- Nuclear Turbines, a Manchester startup that began at BAE Systems, has raised £15 million in initial funding led by IQ Capital.
- The company uses jet-engine-style gas turbines instead of traditional steam turbines. It says this could cut electricity costs to just one-fifth of what they are now.
- This funding arrives at a time when UK businesses pay 50% more for electricity than those in France and Germany. The small modular reactor market is also expected to double by 2034.
Jeremy Owston spent years at BAE Systems designing feedwater systems for nuclear submarines, which still work much like they did in the 1950s. He thought this method was outdated. To change things, he co-founded Nuclear Turbines, which has just come out of stealth with a £15 million round led by IQ Capital.
Rhapsody Venture Partners, Zero Carbon Capital, and Empirical Ventures also joined in.
“The nuclear industry has always designed reactors first, then figured out what to do with the heat. We flipped this script: we started with the cheapest way to generate power and designed a reactor to fit. If we’re serious about reindustrialising while meeting climate goals, we need energy that’s clean and cheap. We’ve created the only tech that solves both, from the UK,” Owston says.
This investment comes as UK electricity prices are still among the highest in Europe. UK businesses pay 50% more than those in France and Germany, and four times more than US businesses. Traditional nuclear plants are costly and slow to build, making it hard for the UK to expand nuclear capacity. The global small modular reactor market could grow from about $8 billion in 2026 to over $16 billion by 2034.
The founders
Nuclear Turbines was started by Owston and Tim Abram, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Manchester. Before launching the company, they published peer-reviewed research on connecting nuclear reactors directly to gas turbines.
The company was set up with Empirical Ventures’ venture studio, which works with deep-tech founders before investing, and came out of BAE Systems’ Launchpad initiative. Nuclear Turbines is based in Manchester.
Ben Miles, co-founder of Empirical Ventures, connected the funding to a recent speech by Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester mayor and Labour leadership frontrunner, to “back our scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs… to show how Britain will be the innovation nation of the decade.”
“We believe Nuclear Turbines embodies that promise: the best of British nuclear talent spun out of a UK-listed global engineering powerhouse, with committed, expert deep tech investors. It’s why Empirical Studios and Empirical Ventures worked with Tim and Jeremy from day one to solve Britain’s energy crisis and power our manufacturing and AI industries into the next decade,” says Miles.
How it works and who’s racing to build it
Nuclear Turbines wants to fix what it sees as nuclear power’s main economic problem by pairing a nuclear reactor directly with gas turbine technology, like that used in planes and gas power stations.
Regular reactors use steam turbines because water-cooled reactors run at lower temperatures. But steam systems need big pressure tanks, heat exchangers, and cooling systems, which raise costs and make scaling harder. Gas turbines are smaller and more efficient, but most high-temperature reactor designs use graphite, which burns in air and stops direct integration.
Nuclear Turbines says its reactor design solves the graphite problem, making gas turbine efficiency possible in a nuclear plant for the first time. The company says a single unit could run behind the meter at industrial sites or data centres, making power without a grid connection and possibly serving factories at one-tenth of current prices.
The startup is joining the small modular reactor sector with a lot of funding and big goals.
Newcleo, a UK-founded and France-based rival, has raised over €650 million and received regulatory approval for its reactor design in the UK’s Generic Design Assessment process, but plans to launch commercially in 2033. Last Energy, a US company making steel-encased micro reactors, recently raised $100 million in Series C funding and has dozens of unit agreements. X-energy finished a $1.02 billion Nasdaq IPO in April 2026.
While these competitors focus on reactor chemistry and building speed, Nuclear Turbines focuses on power conversion. This approach is more like Munich-based fusion developer Proxima Fusion, which recently raised €411 million from Google and RWE, than its direct SMR competitors. Both companies want to innovate by rethinking how reactor heat turns into electricity.
The money
The fresh investment will help Nuclear Turbines test its reactor design, build large test rigs, and grow its team as it gets ready to make its first fuel elements.
“This is the first time I’ve seen an SMR design that genuinely solves the economic and sustainability equation, and it’s at a time when market dynamics, government ambition and regulatory reform are creating unprecedented opportunity. Nuclear Turbines is perfectly positioned to capture that opportunity and to make sure the UK is not left out of the global nuclear race. With its deep engineering and nuclear heritage, the UK has a real right to win in this space, and Nuclear Turbines is the kind of company the UK venture ecosystem needs to back,” says Jordan Billiald, principal at IQ Capital
“Energy is the number one competitive differentiator for any industrial nation. American industry talks a lot about reshoring and energy independence, but you need the genuinely cheap, reliable power that Nuclear Turbines is building to make those economics work. In doing so, they won’t just be exporting reactors, they’ll be exporting the fuel supply chain and setting the global standard,” adds Jason Whaley, general partner at Rhapsody Venture Partners.
“Cheap, firm power generation is critical for the energy transition. We believe nuclear fission is a critical part of that, but current technologies fall short on cost and speed of deployment. Nuclear Turbines’ breakthrough modular approach solves both of these constraints and represents an amazing opportunity to provide clean, reliable power to industry, data centres and the grid,” concludes Alex Gawley, founding partner at Zero Carbon Capital.
With strong demand for reliable, low-carbon power from data centre operators, companies with promising but untested technology may keep attracting investment. The main challenge will be whether Nuclear Turbines can launch a reactor before bigger competitors take the lead.
