Nuclear Turbines Raises £15 Million to Replace Steam Systems in SMRs

Nuclear Turbines, a Manchester-based startup developing compact advanced nuclear power systems, has raised a £15 million foundational round led by IQ Capital, joined by Rhapsody Venture Partners, Zero Carbon Capital and Empirical Ventures. The company, spun out of BAE Systems and founded by former BAE Systems principal engineer Jeremy Owston and nuclear engineer Professor Tim Abram, will use the funding to advance and validate its reactor design, build large-scale test rigs, expand its team, and prepare to manufacture its first fuel elements.

 

Why Replacing Steam Turbines Addresses Nuclear's Core Cost Problem

 

Conventional nuclear power plants generate electricity by using reactor heat to produce steam, which then drives a steam turbine, a system that requires extensive supporting infrastructure including boilers, condensers and cooling systems that add substantial cost, complexity and physical footprint to a nuclear facility. Nuclear Turbines' approach replaces that steam infrastructure entirely with high-temperature turbine technology more commonly found in jet engines and gas-fired power plants, a substitution the company says removes the need for steam systems altogether.

That substitution matters because steam infrastructure has historically been one of the significant cost and scale drivers behind nuclear power's notoriously expensive and slow construction timelines. By eliminating that infrastructure category rather than simply shrinking a conventional reactor design, as earlier-generation small modular reactors have largely done, Nuclear Turbines is targeting a more fundamental restructuring of nuclear power plant economics rather than an incremental size reduction.

 

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Why Behind-the-Meter Deployment Changes the Customer Equation

 

The resulting compactness is central to the company's commercial strategy: a system small enough to be deployed "behind the meter," directly on an industrial site rather than connected to the broader grid, could power facilities such as data centres and manufacturing plants with dedicated on-site generation rather than relying on grid-supplied electricity. That distinction matters considerably for energy-intensive customers facing both rising electricity costs and reliability concerns, since on-site generation removes exposure to grid capacity constraints and transmission costs entirely, offering a different value proposition than simply being a smaller version of a grid-connected nuclear plant.

For UK businesses specifically, that proposition carries particular weight given current electricity pricing: UK businesses reportedly pay 50 percent more for electricity than counterparts in France and Germany, and four times what similar businesses pay in the US, though pricing varies considerably across Europe. A cost-effective, on-site nuclear alternative would directly address that competitiveness gap for the country's most energy-intensive industries, a group increasingly vulnerable to fossil fuel price volatility and grid capacity constraints as data centre and AI-driven demand grows.

 

How This Fits the UK's Broader Nuclear Policy Push

 

Nuclear Turbines' technology arrives alongside several coordinated UK policy efforts aimed at accelerating advanced nuclear deployment, including the November Nuclear Regulatory Review 2025, which called for a "radical reset" of UK nuclear regulation, the Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan aimed at driving investment and jobs in the sector, and the Advanced Nuclear Framework designed to help pioneering nuclear projects move from concept to construction. The UK is also building a new uranium enrichment facility specifically capable of producing the high-assay fuel that reactors like Nuclear Turbines' require, addressing a supply chain gap that has constrained several advanced reactor designs globally, since high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel has historically been available from a very limited number of suppliers worldwide.

That alignment between the company's technology and the UK's regulatory and industrial strategy suggests Nuclear Turbines is positioned to benefit from policy tailwinds specifically designed to support exactly this category of advanced nuclear technology, rather than needing to navigate a regulatory environment built primarily around conventional reactor designs.

 

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What the Investor and Founder Framing Reveals

 

Co-founder Jeremy Owston described the company's design philosophy as inverting the traditional approach to reactor engineering, starting from the cheapest way to generate power and designing a reactor to fit that goal rather than designing a reactor first and addressing its economics afterward. IQ Capital principal Jordan Billiald described the design as the first small modular reactor he had seen that genuinely solves both the economic and sustainability equation simultaneously, framing the UK's engineering and nuclear heritage as giving the country a genuine competitive position in the global advanced nuclear race.

The company has also appointed Lauren Dickerson, previously strategy director at Centrica for more than four years, as chief commercial and strategy officer, bringing commercial partnership and external relations experience to the company's growth plans. Whether Nuclear Turbines' technology successfully validates at the scale its test rigs and fuel element manufacturing plans are designed to demonstrate, and whether the behind-the-meter commercial model attracts the industrial and data centre customers the company is targeting, will determine how significant this funding round proves in translating the company's cost-and-scale thesis into deployed reactors.