Joe Coletti
Welcome to Powering Sustainable Ideas, a podcast series from RBC Capital Markets, where we speak with the leaders and companies shaping the sustainable future.
Nuclear power is back in the spotlight as countries look to strengthen energy security and meet growing electricity demand. Much of the industry’s momentum is centered on small modular reactors. But how close is the technology to commercial reality, and what challenges must be overcome to scale it globally?
In today’s episode, you’ll hear highlights from a discussion at RBC’s Energy Transition Conference in London this past June, featuring leaders from across the nuclear ecosystem.
Cory Kos is Vice President, Investor Relations at Cameco, the Canadian-based integrated nuclear energy player. Alastair Evans is Director of Corporate and Government Affairs at Rolls-Royce SMR, a small nuclear reactor design being developed in the UK.
They are joined by Rajesh Kedia, Director of Investments at the UK’s National Wealth Fund, and also Warrick Matthews, who works in the fusion energy technologies field as CEO of Tokamak Energy.
Mark Fielding, Head of European Capital Goods Research at RBC Capital Markets, moderated the discussion.
Now, let’s dive into the conversation.
Mark Fielding
We are in a Renaissance period for nuclear energy security, very much at the forefront of that. I suppose my first question for the panel. Whether we think the market, technology is evolving in the right way, and whether the regulatory framework supports that today.
Alastair Evans
I think the expectations of nuclear are now extremely high, and that’s a big shift. That’s a big change that we’ve seen as a sector. Nuclear wouldn’t be talked about 3, 4, 5 years ago at these sorts of events. It wouldn’t be brought up at financing conferences, let alone energy transition conferences, and that’s partly because there were many fewer opportunities in the nuclear space. You asked specifically about regulation, and it’s one of my constant bugbears, because it will take me longer to plan and consent a project in the UK than it will to build the asset, and that’s not unique to nuclear. That is the same you will have for offshore wind, onshore wind, solar technologies in the UK. So, it’s right that the UK is looking at how to move faster, learn from other countries, and we’ve seen in the Fingleton Review in Nuclear, 47 recommendations to move faster. We want to see all those implemented. Energy security has gone up the merit order unquestionably, and that’s why France is going through a rebuild, Czechia is doing a rebuild, Sweden, UK, and a range of others, as well as new market countries like Greece, Italy, countries that wouldn’t have talked about nuclear five years ago. So, I think we’re in a much stronger position today, and I suppose it’s on us to outperform the metric even further with these really high expectations.
Alastair Evans
So, there’s lots of MOUs in the nuclear space, there’s lots of promises, there aren’t many contracts, so we’re very proud of the fact that we’ve got firm contractual commitments to delivering, and that that really is a change. I think we’re seeing a lot of focus on SMRs, rightly, because we’re trying to address some of the challenges that the nuclear sector has had, we can be upfront about that. The industry has a poor track record for being on time and on budget. We’ve got to stop over promising and under delivering, and SMRs are a key component of ensuring we can do that.
Mark Fielding
Cory, turning to you, obviously more entrenched in the larger traditional nuclear still definitely has a role to play, as well.
Cory Kos
Absolutely, because from our perspective, the SMRs were a bit of a Trojan horse for introducing nuclear back to the conversation, because now you’re looking at something that’s smaller, perhaps more controlled construction environment in a factory, and more control cost, and, and what that did was spur the conversation on nuclear, which then you start to look at the market maturation for the SMR space, and first steps have to be around scaling down current technology, we’re not looking at new exotic, the generation four, there’s, I think, 180, I’ve heard, plus SMR- and ASMR-type reactors out there in design phases. Well, those aren’t all going to be winners, as we all know, that’s going to be in the, you know, three-to-five range of winners. In the meantime, yes, the role for the large traditional has come back to the conversation, because you start to look at even things like where it started around data centers and you’re looking at, you know, three, four, or 500 megawatt data centers, and today we’re up to gigawatt data centers. But the important part of it is you’re looking at bringing these various technologies on a pathway and on a timeline that are similar, with the point being of building up a supply chain, building up confidence that you’re not building one or two or three and then disappearing for a decade, you’re bringing it on in a way that you’re building a fleet. The SMR model of bringing these things on for a certain use case, from our perspective at Cameco and in Westinghouse, is we’re looking at, that is a great opportunity for carbon abatement, that’s a great opportunity for hard-to-abate industry as you move along with the SMR technology, and get better at it, and you’re rolling that off a factory production line that starts to make sense, and we need both of those to be moving in sync, so to speak, because it’s that high cost we have to get over.
Mark Fielding
Warwick, taking us to the next, dare I say next, next, next step – nuclear fusion, is it still just a pipe dream, or are we getting there now?
