Troels Schönfeldt can trace his path to becoming a nuclear energy entrepreneur back to 2009, when he and other young physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen started getting together for an occasional “beer and nuclear” meetup.

The beer was an India pale ale that they brewed themselves in an old, junk-filled lab space in the institute’s basement. The “nuclear” part was usually a bull session about their options for fighting two of humanity’s biggest problems: global poverty an