Manchester, UK, 27 July 2026
A Manchester start-up developing a new kind of nuclear reactor small enough to sit directly at a factory or data centre has raised £15 million from investors in its first major funding round. Nuclear Turbines was built from the ground up with UK deep-tech fund Empirical Ventures, and is co-founded by former BAE Systems Principal Engineer Dr Jeremy Owston and University of Manchester nuclear engineer Professor Tim Abram.
Andy Burnham entered 10 Downing Street promising to reindustrialise Britain and “back our scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs… to show how Britain will be the innovation nation of the decade”. Nuclear Turbines, based in Burnham’s own backyard, is exactly the sort of company that can fulfil those pledges: a homegrown, university and industry-linked venture solving one of the country’s most stubborn problems, the price of clean, reliable power.
Energy will be one of Burnham’s first big issues to tackle this Autumn, when energy prices are forecast to rise another 24 per cent. British electricity prices are already among the highest in Europe. Businesses pay 50 per cent more than counterparts in France and Germany. Burnham’s promise of reindustrialisation, delivering the AI boom and the government’s current 2030 clean-energy target all depend on power the country cannot currently deliver at anything like the required cost.
If Nuclear Turbines’ technology scales as designed, the implications for the Northwest, and for British industry more broadly, are significant. Compact reactors sited directly at industrial facilities would give steel, chemicals, advanced manufacturing and data-centre operators a route to cheap, clean power that does not entirely depend on grid connections or long-distance transmission, and the entire supply chain could sit in Britain.
Nuclear Turbines is a fundamental redesign of what sits inside a nuclear power station. The company’s founders have replaced the steam turbine at the heart of every existing nuclear plant with a high-temperature gas turbine of the kind used in jet engines and modern gas-fired power stations. Their reactor is designed around that turbine, not the other way round, removing the steam infrastructure that has made conventional nuclear prohibitively expensive.
The story of how the company came together is unusual. In 2024, Owston, then a Principal Engineer at BAE Systems, and Abram approached Empirical Ventures. BAE had concluded that developing a nuclear reactor in-house sat outside its core business, and the two engineers were looking for a partner to help them build a company around the technology. Dr Ben Miles, co-founder at Empirical Ventures, is a physicist, investor, entrepreneur and science communicator, and with co-founder Dr Johnathan Matlock is an early alumnus of Ziylo, which went on to become the largest acquisition of a spinout biotech company in UK history. Both are passionate about backing British science founders.
Empirical had been looking for exactly this type of first-principles nuclear thinking. Rather than backing a company that already existed, the fund built one. Miles led the negotiation to license the technology out of BAE Systems and its Launchpad programme, the deal that established Nuclear Turbines as an independent company. Through Empirical’s Studio programme, the fund’s model for building companies alongside scientists from the ground up, Empirical then proved the market opportunity and built the techno-economic model behind it, assembled the company and its advisory board, developed the brand, and worked with Owston and Abram on the commercial capabilities that technical training leaves out. Empirical invested first, then took the opportunity to investors internationally.
Dr Ben Miles, Co-founder and Partner at Empirical Ventures, said: “Most reactor inventors get fascinated by how to build a more complicated reactor. Jeremy and Tim did the opposite. They started from the commercial question: what is the cheapest way to generate electricity at scale. And then worked backwards to design a reactor that could deliver it. It’s the same first-principles instinct that led Musk to rebuild Starship in stainless steel instead of carbon fibre: once you go back to the fundamentals of cost, the rest of the design has to follow. That kind of thinking, across technology and economics at the same time, is what we’d been looking for in a nuclear founder to partner with.”
He added: “There was no company when we started. There was a technology inside a business that had decided not to pursue it, two exceptional engineers, and a thesis about cost. Everything else had to be built. That is what the Studio is for. We act as co-founders, with a PhD and a commercial track record, providing a stable launch partner between the scientific and commercial worlds.”
The timing is significant. In November 2025, the government-commissioned Fingleton Review called for a “radical reset” of UK nuclear regulation, describing the current system as “rooted in unnecessary complexity, and a mindset that favours process over outcome”, a bottleneck that has held back exactly the kind of new reactor designs Nuclear Turbines is now bringing forward. Alongside the Advanced Nuclear Framework and the Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan, the regulatory environment is opening. Britain is also building the only uranium enrichment facility outside Russia capable of producing the high-assay fuel that reactors like Nuclear Turbines’ will require. Only this month, the Government heralded a “golden age of nuclear power in Britain.”
