AI, Nuclear Power & Energy Abundance | Kevin Kong - CEO, Everstar

Send us Fan MailWhat if the biggest problem in nuclear energy isn’t reactor technology…but paperwork, regulation, and institutional bottlenecks? Today we explore how AI could compress nuclear deployment timelines from decades to years.Kevin Kong is founder and CEO of Everstar ( https://everstar.ai/ ), a company building advanced AI reasoning systems designed to accelerate the deployment of nuclear power and modernize the infrastructure workflows surrounding the industry.Now when most people think about nuclear innovation, they think about reactors, fusion, uranium, or next-generation fuels. But Kevin and his team are focused on a very different problem - the massive institutional and cognitive bottlenecks that slow nuclear projects down. We’re talking about years of regulatory review, millions of pages of compliance documentation, fragmented engineering systems, workforce shortages, operational complexity, and the enormous burden of coordinating safety-critical infrastructure at scale.Everstar is building AI systems intended to transform that process - converting dormant technical documentation into what they call ‘active intelligence.’ Their platform combines advanced reasoning models, retrieval systems, multimodal AI, computer vision, and eventually robotics and sensor integrations to help accelerate engineering review, licensing, inspections, compliance workflows, and industrial decision-making inside the nuclear ecosystem.The company recently participated alongside the Department of Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Microsoft in the DOE’s Genesis Mission initiative - where Everstar demonstrated AI-assisted nuclear licensing workflows capable of generating NRC-style regulatory documentation in a fraction of the traditional timeline. The project has become an early example of how reasoning-based AI systems may begin operating inside some of the world’s most highly regulated industries.Kevin’s own background is unusually interdisciplinary. Before entering nuclear, he worked across software engineering, AI infrastructure, data systems, mobility technology, venture investing, and crisis logistics. He held leadership roles at companies including Bird and Rakuten, co-founded the AI data platform Hyperquery, studied economics and organizational sociology at Harvard University, and later pursued nuclear engineering coursework at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.In this conversation, we explore:- why nuclear energy may be essential for the future of AI and civilization-scale energy demand;- how reasoning systems could accelerate infrastructure deployment;- whether AI is ready for high-consequence industries like nuclear;- the future of AI-assisted licensing and compliance;- digital twins, robotics, and autonomous inspections;- the growing energy demands of AI datacenters;and - the deeper question of whether the true bottleneck to civilization is no longer physics…but institutional throughput itself.#NuclearEnergy #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #NuclearPower #EnergyAbundance #SMR #SmallModularReactors #NuclearInnovation #FutureOfEnergy #EnergyInfrastructure #AIInfrastructure #KevinKong #Everstar #AdvancedAI #NuclearEngineering #CleanEnergy #EnergySecurity #MachineLearning #IndustrialAI #Datacenters #FusionEnergy #TechPodcast #FutureTech #EnergyTech #Infrastructure #Robotics #ComputerVision #AIRevolution #NRC #EnergyTransitionSupport the show