Why Nuclear's Moment Is Now: Stefano Buono, CEO of newcleo

For newcleo founder and CEO Stefano Buono, nuclear energy's next chapter has been more than 30 years in the making. Now, rising electricity demand, energy security concerns, and changing attitudes toward nuclear are creating an opening for ideas he began pursuing in the 1990s.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Clean Energy, host Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search, sits down with Buono to explore what makes this nuclear moment different and what it will take to turn that momentum into commercial projects.

A physicist and entrepreneur, Buono previously founded Advanced Accelerator Applications, the nuclear medicine company acquired by Novartis for approximately $3.9 billion. He shares how that experience prepared him to return to his original ambition: developing a different approach to nuclear energy.

Today, newcleo is developing lead-cooled fast reactors designed to use recycled nuclear fuel. Buono explains the technology in accessible terms, including why useful energy remains in spent fuel, how liquid lead supports the company's approach to passive safety, and why the economics of recycling matter.

The conversation also tackles the difficult questions: plutonium security, the history of costly U.S. fuel projects, regulatory approvals, and the challenge of financing and building an entire reactor and fuel supply chain.

In this episode:

• Why decarbonization, energy independence, and AI-driven electricity demand are reshaping nuclear's opportunity.
• How lead-cooled fast reactors differ from conventional nuclear plants.
• What recycled mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel could mean for fuel supply and nuclear waste.
• newcleo's proposed work with Oklo and its ambitions at Savannah River.
• Why industrial heat and manufacturing matter alongside data centers.
• The milestones that will show whether newcleo is moving toward commercial deployment.
• Buono's advice for founders building technologies that take decades to reach the market.

Release update: This conversation was recorded ahead of newcleo's Nasdaq debut. The company subsequently completed its business combination with NewHold, securing approximately $247 million in gross proceeds, and began trading under NWCL on September 22, 2026.

For energy leaders, founders, and anyone curious about advanced nuclear, this episode connects the science to the practical work of bringing new energy projects to life.

Subscribe to Green Giants: Titans of Clean Energy wherever you get your podcasts, and share this episode with someone following nuclear's next chapter.

Links:
Stefano Buono on LinkedIn
newcleo's Website
newcleo's Nasdaq Listing and $247 Million Funding Announcement
newcleo Targets US Expansion with Nasdaq Debut, AI-Driven Power Demand

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

The nuclear renaissance is about far more than building reactors.

It is also about capital, fuel security, recycling, infrastructure, commercialization, supply chains, workforce, and whether the energy system can scale fast enough to meet a new era of electricity demand.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Clean Energy, Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search sits down with Michelle Urben, Managing and General Partner at The Synergos Fund, to explore what it will actually take to finance and build the next generation of energy infrastructure.

Michelle brings more than three decades of experience across banking, asset management, investor relations, and venture capital. Her path from the Philippines and an oil-industry family to Wall Street and deep-tech investing gives her a unique perspective on energy affordability, energy security, and the role patient capital can play in solving foundational infrastructure challenges.

The conversation begins with a fundamental investing question: Is traditional venture capital structured for technologies that may require years of technical validation, regulation, demonstration, and infrastructure before reaching full commercialization?

Michelle explains how The Synergos Fund approaches that challenge through milestone-driven investing, long-term alignment, active participation, and a focus on durable companies across energy, manufacturing, food, and health.

From there, the discussion moves into one of the most overlooked pieces of nuclear energy: the fuel cycle.

Michelle shares why nuclear recycling company Curio became such an important part of her transition into deep tech and why she believes spent nuclear fuel should increasingly be viewed as a strategic energy resource rather than simply as waste. The conversation explores fuel security, domestic nuclear supply chains, recycling, commercialization, and the broader ecosystem required around the reactor itself.

Wes and Michelle also examine the massive increase in electricity demand being driven by AI, data centers, reshoring, and electrification. If generation, grid infrastructure, and behind-the-meter solutions cannot keep pace, the constraint may increasingly become access to reliable power.

They also discuss Gate 5, a wastewater-to-energy technology in the Synergos portfolio, as an example of a broader investment philosophy: finding valuable energy resources in places the traditional system often treats as liabilities.

