Microreactors: A Mirage of American Nuclear Innovation?

In this episode, Chris Keefer speaks with Hadron Energy founder Samuel Gibson, the twenty four year old entrepreneur pursuing a ten megawatt integral pressurized water microreactor through a one point two billion dollar business combination with GigCapital7. Gibson outlines why he believes light water is the fastest licensing path, how he assembled a veteran nuclear team, and why Hadron shifted from a one megawatt concept to a ten megawatt design built around LEU plus fuel, modular plant layouts, and air cooled decay heat removal. Keefer presses on the harder questions: whether factory fabrication can overcome the fixed civil works and regulatory burdens that have crippled previous SMR efforts like NuScale and mPower, what off the shelf really means in a hollowed out US supply chain, and how long refueling cycles, fuel qualification, and decommissioning challenges scale at microreactor size. The conversation becomes a broader test case for whether startup optimism can meaningfully confront the industrial, economic, and physics grounded constraints that define real world nuclear deployment.

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