3 Key Insights from the NextGen Nuclear Summit
3 Key Insights from the NextGen Nuclear Summit
June 2026, written by Naomi Mburu
The NextGen Nuclear Summit gathered policymakers, developers, investors and supply chain companies together on 11th June for a day of discussion about where advanced nuclear technology (both advanced fission and fusion) is headed in the UK and beyond. Six sessions covered everything from national policy to first customers.
Here are three themes that cut across the day.
1. High energy costs hollow out communities. Nuclear energy can help rebuild them.
Lord Ravensdale, Vice-Chair of the Nuclear All-Party Parliamentary Group, opened the summit by describing a Derby pottery shop that had recently shut down. Energy costs had simply become unworkable, causing the business to close. It was one example among many of how expensive electricity quietly erodes the economic fabric of industrial communities.
The discussion then turned to the other side of that equation—how large energy projects can help rebuild communities.
Large nuclear projects bring substantial workforces during both construction and operation, creating jobs that communities welcome not only for the employment they provide, but for the wider economic activity they generate. As the local population and spending base grows, towns can start to meet the threshold needed to attract larger retailers and services. Aldi was cited as one example: a store of that scale usually needs enough local demand before it will open. By bringing in workers and their families, major nuclear projects can help communities reach those thresholds, supporting not just jobs but also the shops, services and amenities that make communities more prosperous and attractive places to live.
Steve Wood, CEO of Fylde Coast Energy, which is developing a large-scale energy, data centre and infrastructure project on the Lancashire coast, made this point more directly. He discussed a proposal for a bridge that would support the necessary data centre infrastructure while also improving physical connections between communities that have been economically marginalised for decades. For Wood, the energy project and the community project are part of the same proposition.
2. Supply chain continuity is a problem fission and fusion share.
For all their technical differences, fission and fusion share a common problem. Neither can scale without supply chains that are willing and able to invest ahead of demand. Sarah Forman, Head of Strategy at Urenco, a fission fuel supplier, explained how this challenge has become more acute as reactor construction timelines have shortened. In the era of large conventional reactors, suppliers could wait for a project to be approved before investing in new capacity, confident they had nearly a decade before fuel would be needed. Small modular reactors aim to compress that timeline considerably.
The result is a familiar chicken-and-egg problem. Suppliers are expected to invest before demand is fully proven, while developers need suppliers to invest before they can deliver projects. Without a predictable pipeline of projects, supply-chain companies struggle to justify the capital commitments required to expand.
Fusion faces the same challenge. Discussions around advanced fission fuel production highlighted a dynamic that would be familiar to companies currently in the fusion supply chain, especially for technologies that have limited use cases outside of fusion such as fusion fuel cycle technology. No one wants to build the factory without customers, and customers are reluctant to commit without a factory.
For both fission and fusion, success depends not just on proving the technology, but on supporting suppliers to scale alongside it.
FEI Premium subscribers should look out for our “Graph of the Month” analysis feature in July which will go into this in more detail.
3. Fission and fusion are both blue ocean industries.
A useful framing that emerged in the afternoon drew on the business strategy concept of blue ocean versus red ocean markets.
A red ocean is a crowded, competitive market where players fight for existing demand. A blue ocean is open water, where the market itself is still being created. Advanced nuclear, both fission and fusion, sits firmly in the latter category because rising electricity demand from AI paired with national net zero mandates have created a need for new sources of clean, firm power rather than simply reshuffling demand within the existing electricity market.
Given that, the degree to which fission and fusion communities operate in parallel without much structured collaboration struck some attendees as a missed opportunity. The question was raised directly from the floor by Zemfira Knott, Director of Northcourt, a nuclear insurance firm, who asked whether the two sectors should be doing more together. The panel's response was broadly affirmative, though what that collaboration might look like in practice remains an open question.
One concrete area of overlap is project financing. Power purchase agreements (PPAs), in which a large energy buyer such as a technology company agrees to purchase electricity directly from an energy producer, are increasingly being used to anchor investment in new nuclear projects. But PPAs have finite terms, and questions about long-term revenue certainty remain unresolved.
More broadly, advanced fission and fusion face many of the same commercial challenges. Both require large upfront capital investments and both are likely to remain more expensive than other established sources of electricity for some time. As a result, both industries face the challenge of attracting capital and creating markets while simultaneously working to bring costs down through deployment and industry scale-up.
What stood out across the summit was how often discussions returned to the same set of issues, regardless of technology. Questions about supply chains, financing, workforce development and public acceptance surfaced repeatedly across both fusion and advanced fission sessions. Though significant technical differences exist between the technologies, many of the challenges associated with bringing them to market appear increasingly familiar.
