where suburban sprawl surrenders to cow pasture, sits a cavernous industrial workshop in which welders and pipe fitters assemble equipment bound for oil refineries and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. “These guys have been working for decades to modularize components for high pressures and temperatures,” says Bret Kugelmass, 36, the founder and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy.
Leaning into science is one way to make things easier; picking his regulatory shots is another. Although Kugelmass is working with federal agencies to get export permissions for Last’s nuclear technology, he isn’t yet asking for approval to build his plants in the U.S. Instead, he hopes to have his first 20-megawatt reactor up and running by 2025 in Poland, which has been getting 70% of its power from burning coal since Russian natural gas supplies were cut off.
GREEN DREAMS | Last Energy power plants will blend into the environment, with reactor cores underground and fans and steam turbines replacing hulking cooling towers. Each 20-megawatt unit requires less than an acre.that has now grown to nearly 400 episodes. He studied the obstacles to building more nuclear capacity and concluded that too much complexity, along with excessive regulation, were major problems.
they should learn more then