The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth - EP 26 Kurt Terrani

Our guests this week are Kurt Terrani, an Iranian-born nuclear scientist, and Tommy Hendrix, a Green Beret turned venture capitalist, and they arrive with an exceptional story.

Terrani is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Nuclear, and Hendrix is the company’s Chairman and main investor through his firm Decisive Point. Standard has started making a nuclear reactor fuel known as TRISO (Tri-structural ISOtropic) that comes with the promise of being very safe and with the ability to power a new breed of small nuclear reactors that can be placed anywhere someone needs a lot of power.

Standard Nuclear popped out of stealth mode last month via a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal.

It turns out that Standard’s predecessor - Ultra Safe Nuclear – had been backed for years by a wealthy ex-CIA operative named Richard Hollis Helms. When Helms passed away in 2024, the company was left in financial peril. Terrani and Hendrix pulled the venture out of bankruptcy and saved its prized TRISO technology.

As we explain in the episode, TRISO is a type of nuclear reactor fuel that the U.S. has been working on for decades. It places a protective coating around fuel particles that makes them incredibly safe, and the U.S. and other countries have proven this out through vast amounts of research. China, of course, has TRISO reactors already as does Germany.

Standard Nuclear hopes to make a lot of TRISO for a coming wave of nuclear start-ups building SMRs, or Small Modular Reactors. These reactors come in various shapes and sizes, but the general idea is that they’re small enough to be shipped to any place that needs serious power – be it an AI data center, an overseas Army supply line or even an industrial hub in space.

I recently visited Standard’s TRISO plant in Tennessee, which is right next door to Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Terrani and much of his team used to work. We’ll have a video on the visit coming soon.

During our chat, we get into the U.S.’s nuclear failings and aspirations, Standard’s wild history and the future of nuclear technology.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. You can find them here and on X here.

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