The New Nuclear Podcast: Sovereign power – nuclear as strategic European infrastructure
In short
Europe already has the fuel for nuclear sovereignty
On The New Nuclear Podcast, two reactor developers and an analyst told Sam Floy why ideology and a lost supply chain, not uranium, have held European nuclear back.
Anton Steen reached into a pocket and held up a uranium fuel pellet. It was a 3D plastic copy, but a real pellet that size would provide the heat and hot water for Anton's 200-square-metre house, home to a family of five, for a whole year. It is the equivalent of a tonne of coal, and it would still hold 95% of its energy afterwards. On The New Nuclear Podcast, Sam Floy asked Anton and two other guests how nuclear fits into European sovereignty. Their answer was that Europe already has the fuel and the technology. What it has lacked is the politics.
Anton, Sweden country manager of the heat-reactor company Steady Energy, said sovereignty stopped being a theory with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Hormuz crisis. Some 57% of the energy used in the EU is imported. Klaus Nyengaard, chief executive of the molten-salt developer Saltfoss Energy, said it was never theoretical. Klaus remembers the second oil crisis and said politicians simply forgot. A sovereign system needs baseload with inputs it controls, and Europe has little hydro.
Fuel is a strength. Europe imports its uranium mostly from Canada and other geopolitically friendly countries, in tiny quantities compared with fossil fuels, and Nordic plants keep three to five years of fuel on site, Anton said. The hard part of the chain is enrichment. Johan Christian Sollid of the Danish Nuclear Alliance said Europe can enrich about 150% of its own consumption, and the EU holds a strategic reserve of two years or more. German gas storage, meanwhile, was at a 15-year low. Johan called it a conundrum that Europe has the fuel chain and the technology and still depends on fossil fuels.
There are a lot of PowerPoint reactors around. Many of them will fail.
Asked what holds nuclear back, Klaus said, "It's political. It's ideology at its most basic level." Denmark's left turned against nuclear in the 1970s, partly through a link to nuclear weapons and partly as opposition to big capital. When Denmark became the birthplace of the modern wind industry, the right took the industry's side and came to see nuclear as a competitor. Chernobyl and Fukushima did the rest.
The long pause is why nuclear now looks slow and expensive. Europe built two reactors of European design in 25 years, Klaus said, leaving few specialists and few companies willing to work in the field. Sweden once built 12 reactors in about 14 years, and France four a year for 15 years. Anton said recent projects were first-of-a-kind reactors that reinvented the wheel, where the serial builds of the 1970s and 1980s came in on time and on budget.
The start-ups are designing around that history. Steady's reactor makes only heat, which Anton said is half of final energy use and a market the electricity debate overlooks. Running at lower temperature and pressure, it does without 95% of the moving parts, and Johan noted that it is much easier to license. It is sized so that a local utility and local politicians can decide on it in their own boardroom, Anton said, less exposed to swings between left and right. Saltfoss plans to build whole plants on barges in a shipyard, so that learning curves work as they do for cars and phones.
Smaller units also widen the pool of investors. Venture investors once dismissed nuclear as a 15-year wait, Johan said, and some now exit before a prototype runs. Sweden chose small reactors partly because a year's delay on one costs far less than on a 1.6 GW unit.
Asked what they would back apart from their own companies, Klaus offered criteria instead of names. Start with fuel that can be bought today, since many new designs need uranium enriched towards 20%, which has no global supply chain. Add public acceptance, scalability and as many uses as possible. Saltfoss, Klaus noted, ticks every box. Anton was more sober. "There are a lot of PowerPoint reactors around. Many of them will fail." Investors, politicians and the public, Anton said, will need to look past the failures to what the technology can deliver.
Recorded live at The Drop 2026 for The New Nuclear Podcast, hosted by Sam Floy, with Klaus Nyengaard, Anton Steen and Johan Christian Sollid.