Warrick Matthews
Fusion has lived in an era of experimentation for a long, long time, you know, 70 years or so, and huge experiments defined by government labs doing a lot of research. One of the things that that’s changed in the era we’re now in is commercial companies and public/private partnerships taking that into prototypes to demonstrate energy gain and to demonstrate that you can have a power station from this technology and we’re going to see that between now and I think the mid-2030s, a range of those companies you know Commonwealth Fusion systems in Boston, others around the world, China is pushing a lot of investment into most flavors of fusion device. We’re going to see energy gain happening in that period, and that will light up the market, because the market will see, well, this could actually happen. It’s not the perennial joke of always 20 years away, or whatever. The tough bit is, after that, there is kind of the industrialization and rollout phase, and it takes a lot to go from an experiment saying this works and we’ve got gain to this works and we’ve got a 90% available power station that’s incredibly reliable, you know, coupled to a data center with four nines reliability expectations, and I think that industrialization will take us into the 2040s. So, it is a way of answering it to say, could be 15 years away. The promise of getting there is absolutely enormous. It is a humanity-changing energy source, dispatchable base load power, without a lot of the downsides that come from everything else, right. So, we’ve got to go for it, and we’ve got to put the capital into it, but there’s still a lot of hard work to do.
Mark Fielding
Rajesh, I mean, this isn’t cheap. Where are we in terms of government support financing?
Rajesh Kedia
Yeah, so for those who don’t know, National Wealth Fund is set up by HM Treasury to invest in UK energy security and growth opportunities in UK, so we are arm’s length, but we are a policy bank and a principal investor, and from UK government’s point of view, I would say sort of three things there. First is potentially government playing that enabler and policy setter role, setting the targets, enabling the ecosystem that will help the sector. The second part I would say it comes down to capital, and this is where we’ve seen new models or interesting financing discussions coming through, where a risk-sharing framework between different constituents, for example, consumers, taxpayers, developers, capital providers, need to come together, and we’ve seen that play out in Sizewell C, where government enabled with a wrap support, where there was a risk-sharing framework across the board, and within that context, government also stepped up to say there are some high-impact, low-probability risk, which the private sector was unwilling to take, and they stepped out to say, yes, this is the backstop that they’re willing to provide, and that unlocked commercial capital from banks, from equity providers, because then they can see the visibility of those cash flows and the downside risks that enables. And third part is where we come in, we sit right in the middle of that public-private sector, where some risk might be uncomfortable to be absorbed either side, and we can just blend that somewhere in the middle to see what risk can we take.
Mark Fielding
Warwick, you actually touched earlier on the financing of your company being a more developmental business. How do you try and make that work, and things join up when your core dream is, as we said, maybe a few years away.
Warrick Matthews
I joined the company three and a half years ago, and it was pursuing a strategy that’s akin to other fusion companies, which is about building bigger and bigger devices to eventually win the race, right? Improve, yours is the best. I think that plan is kind of flawed, it needs an enormous amount of capital, for starters, like five, 10 billion, you better have deep pockets. But I also don’t think that a challenge as big as Fusion could ever be sold by one company, so I had some big problems with the plan, and we reshaped the plan three years ago, and we said, you know, we know more than most companies in the world on fusion. We’ve got the highest performing fusion device on our site of a private company, but we’re going to partner with government and industry with fusion. We’re not, we’re not going to go it alone. If you want to make a compact, high-field fusion machine, you have to nail the high temperature superconductor. That’s what we’ve done over the last 12 years. We’re now sat here with 70 patent families and expertise in that field, and a few years ago we said we’re going to commercialize this. So now, Who are we as a company? We do fusion research, as I’ve said, but we’re a high-temperature superconducting product company. We’re now a partner to fusion programs, both the UK’s flagship program and commercial fusion companies that don’t have this technology, who are thinking at a system level. We’ve now taken this technology into high-field magnets that aren’t in fusion; science, medical transportation. There are multiple defense applications of this technology as well, and the most recent iteration is not a magnet, it’s just really efficient power distribution, and the market that we’re aiming at with this is data centers that are coping with 15 times the energy for Gen AI, for those training and inference data centers. If you want to deliver one megawatt to an NVIDIA chip in the rack in 2030 or so, that is very, very hard with copper, and copper just gets worse the more you push it, it gets hotter. There’s more losses. Superconductors are cool and calm.
Warrick Matthews
So our biggest market as a company is going to become data center power systems, and we’ve developed prototypes on our site for buzz bars, transformers, interfaces for data centers, and it’s an example of pursuit of that goal, bit like the space race, is just throwing off these incredible technologies.
Mark Fielding
Cory, where do you see the situation developing in terms of support?
