Nuclear Turbines raises £15M to build compact reactors using jet-engine turbine tech

Nuclear Turbines (Manchester) emerged from stealth on 27 July with a £15 million / €17.5 million foundational round led by IQ Capital, joined by Rhapsody Venture Partners, Zero Carbon Capital, and Empirical Ventures. The company was founded in 2025 by Jeremy Owston (former BAE Systems Principal Engineer) and Professor Tim Abram (nuclear engineer), in partnership with Empirical Ventures' venture studio, spun out of BAE Systems' Launchpad initiative. This is the company's first institutional funding.

The cost problem in nuclear

Nuclear power is expensive because of steam. Conventional reactor designs generate heat that must be converted to electricity through large, capital-intensive steam turbine systems — infrastructure that takes years to build and represents a major portion of total plant cost. That expense has kept nuclear power uncompetitive with gas even as it decarbonises baseload supply.

Nuclear Turbines' insight is architectural. Rather than optimising within the steam turbine paradigm, the company replaces it: its reactor design feeds high-temperature gas turbines of the kind found in jet engines and gas-fired power plants. The result, the company claims, could reduce nuclear power generation costs to roughly one-fifth of today's conventional levels, and to a physical footprint compact enough to deploy "behind the meter" on industrial sites.

Target markets are facilities that need large quantities of reliable, low-carbon power independent of grid availability: data centres, manufacturing plants, industrial facilities. UK electricity prices are among the highest in Europe; the on-site generation argument is strong for energy-intensive operators who see a long-term economic case for replacing grid connection with local nuclear generation.

The BAE Systems spinout

The provenance matters both technically and commercially. BAE Systems' Launchpad programme provides a credentialled engineering environment — the IP underlying Nuclear Turbines' reactor design was developed inside the same organisation that builds nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. Professor Tim Abram brings internationally recognised nuclear engineering credentials.

"The nuclear industry has always designed reactors first, then figured out what to do with the heat," said Jeremy Owston. "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."

Alongside the round, Nuclear Turbines has appointed Lauren Dickerson as Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer, joining from Centrica (Strategy Director, four years). A commercial hire at this stage — before the reactor design is validated — signals that the company is building go-to-market structure in parallel with engineering milestones rather than sequentially.

IQ Capital's early-stage deeptech conviction

IQ Capital led this round. The Cambridge-based fund participated in the equity component of QuantumDiamonds' hybrid round earlier this month — a different sector (quantum sensing for semiconductor inspection) but a comparable pattern: capital-intensive British deeptech, hardware-heavy, long-horizon, emerging at a moment of unusual regulatory and policy opportunity.

"This is the first time I've seen an SMR design that genuinely solves the economic and sustainability equation," said Jordan Billiald, Principal at IQ Capital, "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."

The UK government's 2025 Nuclear Regulatory Review — which called for a "radical reset" in how nuclear projects are assessed and approved — is the policy tailwind Nuclear Turbines is positioning against. Whether that regulatory environment actually accelerates is a variable the company cannot control. What it can control: whether large-scale test rigs produce the engineering validation data that would support a next institutional round.