Dr Jeremy Owston, co-founder of Nuclear Turbines, said: “The nuclear industry has always designed reactors first, then figured out what to do with the heat. We flipped that: 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 built the only tech that solves both, from the UK.”
“Empirical Ventures were more than early backers. They built this company with us. They led the negotiation that got the technology out of BAE, proved the commercial case, assembled the team and the board around us, opened the right investor doors, and did the operational work alongside us to turn Nuclear Turbines into an investable company. Their team went above and beyond. We would not have reached a credible first raise without them.”
Dr Johnathan Matlock, Co-founder and General Partner at Empirical Ventures, said: “What Jeremy and Tim have built at Nuclear Turbines is what happens when you pair world-class British engineering with world-class nuclear science. Licensed out of one of the UK’s most respected industrial companies, Nuclear Turbines solves the fundamental cost problem that has held small nuclear back for a decade, at exactly the moment Britain needs a new answer on power. This is the kind of company the Empirical Venture Studio was built to create: we back founders who turn deep science into the companies the world needs, at the moment it needs them, and where the company does not exist yet, we build it with them.”
How Nuclear Turbines’ technology differs from conventional nuclear
Today’s nuclear reactors generate electricity by boiling water to steam to drive a steam turbine. Steam turbines became the nuclear default because they work with the low-temperature heat produced by current water-cooled nuclear reactors, but they are large and relatively inefficient. They need large tanks and boilers, heat exchangers, and complex cooling systems all capable of handling high-pressure water safely, which makes them expensive to build and difficult to shrink to an economically viable size.
Gas turbines, which power aeroplanes and are used in all gas-fired power stations, convert extremely hot air directly into power with very little energy loss. This makes them highly efficient, compact and economically viable at small scales. But they are not suitable for conventional nuclear reactors, which cannot heat air to the temperatures gas turbines need. High-temperature reactors typically use graphite, which burns when exposed to air.
Nuclear Turbines’ novel reactor design bypasses the need for graphite. This means it can harness the efficiency of gas turbine technology for the first time, operate at higher temperatures, and solve the critical scale and cost issues associated with steam systems.
About Nuclear Turbines
Nuclear Turbines is a UK-based advanced energy company developing compact nuclear systems designed to integrate with gas turbine technology. The company was created in 2024 with Empirical Ventures through its Studio programme, built around technology licensed out of BAE Systems via its Launchpad initiative, and is co-founded by former BAE Systems Principal Engineer Dr Jeremy Owston and University of Manchester Professor Tim Abram. It is pioneering a modular reactor architecture that eliminates traditional steam infrastructure to deliver scalable, cost-effective clean power. The £15 million round was led by IQ Capital, with Rhapsody Venture Partners, Zero Carbon Capital and founding investor Empirical Ventures. Alongside the funding, Nuclear Turbines has appointed Lauren Dickerson, formerly Strategy Director at Centrica, as Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer. Funds will be used to validate the reactor design, build large-scale test rigs and expand the team as the company prepares to manufacture its first fuel elements.
About Dr Ben Miles
Dr Ben Miles is a British physicist, investor and entrepreneur, with a global science community of millions across his channels. He trained as a physicist at Bristol University and was the fourth employee at Ziylo, then a small start-up, which went on to become the largest acquisition of a spinout company in UK history, acquired by Novo Nordisk for about $800 million. He is passionate about helping Britain’s scientists take their inventions to market. As well as co-founder of Empirical Ventures, he is the founder of Spin Up Science, which has supported thousands of researchers and contributed to hundreds of deep-tech spin-outs making the same leap from the laboratory to commercialisation. His Dr Ben Miles channel regularly collaborates with the world’s largest technology companies.
About Empirical Ventures
Empirical Ventures is a UK deep-tech venture capital firm backing scientist-founders at pre-seed and seed. Co-founded by Dr Ben Miles (PhD, Physics) and Dr Johnathan Matlock (PhD, Chemistry), both early employees at Bristol spinout Ziylo, acquired by Novo Nordisk for $800m in 2018, the firm manages a £50 million deep-tech fund and is a delivery partner for the British Business Bank. Its Studio programme builds companies alongside scientist-founders from the earliest stages, from licensing and technical validation through to team, brand and commercial strategy. empiricalventures.vc
