You jest, but my first job[1] was back in 2005-ish for a small company[2] in Slovenia building web dashboards for Slovenia's nuclear power plant[3]. PHP and good old forms. My job was parsing the XML data and feeding it into some sort of graph component. Can't remember if they gave me a built graph component or I had to build one from scratch.
Not the kind of startup you'd hear about on HN of course.
And no, I don't know what the motivation was for the nuclear power plant to issue a RFP that involved web dashboards. Maybe upgrading their interfaces from the analog ones built in the 80's?
of course, Berkeley will need to abandon its "nuclear free zone" policy. but i see that as a solvable problem, once they recognize the potential for revenue enhancement.
In all seriousness, there have been attempts at startups looking to disrupt the nuclear industry. It's hit several problems, in the form of bad science and harsh regulation.
Apparently hacking plutonium is not easily accomplished.
I can't wait for Nucly, the only reactor control panel for iOS and Android.