When people hear "nuclear engineering startup," the Bay Area is not the first location they picture. Hanford, Idaho Falls, Knoxville, and the corridor between Washington DC and the mid-Atlantic national labs tend to come up faster. There is a reasonable historical explanation for that association: U.S. nuclear engineering talent has been concentrated near the places where the original commercial nuclear industry built its plants and where the national labs are located, and that is not where the Bay Area is.
We are in Oakland anyway, and the reasons are not accidental. When Sofia and I were working through where to base Applied Atomics, we thought carefully about what kind of talent we would need, not just for the next eighteen months but for the full arc of what we are trying to build. The answer pushed us west, even though it is not the obvious choice.
Lawrence Berkeley and the National Lab Pipeline
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is twelve miles from our office. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is thirty-five miles. The national labs are different from research universities: they have operational programs, long-duration projects, and engineers and scientists who have spent careers working on problems with real engineering and regulatory constraints rather than academic ones. That is the profile of person we need for the hard technical work, and the Bay Area has a dense concentration of people who have rotated through LBNL, LLNL, or both during their careers and stayed in the region.
We are not a national lab spinout and we are not affiliated with either laboratory. But the talent pipeline and intellectual community that those institutions create in the Bay Area is a real asset that we draw on. When we are trying to hire someone with experience in reactor physics simulation, neutron transport codes, or high-temperature materials characterization, the regional pool of people with that background who are open to startup opportunities is meaningfully larger than it would be in most other cities.
UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering
UC Berkeley has one of the strongest nuclear engineering programs in the country. It has a long tradition of research in reactor design, neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and more recently in advanced reactor systems and nuclear fuel cycles. The department has produced a consistent stream of graduate students who, in the last few years, have been increasingly interested in commercial reactor development rather than following the traditional paths into the national labs or utility operations.
This matters practically for Applied Atomics. We are early-stage and we cannot match compensation packages that a large defense contractor or a well-funded national lab can offer. What we can offer is work that matters on a fast timeline with a small team where individual contributions are visible. For a certain type of engineer coming out of a Berkeley PhD program, that is a compelling trade. We have already had preliminary conversations with people in that pipeline, and the interest is genuine.
We also benefit from being in the same city as Berkeley in less formal ways. Seminars, departmental events, conferences hosted at Berkeley that draw the national nuclear engineering community. Being fifteen minutes from campus rather than a flight away changes how much of that community we can participate in.
The Software and Systems Engineering Concentration
The piece of the talent picture that is harder to find anywhere else is software and systems engineering at the level the Bay Area concentrates. We are building an AI-optimized control layer for compact fission plants. That work requires engineers who can write production-quality control systems code, who have experience with real-time operating constraints, and who understand the safety-critical systems design patterns that separate industrial control applications from ordinary software products. Those requirements exist at the intersection of nuclear systems knowledge and serious software engineering, and it is a narrow intersection.
The Bay Area has the software engineering side in depth. The nuclear systems side we are bringing to it. What we find is that engineers who have spent time on high-reliability systems in aerospace, industrial automation, or defense are often interested in applying those skills to a hard problem in a new industry, and the regional concentration of that kind of engineering talent is very high here. When Jamal joined us from his prior work on industrial ML control systems, his decision to join a nuclear startup was in part a function of being in an environment where that kind of move felt normal rather than strange.
The Data Center Customer Proximity
Northern California has a substantial concentration of hyperscale data center infrastructure and the technology companies that operate it. The power challenges facing data center operators are understood at a firsthand level by many of the engineers and infrastructure professionals in this region in a way that is harder to replicate in other markets. Our conversations with potential partners benefit from being in a city where data center power constraints are a familiar problem, not an abstract one.
This is not the dominant reason we are in Oakland, but it is not irrelevant. Product development that happens near the customer tends to stay more grounded in what the customer actually needs. We can get to infrastructure leaders at data center operators for site visits and working conversations without cross-country travel. That shortens feedback loops in ways that matter when you are figuring out what your product needs to be.
The Honest Constraints
Oakland is not without its challenges as a base for what we are building. California's regulatory environment for industrial operations is demanding. Office and lab space costs more than in many comparable cities in the Southeast or Mountain West. For an early-stage company watching every dollar of operating expense, this is a real consideration.
We are also not physically near the reactor test facilities and material laboratories where some of the experimental validation work for advanced reactor components is done. That work will happen at national laboratory facilities in Idaho, New Mexico, or Tennessee, which means some of the team will spend time traveling to those sites during critical development phases. We manage that as a normal operational constraint, but it is not nothing.
The calculation we made is that the talent access in the Bay Area, both the nuclear engineering pipeline from Berkeley and the national labs and the software and systems engineering depth in the general tech ecosystem, is worth the cost premium and the distance from some of the experimental infrastructure. That calculation might not hold for every team doing this kind of work. For ours, given our specific technical direction, it holds.
What Oakland Specifically Offers Over San Francisco
We looked at both sides of the bay. What Oakland has that matters for us: lower commercial lease costs than comparable San Francisco neighborhoods while still being BART-accessible for Bay Area commuters; proximity to the port industrial corridor for equipment logistics that are relevant as we move into physical prototyping; and a community of industrial and manufacturing companies that is less concentrated on pure software than across the bay, which makes for better hiring dynamics for the kind of hardware-adjacent engineering roles we fill.
We are at 1330 Broadway, which is central Oakland, easy transit access, close to the freeway network. We did not make this decision lightly, and we did not make it because Oakland is the obvious nuclear startup location. We made it because the combination of factors it offers matches what we need to build the team and do the work. Two years in, that assessment has held up.
