The Nuclear Industry’s Real Bottleneck Isn’t the Reactor
NAC International strengthens its consulting expertise with the addition of Bret van den Akker as Director of Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technology. A nuclear engineer and researcher with deep experience in advanced reactor technologies, fuel cycle strategy, and supply chain challenges, van den Akker brings a systems-level perspective to NAC’s mission of enabling the next era of nuclear energy. Below, he shares his view of where the industry stands and where NAC is positioned to make a difference.
There is no shortage of enthusiasm for nuclear energy right now. Advanced reactor designs are attracting serious capital, bipartisan policy support, and a level of public interest the industry hasn’t seen in decades. The conversation has shifted from whether nuclear should be part of the clean energy mix to how fast we can deploy it. That shift is welcome. But it has created a blind spot.
Most of the attention, and most of the investment, is focused on reactor design. New coolants, new fuels, new safety architectures. These are important. But a reactor design, no matter how elegant, is only as deployable as the ecosystem around it. And that ecosystem (the supply chain, the workforce, the regulatory infrastructure) is not ready for what’s coming. We are trying to stand up a fleet of advanced reactors using a supply chain built for an era when the United States commissioned maybe one new plant per decade. Closing that gap is the defining challenge of this nuclear moment, and it’s precisely the kind of challenge NAC International was built to help the industry solve.
The Supply Chain Problem Is a Systems Problem
When people talk about supply chain constraints in nuclear, they tend to focus on individual bottlenecks: a shortage of qualified welders, a single forge that can produce reactor pressure vessels, or a backlog at the NRC. These are real problems. But treating them in isolation misses the point.
The nuclear supply chain is a system of interdependent constraints. Material qualifications take years because regulatory frameworks weren’t designed for advanced manufacturing methods. Workforce shortages persist because the regulatory complexity of nuclear work demands specialized expertise that the industry has no scalable way to develop. Construction costs remain high because standardization and modularization require coordinated progress across materials science, manufacturing processes, and licensing approaches simultaneously. You cannot solve any one of these without addressing the others. Pull on one thread and the bottleneck just moves.
This systems-level perspective is something NAC brings to every client engagement. With more than 50 years in the nuclear fuel cycle, spanning spent fuel storage, transportation, licensing, and consulting across dozens of regulatory jurisdictions, we see these interdependencies as operational realities, not abstractions. That experience allows us to help clients think beyond the immediate technical problem to the broader ecosystem that determines whether a project gets built.
Where the Opportunities Are
If the problem is systemic, so must be the approach. Three areas, pursued in parallel, could fundamentally change the trajectory of advanced reactor deployment. Each plays directly to NAC’s strengths.
The first is transforming how we qualify and manufacture nuclear-grade components. The concept of “born qualified” manufacturing, where components are qualified through the production process itself using real-time monitoring, digital twins, and computational methods, could compress qualification timelines from years to months. Additive manufacturing and modular construction techniques are already proving themselves in aerospace and defense. Adapting them for nuclear is a solvable problem, but it requires investment in both the technology and the regulatory science to support it. NAC’s deep experience gives us a practical foundation here. We understand what regulators need to see because we’ve been working with them for decades.
The second is intelligent instrumentation and control. Advanced sensors, AI-driven monitoring, and digital twins can provide real-time insight into reactor and fuel cycle performance, enabling predictive maintenance and optimized operations. Robotic systems for remote inspection can reduce workforce requirements while improving safety. The underlying technologies exist. What’s missing is the integration and regulatory acceptance framework specific to nuclear. This is exactly the kind of gap NAC is equipped to bridge: translating proven technology into nuclear-qualified, regulator-accepted solutions.
The third, and arguably the most consequential, is rethinking the relationship between technology and workforce development. The industry faces an aging workforce and a pipeline problem, and the traditional response is to call for more training programs. That’s necessary, but insufficient. The real leverage is in using technology to change what the workforce needs to do. AI-powered regulatory compliance tools, immersive VR/AR training simulations, intelligent tutoring systems. These aren’t just workforce development tools. They’re force multipliers that make a smaller, younger workforce effective faster while reducing the regulatory burden that makes nuclear projects so labor-intensive. At NAC, we’re actively exploring how digital and AI capabilities can enhance both our operations and our advisory services, because the consultancy of the future has to practice what it preaches.
The Window Is Open
Public support, policy momentum, and private capital are aligned in a way we haven’t seen in a generation. But windows close. The risk is not that we lack good reactor designs. We have those. The risk is that we fail to build the industrial infrastructure to deliver on them.
That requires doing the harder, less glamorous work of modernizing the supply chain, the workforce, and the regulatory frameworks that everything else depends on. It requires organizations with the technical depth to understand the full fuel cycle, the operational experience to know where things break down, and the willingness to bring modern tools and fresh thinking to an industry that has historically been slow to change.
That’s the work NAC is doing. It’s why I joined this team. And I believe it’s where the real story of nuclear energy’s future will be written.
