Novartis bought his first startup for $3.9 billion. Now this physicist is trying to sell Europe on a new generation of nuclear energy

Does Europe need Nuclear Now? Filmmaker Oliver Stone certainly thinks so. He’s going on a roadshow in Italy next week to present his latest documentary with the same title. 

Joining the American on stage is Stefano Buono, the founder of two nuclear startups and coproducer of the film. Buono is a man with a mission: to reconvert Europe to nuclear energy and increase nuclear’s share of the growing electricity market to over 30%. The Italian believes that betting big on a new type of nuclear is the only way for Europe’s economy to remain competitive globally. Is he right?

It was just a few years ago that Germany, Europe’s largest economy, firmly said no. For much of the past decade, the country went all-in on renewables and Russian gas. It closed its last remaining nuclear plants this year. But the timing of that nuclear phaseout, we know now, couldn’t have been worse. 

Last year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended Germany’s fragile energy balance. Germany turned to Norwegian gas after rejecting Russian supplies. That abrupt shift came at a substantial cost. This year, Germany is the only major Western economy to experience a recession. And while the country is scaling up its solar and wind energy sources, daily fluctuations in supply mean the country’s—and the continent’s—energy woes are far from over.

According to Buono, a new generation of nuclear energy is the answer to that problem. “The energy cost is the fundamental asset that is moving the economy,” he told me in a phone interview from Turin. And since nuclear energy can “flatten the prices,” it will be indispensable going forward, he said. “Nuclear is necessary in the energy mix because it can supply best programmable energy,” he said. 

Even in a country like Germany, nuclear could supply up to 30% of energy, Buono said. The lead-cooled nuclear plants Buono advocates for are allegedly much more sustainable, too. The nuclear waste produced in them stops being radioactive in a few hundred years—as opposed to thousands of years for waste from conventional plants—and creates a lot less waste to begin with, Buono claims. And of course, they have zero CO2 emissions. 

Whether the founder will be able to convince Germans with those arguments remains to be seen. But in France and Italy, the EU’s next two biggest economies, his company Newcleo is making inroads. By 2030, the first Newcleo nuclear plant should be operational in France. 

That traction, together with the EU’s push to end oil and gas subsidies by 2030, may indeed herald a new era of nuclear in Europe. It may be a good thing, indeed. Europe’s companies desperately need affordable energy to remain competitive. And the continent needs an alternative to coal, oil, and gas to get to “net zero” in terms of CO2 emissions.  

For Buono, there may be another silver lining. After selling his nuclear medicine startup, Advanced Accelerator Applications, a few years ago, he hopes Newcleo will be his first startup to turn into a Fortune 500 Europe company. “It will be a high multibillion euro company in the next decade,” he predicted. Given that Novartis bought his first company for $3.9 billion in 2017, we wouldn’t bet against him. 

What do you think of the push for nuclear in Europe? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

More news below.

Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
@petervanham

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