Kofi Asante has spent much of his career building and financing companies – but his latest venture may be his boldest yet.
Earlier this year he founded Bluecore Energy to develop and deploy portable nuclear microreactors that could be placed atop floating barges to provide power for ports and other maritime uses, as well as data centers.
The company is seeking to take advantage of a resurgence in interest in nuclear power, especially for portable microreactors. Investors have quickly climbed on board, putting in $10 million initial seed round and $50 million more just weeks later.
The fledgling company chose the Port of Long Beach as its first target, setting up its headquarters at the port, much to the delight of local and port officials. Bluecore brought in its own barge with its prototype microreactor on top. The microreactor uses a water-based cooling system and can generate up to 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 15,000 single-family homes.
The Business Journal recently caught up with Asante to discuss his new company. The interview took place a few weeks after the company announced a seed investment round of $50 million and before last week’s announcement that the company had secured a supply of enriched uranium – a key step in the development of its modular nuclear reactor.
How and why did you decide to launch a nuclear microreactor company?
I had been working at Uber Freight, helping to create a universal link up technology that allowed for the seamless connection of loaded truck trailers with various carriers. I had the opportunity to move to a venture capital firm where one of the founders was helping to launch a vertical takeoff and landing aerospace company focused on air cargo. We raised about $100 million and eventually the company, Elroy Air, went IPO. That’s how I learned to raise money for a company. Then I was asked to help build electric ships for a startup in the L.A. area. That company focused a lot on the Port of Long Beach, which has been trying to electrify as much as possible as part of its Clean Air Action Plan. That’s how I got to know the management at the port. I focused us on things like electric tugboats.
How did you get to the power supply industry?
I realized pretty quickly that it’s one thing to build the ships and to do the battery packs, but you really need a lot more energy, and without it, a lot of the things that we want to be clean energy fundamentally just won’t be possible. I thought this would be easy – just draw power off the grid. But it wasn’t so easy: You have to plan out years in advance and you face delays of months or even years. I turned my attention to solving this problem of how to get electricity quickly and efficiently for all the parties and equipment that need to convert to electric power at the ports. I’m talking the cranes, the charging stations for electric trucks, the tugboats I had been working on and of course, the cargo ships.
But the electric utilities – the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for the Port of Los Angeles and Southern California Edison for the Port of Long Beach – already supply power to the ports and are eager to supply more. Why not leave the additional power demand to them?
The electric utilities plan for power supply expansions years in advance and are generally locked into that schedule. But look at what’s happened in the last two or three years: climate change has kicked in, which means people are using much more air conditioning. More and more data centers are coming online, drawing electricity. And electric ships are beginning to show up at the ports and those ships have to draw on shore power. This all means the demand for power at the ports has not been as linear as people thought, leaving a tremendous gap to fill.
Why choose nuclear power?
A lot of it was process of elimination. To meet clean air goals, I couldn’t use anything involving fossil fuels. That leaves electric batteries, solar and wind. We were doing electric battery packs, but typically they are energy storage that need to draw on power. Then I was looking at solar and wind, and those are good options as supplements, but the energy density just is not nearly as close, and so you need a lot of space, which isn’t there at the ports and you can’t really control the sun and the wind.
At some point you just arrive at nuclear being the only other alternative that can work with limited real estate.
Limited real estate? So far, the only working nuclear power generators in California have been the now-shuttered 84-acre Southern California Edison San Onofre plant in northern San Diego County and the still-operating 12-acre Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on the Central Coast…
You’re forgetting: for 70 years, we’ve had very small nuclear reactors powering U.S. Navy submarines. They have an excellent track record. And, as you know, we have a new generation of small nuclear reactors now being developed. What we’re now working on is 100 times smaller than an industrial scale nuclear power plant such as Diablo Canyon.
Why have you chosen to place your small reactor on a barge?
