On 15 September, Kofi Asante walked Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson past an unfuelled reactor pressure vessel parked at the edge of the busiest seaport complex in the United States. The vessel is a showpiece. It exists to make one argument: that Asante's reactor can be assembled on a dock, rather than welded together inland over most of a decade.
Asante runs Bluecore Energy. The company is roughly a year old, headquartered at the Port of Long Beach, and on 8 September it closed a $50 million seed round led by Silverton Partners. Add the $10 million pre-seed that Slauson & Co led in July, and disclosed funding reaches $60 million. Its thesis fits in a sentence: take a conventional water-cooled reactor, shrink it to a fraction of a commercial plant's output, and mount it on a barge that can be towed to whoever needs the power.
The $50 million buys engineering, testing and a regulatory process that remains years from a fuelled barge. Its own framing — deliver zero-emission energy "as safely and quickly as possible" — is a speed claim, not a capacity claim.
The customers it names are the ones with the least patience for grid interconnection queues: ports, coastal industry and AI data centres.
The barge, not the reactor
The machine is called the BC-12: a pressurised water reactor rated at 45 megawatts thermal (MWt), producing 15 megawatts electric (MWe) gross and 10 MWe net. Ocean water cools it in a closed loop, which removes the cooling towers that make land-based nuclear plants expensive to site. The unit refuels every few years. It can be moored or anchored like an offshore oil rig and tied to shore by subsea cables.
Ten megawatts net.
That number is small. It covers roughly 15,000 homes, a fraction of what a major port draws on a peak afternoon. Asante's pitch rests on modularity instead of scale: add barges as demand grows, rather than financing one enormous plant up front and waiting a decade for it to pay back.
The pedigree behind the hardware is unusually narrow for a company this young. Bluecore's staff includes former Navy nuclear submarine officers and engineers recruited from SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Toyota, Rivian and Uber. Asante himself came from Uber Freight. When Bluecore left stealth in July, it became the first nuclear company headquartered at a major US port.
The Navy is doing this as we speak, for the last 70 years, and has never had an accident. We just made it smaller, so you can actually move things around in a way that doesn't take years — or a new set of infrastructure — but days.— Kofi Asante, founder and CEO, Bluecore Energy
Ten megawatts and a licensing shortcut
The sharper decision sits in the regulatory file, not in the reactor hall. Its design is conventional on purpose. Its pre-application slides to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission make the case directly: the first-of-a-kind questions concentrate on the marine deployment platform, not the nuclear design. A PWR that the Navy has operated at sea since the 1950s is a known quantity to regulators. A reactor bolted to a barge is not.
That framing splits the approval work into two tracks. The NRC keeps authority over the nuclear system. The Coast Guard takes the lead on the vessel, its stability and its operation in navigable water. Bluecore filed a pre-application engagement request on 22 July 2026, held a formal kickoff with the NRC on 27 July and published non-proprietary kickoff slides on 11 August. It says it has also opened a partnership with the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration and is working with both agencies on product design.
The name on the paperwork is the Nautilus Floating Nuclear Power Plant (FNPP), a nod to the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. The company had secured its first barge by July and says it has launched two.
The capital is chasing that sequence. Silverton Partners led the seed, joined by returning backers Slauson & Co, Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, LMNT, Visible Hands and Karman Ventures, alongside Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Kevin Hart's Hartbeat Ventures and Markham Valley Ventures, where the actor Simu Liu is a general partner. It says the money funds hardware testing, regulatory and classification work, manufacturing and hiring.
Fundraising was not supposed to happen this year. Asante told TechCrunch the calls kept arriving after the pre-seed, and the round closed oversubscribed in eight weeks.
Six months ago, we were building the foundation. Today, we have the capital, the team, the hardware, and some of the most important institutions in nuclear and maritime working alongside us. Our focus now is simple: create and deliver zero-emission energy as safely and quickly as possible.— Kofi Asante, via ESG Today
The gap between the press release and first power
Every energy sector runs the same test: measure the distance between the announcement and the first electron. Bluecore sits early on that curve. Bloomberg's report on the round noted the company remains a few years from a fuelled barge serving the Port of Long Beach. No nuclear fuel has been ordered. Marine classification, insurance and port safety approvals lie ahead. The design has entered pre-application engagement, not formal NRC review.
The peer set is crowded and well funded. Kairos Power, TerraPower and NuScale are further through the licensing queue on land. We covered Valar Atomics in August, when a small reactor briefly powered an Nvidia chip and a partnership with Nvidia followed. Earlier this month we wrote about Aalo Atomics, which reached criticality with a factory-built reactor. Those milestones carry less commercial scope than Bluecore's ambition. They also sit closer to physical proof.
Demand is not the constraint. Ports are electrifying berths and cargo equipment while their grids face interconnection queues measured in years. Data centre operators are signing power contracts faster than utilities can build generation. A barge that arrives with its own reactor answers a real bottleneck, provided it clears regulators and the fuel supply chain can feed it — still a live question for advanced reactors.
The Port of Long Beach intends to find out. It hosted the 15 September panel where Asante toured the vessel with the mayor, and its chief executive, Noel Hacegaba, has publicly welcomed the company. Long Beach bills itself as a green port and has been the most willing major US port to entertain small modular reactors.
The Port of Long Beach is our priority, because it's the first port in the country to be publicly enthusiastic about incorporating small modular reactors, but we've gotten inbound from other ports and even data centers.— Kofi Asante, via Axios
That inbound interest is the signal to watch. A funded design with a regulator's calendar is a project. Signed customers make it a business. It holds the first and is still selling the second — a gap that, in nuclear, has always taken longer to close than the pitch implies.
What stayed with me after the Long Beach panel was the pressure vessel itself. It is the least glamorous object in the story: unfuelled steel, built to be opened and inspected rather than admired. The reactor concept inside it is decades old. The innovation is where Bluecore chose to float it, and which regulators it convinced to look.