# The muscle we forgot: SMRs, hyperscalers, and why this nuclear renaissance might actually be different

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/interchange-recharged-1117793/the-muscle-we-forgot-smrs-hyperscalers-and-why-this-nuclear-renaissance-might-actually-be-different
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/interchange-recharged-1117793/the-muscle-we-forgot-smrs-hyperscalers-and-why-this-nuclear-renaissance-might-actually-be-different.md
Podcast: [Interchange Recharged](https://stenobird.com/podcast/interchange-recharged-1117793)
Published: 2026-03-24T12:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/rss.art19.com/episodes/0f678573-105f-4373-9fc9-09ce2fa6865a.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/rss.art19.com/episodes/0f678573-105f-4373-9fc9-09ce2fa6865a.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
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Duration seconds: 3363

## Resource

Why nuclear has never been project financed and how that might finally be about to change. Every nuclear plant ever built has ultimately been backstopped by taxpayers or ratepayers. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because nobody has ever cracked the construction cost and schedule problem well enough to convince a bank to finance it without government support. Bridget van Dorsten is joined by Jake Jurewicz, Co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, to explore why that has been so hard and what a credible path to fixing it might actually look like. Jake walks through the root cause of nuclear's cost overrun problem and it is not the reactor. The reactor equipment itself represents around 7% of total project costs. The real problem is what Jake calls nuclear construction overhead: the cost of mobilizing, training, and retaining the 10,000 or so skilled workers needed to build these plants in the field, the way we have been building them for 70 years, essentially the same way you would build a castle. The episode then turns to what Blue Energy is doing differently. By intentionally selecting sites accessible by barge and contracting existing oil and gas fabrication yards and shipyards to build large pre-assembled modules offsite, Blue Energy aims to bring fixed-price contracts into nuclear for the first time, the same contracting structure that made offshore wind and LNG bankable. Jake explains why that single shift changes everything for project financing. Bridget and Jake also work through the demand side of the equation: why hyperscalers are becoming the crucial beachhead market for new nuclear, what binding PPAs from investment-grade counterparties actually signal versus announcements, and why the restarts and uprates, while valuable, only go so far. The conversa…

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