But technology and capital alone will not build the next energy system.

The episode closes with one of the most important constraints facing the industry: people. Engineers, welders, electricians, operators, technicians, construction professionals, regulators, and other skilled workers will all be necessary to turn ambitious energy plans into functioning infrastructure.

In this episode:

• Why Michelle moved from traditional finance into nuclear and deep tech
• What patient capital should demand from infrastructure companies
• Why timing matters in private-market investing
• The nuclear fuel-cycle opportunity beyond the reactor
• Why spent nuclear fuel could become a strategic resource
• How AI and data centers are reshaping electricity demand
• Wastewater-to-energy and the opportunity behind overlooked resources
• Why commercialization requires strong operators, not just investors
• The workforce challenge facing nuclear and energy infrastructure
• Why the companies quietly building through difficult problems may ultimately shape the next energy era

For investors, founders, energy executives, and anyone thinking seriously about the future of nuclear power and energy infrastructure, this episode offers a much broader framework for understanding what the next energy system will actually require.

Links:
Michelle Urben on LinkedIn
The Synergos Fund Website
Curio's Website
Episode 89 with Ed McGinnis of Curio

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Breakthrough science is only the beginning. The harder challenge is turning promising technology into a system that can operate reliably, economically, and repeatedly in the real world.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Clean Energy, Wes Ashworth, host and President of Lee Group Search sits down with Tina Tosukhowong, Investment Director at TDK Ventures, to explore what separates deep-tech companies that scale from those that stall between the lab, pilot plant, and first commercial facility. Tina brings an unusually valuable perspective to venture investing. Before becoming an investor, she spent years as a chemical engineer and industrial operator working across process development, pilot operations, scale-up, commercialization, manufacturing, and customer qualification.

That operating experience shapes how she evaluates climate tech, advanced materials, AI infrastructure, and other capital-intensive technologies today.

Tina explains why scaling is not simply a matter of building a larger version of a successful pilot. At commercial scale, entirely new risks emerge around heat transfer, fluid flow, contamination, materials handling, uptime, permitting, utilities, feedstocks, safety, supply chains, and integration with customer sites. The companies that succeed are often the ones that identify failure modes early, run the right experiments, and learn faster than their capital disappears.

The conversation also tackles one of the most important questions in deep tech: When has a company actually earned the right to scale?

Wes and Tina explore why raising too much money too early can be dangerous, how founders should think about risk retirement before committing hundreds of millions of dollars to a first commercial plant, and why the strongest financing strategy aligns capital with specific learning milestones. They also discuss founder-market fit, coachability, executive hiring, productive board conflict, and why the right investor syndicate can matter as much as valuation.

The discussion then moves into the rapidly evolving physical infrastructure behind AI. Tina breaks down opportunities across data-center power delivery, energy storage, cooling, thermal materials, networking, semiconductors, and photonics. She explains why the next wave of AI infrastructure innovation may come not only from better chips, but from everything required to power, connect, and cool them efficiently.

The episode also explores fusion energy, synthetic fuels, critical minerals, and frontier technologies, including Tina’s perspective on Type One Energy, INERATEC, and the growing overlap between clean energy, computing, advanced materials, manufacturing, and national supply-chain resilience.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why industrial scale-up exposes risks that laboratory success cannot predict
• What founders should prove before committing to a first commercial facility
• How capital discipline can prevent expensive first-of-a-kind mistakes
• Why learning speed and coachability matter so much in deep-tech leadership
• When experienced executives help startups and when they can slow them down
• Why investor syndicates and boards become critical when plans break
• Where Tina sees overlooked opportunities in AI data-center infrastructure
• Why cooling, rack-level power conversion, and photonics could become major bottlenecks
• What industrial operating experience reveals about the future of fusion
• How e-fuels, critical minerals, AI, and advanced materials are increasingly converging

For founders, investors, operators, and leaders building the next generation of clean energy and deep-tech companies, this episode is a practical look at what it really takes to move from possibility to commercial reality.

Links:
Tina Tosukhowong on LinkedIn
TDK Ventures Website

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

What if the next major battery breakthrough does not require a new chemistry, a new factory, or an entirely new manufacturing ecosystem?

