big civil nuclear power plant, but things like the coolant would change or the type of fuel that would change. But the fission event is what creates that heat that gets converted to electric that powers things. In our, say, our Kronos reactor, that is a high temperature gas reactor, very well-known tech, been in operation for 60 years, deployed all over the world, but never at this scale commercially. So for the first time, we're going to be making much smaller reactors. And the reason why we're doing that, too, is that so we can have a production line of these things being produced on a mass scale. And through that methodology, we'll have economies of scale to start driving down the cost of nuclear energy and the timelines for deployment because we won't have big construction and fabrication events at the site. The reactor will be effectively all made at the production line and licensed there and then delivered to site and assembled like a Lego set. So it's a very different prospect to what you've seen in the past. And it's also kind of industry's way of navigating some of the challenges that have befallen larger civil nuclear power plants.
I think when you're talking about reactors, some people have concerns about the dangers of nuclear power. How safe are these reactors?
This is a very important thing. I think that we need to keep reiterating to the public in general because I always like to point out that even if you were to take the conventional civil nuclear power plants, and they've been in operation obviously for decades, but you were to look at deaths per gigawatt hour for all types of energy, nuclear beats out even wind and solar in terms of safety already. But these new nuclear power plants, they don't have the worst case accident scenarios that the big civil nuclear power plants have. They could still melt down if there's something like a loss of coolant accident or a depressurized system. But the new type of reactors, especially like our reactor and a lot of other vendors involved in this space, they've got sort of fuels like the TRISO fuel where each fuel pellet has its own containment system. So it can't experience that kind of meltdown that you could see at Fukushima or Three Mile Island. It's just not possible. I mean theoretically even if you were to blow up the reactor with a missile or something like that or a terrorist attack, you would just actually separate the critical mass so the reactor would get less reactive and all of the fuel would be contained. So already the safest form of energy ever devised by mankind made safer still.
And we've seen a lot of attention paid to the mini modular reactors, but what are some of the other business lines your company is focused on?
The interesting part is that there's sort of this massive resurgent interest in nuclear energy at the moment and obviously we started our business concentrating on applications like small reactors that could cater towards these different places. But as we built, we realized that actually a lot of US industry had atrophied because it had an ability to buy highly enriched final product from Russia and that meant a sort of an underinvestment in the US infrastructure with regard to enrichment and conversion, transportation, all of these different elements. So now the company is taking a look at one, de-risking its own reactor development by involving itself in these different areas amongst the fuel supply chain, but also building up our internal capabilities which gives us the capability to provide consultancy services, transportation services and then also be involved in the build back of that fuel supply chain. So if we win or if our competitors do very well, we would still benefit. So we want everyone to win in this business. It would benefit us as a company greatly.
And big tech players like Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and Google have taken steps to supplement their energy requirements with nuclear. What have you been hearing from these hyperscalers in terms of demand outlook?
So we have been talking with the hyperscalers and the tech companies. I mean, it's very interesting. Some of the projections of the amount of power that they actually need are astronomical. And even if they were to find coal or gas or anything like that that could power these centers, they would still need massive grid infrastructure upgrades, which would cost billions and billions of dollars to get into a point where they could outlay the power that they would require. Not to mention gas pipelines and transmission lines. But nuclear they've settled on because it has that high base load power. It can be put anywhere. It doesn't need the grid necessarily because you could collocate with nuclear. And so the tech industry, it's not an advocate for nuclear inherently, but it's been pushed into our direction and it's sort of settled on the long-term strategy will need to have a big nuclear component because even if you were to have, you know, all the wind and solar you could manage, those are still locationally dependent energy systems that don't have high base load. That would still need very expensive and expansive storage capacities. So just by default the tech industry has sort of found nuclear and is investing very heavily into that space because it needs to de-risk its own future and by investing in nuclear it can do that.
And many of these companies are also investing in their own nuclear solutions and it sounds like you have a rising tide lifts all ships mentality when it comes to the competitive field. But I'm just curious, how do you view the competition and what makes NANO Nuclear Energy stand out?