Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

Making nuclear reactor fuel #oakridge #standardnuclear #nuclear #corememory

27 Jun 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:18

This content was created by Ashlee Vance. This content was uploaded by Ashlee Vance. This is a YouTube video titled "Making nuclear reactor fuel #oakridge #standardnuclear #nuclear #corememory" (uploaded June 27, 2025). The excerpt is a narrated on-site piece filmed inside the labs of Standard Nuclear near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The speaker (a single on-camera narrator) describes Standard Nuclear's work producing enriched-uranium fuel pellets for small modular reactors, notes the company's previous secrecy and a recent Wall Street Journal story that revealed them, and says this is the first video about the company for the Core Memory channel. Participants referenced include the narrator and Standard Nuclear employees; the clip is informational/reporting rather than a multi-person conversation.

Chapters

All right, I am inside the labs of Standard Nuclear. We're filming an episode. We're in— we're near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A lot of the people that worked here used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and these guys are working on fuel for new classes of small nuclear reactors. There's a lot of startups trying to make these small, super safe nuclear reactors. Standard Nuclear makes fuel for those with these little, um, kind of pellets of enriched uranium. And they've been at it for a while. They've been in this building for a couple years and are getting ready to try and sell their pellets. They, they were in secrecy mode, but the Wall Street Journal did a story on them a couple months ago, outed them. And now we're here shooting the first ever video on Standard Nuclear, which you will find on Core Memory soon. It's cool stuff.