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, Wes Ashworth sits down with David Mackanic, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, to explore why the electrolyte may be one of the most overlooked levers in battery performance.

Anthro Energy is developing Proteus, a phase-change electrolyte designed to enter a battery cell as a liquid and then solidify during formation. The goal is to improve safety, mechanical stability, swelling behavior, and compatibility with higher-energy chemistries while using existing lithium-ion manufacturing equipment.

David explains why this approach could matter for everything from silicon-rich batteries and consumer electronics to EVs, robotics, defense, autonomous systems, and physical AI.

The conversation also gets into one of the biggest challenges in battery innovation: making something work not just in a laboratory, but consistently, economically, and at industrial scale.

Wes and David discuss:

• Why the electrolyte has historically received less attention than the anode and cathode
• How Proteus transitions from liquid to solid inside the battery cell
• Why "drop-in" manufacturing does not mean zero process changes
• How mechanical stabilization can help address silicon expansion, cracking, swelling, and degradation
• Why better batteries require progress across energy density, safety, cycle life, and manufacturability at the same time
• How Anthro thinks about reducing both the frequency and severity of battery safety events
• Why a more expensive electrolyte can still create greater value at the full cell and application level
• Why robotics, autonomous systems, defense, and physical AI create a different battery problem than conventional EVs
• How structural batteries could eventually change the architecture of products themselves
• How Anthro Atlas uses AI to explore enormous electrolyte design spaces and accelerate materials development
• Where AI predictions still have to prove themselves against real-world chemistry and manufacturing
• What changes when a materials science company moves from discovery into production
• Why Anthro is scaling advanced electrolyte manufacturing in the United States
• Why the future of batteries is unlikely to be defined by one winning chemistry

David’s background spans mechanical engineering, chemistry, polymer science, and advanced battery research, including a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford focused on polymer systems for safer, longer-lasting, higher-energy lithium-ion batteries.

This episode is a deep look at the intersection of battery technology, advanced materials, AI-driven discovery, U.S. manufacturing, energy storage, robotics, and the future of electrification.

Links:
David Mackanic on LinkedIn
Anthro Energy's Website

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Most of the buildings we will depend on for the next several decades are already standing. That makes the next phase of building decarbonization less about showcase new construction and more about upgrading the systems hidden behind walls, beneath floors, and underground.

In this episode, Wes Ashworth sits down with Mike Richter, President of Brightcore Energy, to explore geothermal heating and cooling as a practical building-performance strategy. Mike brings a rare perspective to the conversation. After a 15-year NHL career that included a Stanley Cup championship and Olympic medal, he built a second career focused on climate, energy efficiency, and the built environment.

Mike explains the critical difference between geothermal power generation and the ground-source systems used to heat and cool buildings. He breaks down the physics in accessible terms, then shows how smaller drilling rigs, directional drilling, hybrid systems, advanced controls, and real-time data are expanding what is possible in dense cities and occupied buildings.

The conversation also examines why retrofits are the true test of decarbonization. Existing buildings come with aging infrastructure, limited space, complex load profiles, and owners who often wait until equipment fails before considering alternatives. Mike outlines why early evaluation matters and why every geothermal project must be designed around the building, geology, distribution system, operating needs, and financial horizon.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why geothermal HVAC is different from deep geothermal power
• How the ground can function as a stable heat source, heat sink, and thermal battery
• Why urban and occupied-building retrofits are becoming more feasible
• How Brightcore integrates engineering, drilling, controls, implementation, and performance monitoring
• What The Beresford project demonstrates about geothermal in a historic New York City building
• Why one-directional cooling loads, including data centers and ice rinks, create new design challenges
• How Local Law 97 is changing capital planning for New York City building owners
• Why education, perceived risk, financing, and timing remain major barriers to adoption
• How better building systems can reduce operating costs while improving comfort, air quality, and performance

Mike offers a grounded view of the market. Geothermal can deliver major efficiency and emissions benefits, but it is not a universal, one-size-fits-all solution. The opportunity depends on sound engineering, realistic economics, thoughtful integration, and a willingness to evaluate options before an emergency replacement locks a building into another generation of legacy equipment.