Cory Kos
Our industry in the past has been peaks that last for weeks or months and valleys that last for a decade, and this time the conversation has been going on for year after year, which means it’s held on long enough that we’ve gone from this industry-led preaching to the choir in a room full of everyone who supports to government-enabled, getting government on board, the evolution of our deals that we’ve had right now with the U.S. government has been starting last October, November, we had a Department of Commerce investment commitment, binding commitment to invest $80 billion in Westinghouse technology, and first steps of that is building out the supply chain, again, creating that confidence that you’re not just building one or two and disappearing, that it’s a fleet model. So now we have what, 20 potentially in the U.S. these two different tracks; we have 14 in Ontario, Canada, potentially with additional units being proposed and considered in Saskatchewan, Canada, in Alberta, Canada; as you mentioned, here in the UK, we’ve already been working for several years as Westinghouse with Poland to work towards their first of three that they want to build in one particular site, you have Bulgaria for one, and these ones are nearing FID, they’re at that next step, and it all goes back to again supply chains, and where the support is needed, and the recognition is this stuff doesn’t move unless you create that confidence, and that then builds, of course, into the labor support, and the EPC contractors that will build these things, and then again it goes back to cost overruns, and who’s taking the first-of-a-kind risk. This is where the government piece comes in with the U.S. government, with our initial deal with the Department of Commerce, which is, we’re going to pay to build the first two pack, the first two two packs, or whatever it takes to get from next-of-a-kind to nth-of-a-kind. This is now not only just engineer design, but this is construction design. We know where every millivolt wire, there’s no deciding on those factors. So this is now a product you’re going to replicate. And, of course, when the U.S. government does this, this supports the entire global supply chains for gigawatt scale build out of AP 1000s and others. Just that confidence that when you set the conditions right, the pieces come together, and we’re able to follow on, you know, what that the promise of nuclear is in this current durable conversation.
Mark Fielding
Alastair, thinking about the supply chain, do you think the supply chain really exists to support the SMR rollout?
Alastair Evans
Yeah, I’ll pick up exactly where Cory left off. Design wants and build many, and fleet means we can go out to the supply chain with a meaningful opportunity. So, our starting point, our philosophy is maximum utilization of commercially off-the-shelf components. That means that we can go and procure from the market today. We can look at the oil and gas world to identify what can we procure from those supply chain companies that may be reducing their output, particularly in the UK. And what we want to do is build a single robust and enduring supply chain, so again localization is important. Localization and showing demonstrable benefit to the first movers, to the countries that commit to us early – UK, Czechia, Sweden. We will maximize localization in those markets. But follow-on markets need to understand what we’re bringing to them is a de-risked product, sort of Henry Ford Motor principle of, ‘You can have it in any color as long as it’s black’. That’s what we need to be delivering is a single design repeatedly, and that will give confidence to the supply chain. So, the biggest risk that we see in the supply chain is not capability, because the capability is there for the most part. Where we see more of a risk is capacity, keeping up with the demands as a much greater number of countries look to maximize nuclear, but as soon as those supply chain companies see the contractual commitments, the market commitments, the certainty that gives them the ability to invest in that capacity and in building greater capability.
Mark Fielding
And to that point, therefore, you think, workforce that we’re going to need does actually exist in the world. We haven’t de-skilled, because we haven’t done this for 50 years.
Alastair Evans
I think we use skills as a bit of an excuse in many areas. Frankly, you wouldn’t, in the UK, have a huge great backlog of nuclear-skilled workers ready to go, because there haven’t been projects, so you don’t train for projects that aren’t there, you train when the projects are clear. We’ve had a slow build up with Hinkley, and now with Sizewell, so that’s great. We’ve got more skills here than we did 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago, but the market is moving. The skill, the people will come to the jobs when the jobs are there.
Warrick Matthews
Fusion has got to really develop skills because they’re quite scarce. You know, people come from all over the world to work on our machine and at our site. If you, coming back to what China is doing, yes, it’s investing a lot, it’s building various machines, but it’s also really focused on its PhD pipeline and is pushing through 1000s of PhDs in fusion science. So, we do need to be focused on it, but when it comes to, you know, developing plants, building prototypes, it’s not all fusion physicists that you need, you need the skills in construction and engineering, and that’s what we really need to grow, particularly in the UK.
Cory Kos
Nuclear projects tend to attract labor from other industries, and what we’ve seen on the North American side is the data center industry is doing a great job of training up electricians that we need, and so, unlike a data center, where I’m maybe not as familiar with the timelines, 18, 24-month build. If you’re talking about a nuclear site, where you’re potentially looking at minimum two reactor pack, maybe two two reactor packs, you’re talking about an industry now where that electrician gets certified, whatever needs to be done to be in the nuclear industry, attracted from another industry, and you now have your kids going to school for their entire academic career in the same place, because you’re not jumping from job to job, so there’s the multiplier factors, there’s the attraction of the high salaries and things that come with it, but we’ve realized that some of these other industries are actually helping us train up some of that labor.
