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Chris Levesque spent a career in the nuclear industry as a Navy submarine operator and a commercial nuclear executive before he joined Bill Gates’ startup TerraPower a decade ago, only to realize he “didn’t know what innovation was.”
The staid nuclear sector stalled for decades as natural gas and renewable energy came to dominate a power sector that feared nuclear for both safety concerns and its history of dramatic cost overruns. The only major U.S. expansion in nearly 30 years was the Vogtle project in Georgia, which took 15 years and cost over $35 billion—more the double the planned budget and timeline. That exercise hardly created an appetite for more.
“The U.S. (nuclear) safety record has been so good, but it created a culture where you were almost punished if you innovated,” TerraPower CEO Levesque said. “We were rewarded for doing everything the same way it was done last time, maybe 1% better. But don’t be a cowboy!”
When Levesque joined TerraPower from Westinghouse, a stalwart of the nuclear industry, he found a company guided by a different mindset: What does nature allow? What does science allow?
Roughly seven decades after the first nuclear power plant came online in the U.S., we may be witnessing a watershed moment for the industry as a new generat...
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