This episode is essential listening for professionals in commercial real estate, facilities, engineering, higher education, government, finance, climate policy, and renewable energy who want to understand how geothermal retrofits can move from niche technology to mainstream building infrastructure.

Topics: geothermal heating and cooling, ground-source heat pumps, commercial building retrofits, building decarbonization, energy efficiency, urban geothermal, Local Law 97, thermal energy storage, HVAC electrification, Brightcore Energy

Links:
Mike Richter on LinkedIn
Brightcore Energy's Website

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Nuclear energy is having another moment. But enthusiasm alone will not create a nuclear renaissance.

The bigger question is whether the industry can finally learn to deliver complex projects predictably, repeatedly, on time, and at a cost investors and utilities can accept.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, host Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search, sits down with Tony Roulstone, Lecturer in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Cambridge and former Group Managing Director of Rolls-Royce Nuclear Engineering.

Tony brings decades of experience spanning nuclear energy, aerospace, complex engineering programs, business transformation, and nuclear education. That perspective leads to a fascinating argument: the biggest breakthroughs nuclear needs may have less to do with reactor physics and more to do with how reactors are manufactured, financed, constructed, and repeated.

The conversation begins with a Rolls-Royce aerospace failure that left Boeing 747s waiting for engines. The technology problem ultimately exposed a deeper organizational problem. Tony explains why that lesson still matters for nuclear projects today.

From there, Wes and Tony examine one of nuclear energy's fundamental challenges. Building a large reactor can resemble manufacturing an aircraft in a field. Thousands of people, intricate supply chains, enormous documentation requirements, specialized inspections, and long construction timelines make repetition and productivity incredibly difficult.

That is where small modular reactors, or SMRs, could change the equation.

Tony explains why smaller does not automatically mean cheaper and why the real economic opportunity behind SMRs depends on three principles:

• Standardization: Stop redesigning the product for every customer and site.
• Modularization: Move significantly more construction into controlled factory environments.
• Production learning: Build repeatedly enough for teams, suppliers, and processes to improve from one unit to the next.

The discussion also explores advanced nuclear reactors, including high-temperature gas reactors, liquid-metal systems, and molten salt concepts, along with what new reactor technologies could mean for safety and industrial applications.

Tony and Wes also confront nuclear's most persistent public challenge: trust. They examine lessons from Chernobyl, the importance of organizational safety culture, and why modern nuclear safety cannot be understood solely through the industry's historical accidents.

Finally, they tackle the false choice between nuclear energy and renewable energy. Deep decarbonization will require an entire energy system, including electricity, industrial heat, transportation, storage, renewables, and firm low-carbon generation. The real question is not which technology wins. It is how these resources work together.

In this episode:

• Why technically brilliant projects can still fail
• What aerospace can teach nuclear about systems engineering
• Why large nuclear construction struggles with productivity
• The real economics behind small modular reactors
• Why SMRs require fleet deployment and repeatable production
• Standardization, modularization, and manufacturing learning
• Advanced nuclear reactor technologies and their potential
• Nuclear safety, Chernobyl, and public confidence
• Private capital and the growing nuclear ecosystem
• Why nuclear and renewables should not be treated as opposing camps
• What nuclear must accomplish by 2035 to prove it can truly scale

The ultimate test is simple: nuclear must become predictable.

If the industry can turn extraordinary engineering projects into repeatable industrial products that arrive when promised and near the cost promised, nuclear could play a much larger role in the global energy transition.

Links:
Tony Roulstone on LinkedIn

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

The energy transition is usually framed around generation, storage, transmission, permitting, and capital. But one of the biggest constraints may be hiding in plain sight: the physical materials required to build everything.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search, sits down with Bryan Guido Hassin, Co-Founder and CEO of DexMat, to explore why the future of electrification, renewable energy, AI data centers, grid expansion, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing may depend on a fundamental materials transition.

Bryan brings an unusually broad perspective to the conversation. His career has spanned software entrepreneurship, energy technology, climate innovation, venture ecosystems, and deep tech. He also co-founded Third Derivative, where exposure to hundreds of climate technologies helped reveal a recurring challenge: nearly every major electrification pathway depends on rapidly scaling conductive materials such as copper, while supply, performance, and production constraints continue to intensify.