It’s a lot easier and less time-consuming. If you’re building small modular reactors on land, a lot of costs are in the land itself, making sure you have access to water, the earthquake proofing and the permitting. A barge can be pushed out offshore, you can use a subsea cable to be able to connect to the port. You’re surrounded by water, so that access is not an issue. And once you obtain the permit for a small nuclear reactor on a barge, the permit goes wherever the barge goes. That means you just have to wait days, not years for new permitting.
So the idea is to provide power to ports in Los Angeles and elsewhere?
We want to be at every major port. Barges come in different shapes and sizes, so it’s hard to put a specific number of barges. But I can say at some point, we will need hundreds of barges.
Look, our mission is to democratize clean energy. You should be able to order up additional energy in days, not years. And we can do this by using a tugboat to move a barge with our reactor on it.
Why did you decide on the Port of Long Beach instead of the Port of Los Angeles?
Through my previous work, I’ve been really close with Noel Hacegaba, the CEO of the Port of Long Beach, and (Long Beach) Mayor Rex Richardson. They are phenomenal leaders, they are ambitious and they are accessible. When I was coming up with the idea, they said we were going to support you, and we have your back. We spent the last six months of last year and the first six months of this year harmonizing on all the safety procedures, the way that we were going to communicate to the media, having this headquarters here, partnerships, and engaging with the community.
How does your reactor work?
It’s a light water pressurized reactor – just like the Navy has been using for all those decades. You heat water to turn it into steam, which in turn powers a turbine, creating electricity. Besides the intake of seawater, it’s all closed loop – all inside the shielding. We’re not developing new technology here: we’re taking the 70-years of accident-free precedent that’s existed with the Navy and applying it for commercial use. There have been nuclear submarines docked at ports all around the world – some for years – and no one really pays attention to them because they work. And there’s one additional side benefit…
What’s that?
Desalinated water. We’re taking ocean water and purifying it – you can’t leave the salt in because it would corrode the equipment. That desalinated water can be used to supplement local water supplies.
Is anyone else taking this approach of floating small nuclear reactors?
Not now in the U.S. But Russia has had a floating nuclear power plant for years and we believe that China is working on one. But we’re the first nuclear company to be headquartered at a port in the U.S. and we’re leaning into making sure that the U.S. has this option.
What about the issue of nuclear waste?
We use small pellets. Also, we’re offshore. There are recyclable ways to use spent fuel pellets within the reactor. This would involve using whatever we can internally and also having third parties pick up the spent pellets to draw whatever energy they can out of them. We don’t expect to have many pellets that would have to be disposed of as nuclear waste.
You’ve raised $60 million in very short order toward this effort. How have you done that?
I started off with the pre-seed, and then I raised the seed. When I started the company, it was me and some slides. I had good relationships with some investors that I had known previously and worked with. They had either invested in my aerospace company or they had gotten to know me over the years as I was building other companies. And I’m the first Black nuclear founder, so I really wanted to make sure that I could find a lot of other like investors. If this venture goes well, I could return that capital and go find a lot of other great communities that typically may not have the option to raise this amount of capital.
So who did you reach out to?
I called up Slauson and Co. (in Windsor Hills), Harlem Capital, the Kevin Hart Fund, Heartbeat Ventures and others. I pulled that team together of investors, and then they ended up writing me the equivalent of about $10 million to get started for the company.
But then within months you raised another $50 million…
I hadn’t planned it that way, but there was such enthusiasm. I used the initial $10 million to bring on board some nuclear scientists, ex-U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officers, ex-SpaceX engineers and folks from Rivian and Toyota. We quickly had a lot of success in designing this reactor with reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Coast Guard and other big regulatory bodies. It was all trending very well and that convinced the investors to put in some more money.
Now that you have raised $60 million, what are your next steps? When do you expect to deploy the first revenue-generating micro-reactor?
We’ve partnered with one of the national nuclear labs with the goal of turning on a reactor to achieve criticality (a self-sustaining nuclear reaction). We expect to send the nuclear fuel to the lab later this month. We should have the ability to achieve criticality sometime next year, though we haven’t put a public date on that. The next step after that is net positive energy production and then deployment shortly after that. All this could take place in the next two to three years.
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