A Conversation with Leslie Dewan: The Future of Nuclear Energy

Positioned at the forefront of the nuclear technology development renaissance, engineer and environmentalist Leslie Dewan is among the wave of young engineers adapting and improving reactor designs from the earliest days of the industry in order to solve modern problems.With a classmate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dewan created and served as CEO for Transatomic Power, reimagining a 1960s design for a molten salt reactor — coming inches from solving the two biggest problems with nuclear energy: the risk of meltdown from conventional reactors and the proliferation of nuclear waste. After open-sourcing Transatomic’s data, Dewan pivoted to a bigger obstacle facing nuclear energy as a critical element of a carbon-neutral future: our resistance to it. Now her startup RadiantNano is developing next-generation radiation detectors with applications in national security, clean energy production and medical diagnostics.