Announcing Applied Atomics
By David Pacak
When we met Ben and Paul, the co-founders of Applied Atomics last autumn we were immediately impressed by their deep understanding of nuclear energy, track record of execution, and their ambition to build something really big. Ben and Paul started their careers at SpaceX, working on the launch systems for the Falcon 9 rocket. They stayed there for a number of years, before their paths split - Ben co-founded and sold a space launch infrastructure company and Paul co-founded Radiant Nuclear, a leading gas-cooled nuclear microreactor company, which recently raised $300m in fresh funding. At the beginning of 2025, they decided to team up again and founded Applied Atomics.
The need for clean and reliable baseload power
Over the past couple of years, power has quietly become one of the key bottlenecks for growth. As AI and data centers scale, electricity demand is increasing much faster than most people expected. Because of this, getting access to power is becoming harder. In many parts of the US and Europe, connecting new projects to the grid can take years. Projects are delayed, sites reconsidered, and in some cases, companies simply cannot get the capacity they need.
The problem is not just how much power is available, but what kind of power. A lot of new capacity is coming from renewables, which are intermittent. That works well for flexible demand, but not for large compute clusters or industrial sites that need to run continuously. These systems need stable, high-density power, and there are very few clean options that can provide that.
Nuclear is one of them. But large-scale nuclear projects in the West have been quite difficult to deliver. They are complex, highly customised, and involve many different stakeholders, which is why they so often run over time and budget (Vogtle 3 and 4 are a shining example of this).
Small modular reactors are supposed to partially address this by making nuclear more standardised and easier to build. But many SMR companies are pursuing entirely new reactor designs, often with novel fuels and less established regulatory pathways. This might be technically interesting, but also introduces additional risk, and in many cases pushes timelines further out (2035+).
As a result, the core challenge remains unresolved.
Where Applied Atomics comes in
Applied Atomics is built around a simple but important idea: instead of trying to invent a new reactor, lets focus on making nuclear deployable.
The company uses a proven light-water reactor design and puts most of its effort into how the plant is actually built and delivered. By integrating the reactor and the rest of the plant, standardising the design, and building directly next to customers, they ultimately reduce the number of interfaces, dependencies, and things that can go wrong. The goal is not to make nuclear fundamentally different, but to make it repeatable and deploy it ASAP.
What stood out to us is how clearly the team understands where the real difficulty lies. They are not trying to solve everything at once. They are making deliberate choices to reduce risk, especially on the technology and regulatory side, and focusing their innovation on execution.
The team has moved fast and made meaningful progress in the short period of time since the company was founded, including securing access to BWXT’s mPower reactor and advancing the plant design. The next phase is all about execution: completing the engineering work, progressing through the regulatory process, securing customer commitments, and ultimately building the first plant. The long-term goal is to make nuclear power deployable in a repeatable way and become a core provider of reliable energy for the next generation of industry. We are honoured to be partnering with Ben, Paul, and the Applied Atomics team on this journey!