Mark Fielding
Rajesh, from a financing side, obviously you’re linked to the government, but independent from the Treasury. How important is developing that local content, the local economy growth, the growth in the UK, in terms of your mandate, and generally how financing is thought about?
Rajesh Kedia
Yeah, that is a front and center for us. I mean, we’ve got three KPIs that we look at. One is to make positive financial return, second is to how much carbon emission we have avoided, and third is the local and the job growth. So, when we go to our investment committee, we look at all the three pillars. I recently went on a visit to Hinkley. There were generations of people who have worked on Hinkley site A, B, and C that has gone through the whole family chain of grandfathers, fathers, and you know, so it has a massive regional local impact when you talk about nuclear power plant. But also, I think Hinckley is another good example where across the board, the not just regionally, but across England and actually entire UK, the amount of businesses that they have managed to attract to support, either from different components or services or project management is enormous.
Mark Fielding
This is an industry with a history of significant cost overruns at times. I mean, Alistair, on that topic. I mean, SMR is a new technology. How can we be confident that it will actually deliver to a sensible budget that we can keep the costs in control?
Alastair Evans
Our approach, it’s a standard pressurized water reactor, a standard PWR, standard fuel, standard fuel assemblies, and that was a decision taken back in 2015 when the team got together and decided what is the fastest way of getting megawatts on the grid, and I accept that was back in 2015, 12 years ago, but the point stands that regulators know how to regulate pressurized water reactors, it’s a known quantity. So, why do projects struggle? It’s the project delivery side. So, what our solution to that is, modularization. It’s moving work into factories, it’s minimizing the world’s biggest or the world’s most complex anything, and it’s trying to drive as much risk out of the timeline as possible. So that’ll get us to a faster build time, a smaller footprint, and again it was referred to me as bite-size investments. This is the big shift you get from large to small in size. Well, really important project, but you’re trying to corral 40 billion pounds in SMRs. You’re into single digit, low single digit billions, you’re in a very different ball game. And what you can do, it’s additive, so you can commit initially in the UK, we have a commitment to three, and we want to see that grow, and it’s on us to show costs coming down over time.
Mark Fielding
Rajesh, when you’re thinking about the financing and funding process around these plants, how does this cost overrun risk impact on you and the decisions that have to be made?
Rajesh Kedia
There’s only one track record in nuclear, which is cost overruns, delays. There was about 7,000 design changes on Hinkley that happened, and those are very valuable, important lessons, which fed into size, we’ll see when the cost assumptions and estimates was being thought about, but even then, with that confidence of 70% replication, you still needed to capture what is the precedent of cost overrun, and how lenders and financiers will look at what the base in that scenario of cost overrun, what the return profiles looks like. I do feel that question will still be paramount for at least the first of a kind or the first cohort of the fleets that come. Again, with replication and with that fleet approach, I think investors and lenders will probably get more comfortable over time, but I’m afraid the problem will still remain for the first SMRs and AMRs in that context. And in that context, thinking about how we share the risk of those cost overruns and what framework we put in place to sort of allocate that risk and share that risk will be important, whether it’s consumers, taxpayers, capital providers, developers.
Cory Kos
The approach has to be to standardize, sequence, and simplify the build. You want to minimize design risk, and this comes from talking to the CEOs, the utilities, who are looking at what am I going to undertake, what will I accept as risk? Design risk, no, design risk has to be off the table. It has to be a designed, ready-to-build, ready-to-construct reactor. Then you’re looking at licensing risk, is it a brand new technology that the regulator has to wrap their head around, and you’re starting from square one, or is it scaled down version of current light water technology. Permitting risk, and that kind of applies to more the community. Are you building it in somewhere that’s never been built before, or are you building the third and fourth unit on a two-unit site in a community that understands the risks but also understands the opportunity, the high paying jobs, and all those pieces? Then very important is the fuel cycle risk. Can you build a fuel bundle for it? When we look at some of these advanced models. There’s no fuels, there’s no commercial fuel cycle or incentive to build it. Is there a step changing cost to fuel this machine? The fifth risk is just big civil project risk; that’s the risk that needs to be focused on and managed. There’s the infrastructure risk, get those other risks off the table, and that’s what’s going to take us down the path we need to be on for large-scale build out of new nuclear.
Joe Coletti
Thanks for listening to Powering Sustainable Ideas, brought to you by RBC Capital Markets. Please remember to subscribe to get more great content and to be alerted to future episodes. This podcast was recorded on June 25, 2026. If you would like to learn more or continue the conversation, please contact your RBC representative or visit rbccm.com/poweringsustainableideas. See you all next time.
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