Nuclear’s $1.1B Gamble: Can Startups Fix What 40 Years of Offshoring Broke?

The nuclear renaissance is facing a brutal reality check: even with $1.1B in investor cash, startups can't outsource the U.S.'s decades-old industrial rot.

Nuclear startups raised $1.1B in 2025 alone, betting on smaller reactors to solve cost and timeline issues of traditional reactors—like Vogtle 3/4, which were $20B over budget and 8 years late. But Milo Werner, a supply chain expert, warns that the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to produce critical materials domestically.

Milo Werner said:

"We have to buy them overseas. We’ve forgotten how to make them."

Werner’s analogy of the U.S. industrial skills decay is stark: "It’s like we’ve been sitting on the couch... and then getting up and trying to run a marathon the next day."

Startups are leveraging modularity to test production processes at small scales, but scaling will take "years, like a decade" to realize cost reductions.

The U.S. lacks 'seasoned manufacturing people' across all levels—from operators to C-suite executives—with no new industrial projects built domestically in 40 years.