MacroVoices #548 Dr. Carly Anderson: Emerging Energy Technologies Roundup

**Carly Anderson** (0:00)
You can't understate the importance of hyperscalers and data center builders to opening up these new markets and creating the conditions for a nuclear renaissance. Because you really do need somebody who's willing to sign a 20-year PPA for $100 per megawatt hour. And that didn't exist until a couple of years ago.

**Erik Townsend** (0:22)
That was Dr. Carly Anderson. I'm Erik Townsend, and this is Macro Voices, the free weekly podcast targeting professional finance and sophisticated private investors. Episode 548 was produced earlier in August, 2026 We've got a special treat lined up for you this Labor Day weekend. Dr. Carly Anderson is one of the smartest and most interesting investors I know. She's a PhD energy geek whose day job is being a venture capitalist specializing in early stage investments in the energy related technologies that have the potential to change the world. She's an early investor in all of atomics and a frequent source of new and exciting energy related investment ideas. We'll discuss the formative nuclear renaissance in both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, turbine technologies, laser enrichment of uranium, and much more in this interview.
Joining me now is Dr. Carly Anderson, who is the Founder and Managing Director of TimeScale.VC.
Carly has a PhD in chemical engineering, although it doesn't sound nearly as exciting as what her PhD thesis was on, which was actually creating miniature lightning in order to heal wounds, fascinating stuff. Carly, it's not actually all that surprising that you went from a PhD in plasma to eventually becoming my favorite champion of nuclear fusion energy. But why don't we start with something that we actually agree on, which is nuclear fission? What do you think are the most exciting things that are going on in terms of this nuclear renaissance? What do investors need to understand about it?

**Carly Anderson** (2:09)
Thanks, Erik. It's great to be here. As I think a lot of people have noticed, hopefully it's been a crazy exciting year in terms of ground being broken on new demonstrations for some of the smaller reactors, as well as continued progress on the regulatory front and on supply chain maturing for some of the larger designs. I know you've talked to many people on the show already about the happenings earlier this summer at Idaho National Lab. Fantastic to see so many new companies deploying technology, or at least at the first steps, for showing that their nuclear cores work. In the coming 12 months, I'm sure we'll see many more milestones from some of these smaller reactor companies. Again, I know we're both very excited about this space and being able to come down that cost curve and rapidly iterate on some of these new designs.
On the larger end of the spectrum, I think there's a lot of stuff that people don't hear about in the headlines around restarting, obviously, some of the older nuclear plants, potentially one of the fastest ways to get gigawatts of nuclear power back on the grid.
There's also some work going on to increase the power production at existing nuclear plants. And that's an area that I think is super exciting because it's also a way to bring more power online fast to meet the growing demand that we keep hearing about from the electricity sector to power data centers and all kinds of new infrastructure in the US.

**Erik Townsend** (3:34)
Let's talk about what it takes to do that, deliver the goal, which is more power data centers, blah, blah, blah, so forth.
Okay, but conventional nuclear power plants take at least a decade to build and sometimes longer than that to get permitted and sorted out and so forth. So what are the bottlenecks? And more importantly, what do you think are the technologies or trends or changes or whatever you want to call it, that's going to allow us to not have to take upwards of a decade in order to deliver more energy using nuclear technology?

**Carly Anderson** (4:08)
Great.
Well, one of the key things that I think we're both very excited about is mass producing as many components for these reactors as we can. This is something that should shrink the lead time for everything from the reactor vessels to the pumps that move the fluid around inside these power plants, to the instruments, to the safety mechanisms, to days, if not weeks, if not months. If you look at the time it takes to build a standard nuclear power plant, a standard is that 1,000 megawatt chunk. You have to, by the time you get through SiteWorks and then concrete pouring, and then shipping these massive, massive metal containers to site, I mean, Vogel was way, way over schedule and over budget. I think the best people in the world are installing these in five years.