All the nuclear fuel it would take to power your entire life would fit inside a soda can.
So why does a nuclear power plant cost billions of dollars and take a decade or more to build?
It isn’t the reactor core. The core is small, compact, and relatively simple to build. It’s everything built around it: the containment dome, the pressurizer, the thick reactor vessel, and the safety systems designed to make sure nothing ever goes wrong.
Nuclear power should be a no-brainer. It's clean, it's reliable, and unlike solar or wind, it runs twenty-four hours a day. It also might be the only energy source in America that both political parties actually agree on. Together, Republicans and Democrats have produced a rare run of bipartisan legislation, executive orders, and federal programs all pushing in the same direction to actually build more nuclear power.
Despite recent bipartisan support, the cost of building nuclear reactors has kept nuclear power on the sidelines for decades.
But what if you didn’t need the concrete containment dome, the steel pressure vessel, or the cooling systems built to contain an accident? What if, instead of building a billion dollars of concrete and steel to create the conditions a reactor needs, you simply put the reactor somewhere those conditions already exist?
Our guest today is a three-time founder who built a company based on that bet.
Liz Muller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deep Fission, a company building an underground nuclear energy system designed to dramatically cut the cost and time it takes to build nuclear power.
Liz grew up in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a nuclear physics professor, in a city that declared itself a “nuclear-free zone.” She found her way back to nuclear power after building a nonprofit to bring transparent data to the climate debate, then a nuclear waste disposal company, before landing on the idea that would become Deep Fission.
Deep Fission places the most common type of nuclear reactor at the bottom of a borehole a mile underground, where the rock and the weight of the water in the borehole replace much of the above-ground concrete and steel that nuclear plants usually require for containment and pressure.
In our conversation, Liz walks me through her path and what it takes to bring nuclear power to market faster and cheaper.
Today, Deep Fission is a public company, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker FISN, with a market cap of about $250M as of this episode’s release. The company is part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, broke ground on its first reactor site in Parsons, Kansas, in 2025, has signed letters of intent for 18.5 gigawatts of future power, and has more than 75 employees.
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