That realization ultimately helped lead Bryan to DexMat and Galvorn, an advanced carbon material made from aligned carbon nanotubes. DexMat is developing Galvorn for applications where conductivity alone is not enough and properties like low weight, strength, flexibility, heat dissipation, corrosion resistance, and durability become critical.

In this conversation, Wes and Bryan explore:

• Why copper could become a major bottleneck for electrification and renewable energy growth
• How AI data centers add another layer of pressure to materials demand
• Why mining and recycling more copper may help, but may not solve the full problem
• How Galvorn is made and why carbon nanotube alignment is the key breakthrough
• Where Galvorn can compete with copper today and where copper still has advantages
• Why conductivity must be evaluated alongside weight, heat, strength, frequency, and system design
• How wet fiber spinning could help advanced carbon materials scale economically
• The qualification hurdles behind aerospace, defense, medical, grid, and wire-and-cable adoption
• Why hard-tech commercialization requires manufacturers, investors, policymakers, and customers to move together
• What investors often misunderstand about materials startups
• How entirely new materials can unlock designs that were previously impossible

Bryan also shares the personal journey behind the work, including the influence of Nobel laureate Rick Smalley at Rice University and how a career spent studying climate innovation ultimately brought him full circle into advanced materials.

The bigger idea is simple but consequential: building a cleaner, more electrified economy requires more than changing how we generate energy. It may require changing the materials civilization is built on.

For anyone working in renewable energy, grid infrastructure, AI infrastructure, electrification, climate tech, advanced materials, deep tech, or industrial innovation, this episode offers a very different lens on what could determine the speed of the energy transition.

Links:
Bryan Hassin on LinkedIn
DexMat's Website
Info on Galvorn

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Major energy projects do not fail simply because of weak contractors, poor controls, or the wrong contract structure. They fail when owners misunderstand their role.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search, sits down with Gary Fischer, Executive Director of the Project Production Institute and a longtime capital projects leader who spent more than 40 years at Chevron.

Gary brings a rare perspective shaped by work across engineering, construction, operations, benchmarking, major project leadership, and enterprise project-system design. After helping architect Chevron’s project management system, he came to a difficult conclusion: even sophisticated project frameworks can produce disappointing results when they ignore how work actually flows through a production system.

The conversation centers on one critical idea: capital projects are not products an owner can simply buy. They are production systems that must be actively designed, led, and integrated.

Wes and Gary explore the difference between owners who behave like buyers and owners who behave like builders, along with the responsibilities that cannot be outsourced. These include defining the business outcome, setting requirements, managing stakeholders, making timely decisions, shaping the contracting strategy, and retaining accountability for the final result.

They also examine why lump-sum EPC contracts do not eliminate owner risk, how traditional metrics can reward excessive work in process, and why adding more people to a delayed project can sometimes make performance worse.

Gary shares lessons from major LNG, refinery, offshore, and supply chain environments, including how production control improved collaboration, reduced manpower, accelerated delivery, and helped teams complete more work with fewer resources.

The discussion also applies directly to renewable energy, battery storage, hydrogen, transmission, data centers, and other rapidly scaling infrastructure sectors. As companies deploy capital into new technologies and unfamiliar project environments, owner capability may become one of the most important competitive advantages.

In this episode:

• Why project failure is often misdiagnosed
• What separates a capable owner from a passive buyer
• Why contractors cannot own the business outcome
• How contracts can obscure risk without truly transferring it
• Why production science changes project decision-making
• How excessive work in process delays completion
• Why supply chains should be managed as connected production systems
• How rigid stage gates can encourage the wrong behavior
• What leaders should evaluate before approving major capital
• The first steps organizations can take to strengthen owner capability

This episode is essential listening for CEOs, project sponsors, investors, developers, EPC leaders, and anyone responsible for delivering complex energy and infrastructure projects.

Gary Fischer is Executive Director of the Project Production Institute and previously held senior project leadership roles at Chevron, including responsibility for Chevron’s project management system and capital project capability.

Links:
Project Production Institute Website & Resources
Gary Fischer on LinkedIn

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/