MIT Know-how Assessment launched our checklist of 15 Local weather Tech Firms to Watch lower than two months in the past. Since then, awardee Kairos Energy has had three huge bulletins about its progress towards constructing next-generation nuclear reactors.
Every of those bits of stories represents an attention-grabbing side of the method. So let’s dig into the bulletins and what they imply for the place nuclear know-how goes.
First, a fast refresher on Kairos Energy: Whereas nuclear crops immediately overwhelmingly use pressurized water to maintain reactors cool, Kairos is utilizing molten salt. The concept is that these reactors (that are additionally smaller than these usually constructed immediately) will assist generate electrical energy in a method that’s safer and extra environment friendly than standard nuclear energy.
On the subject of technique, Kairos is taking small steps towards the final word objective of full-size energy crops. Development started earlier this 12 months on Hermes, the corporate’s first nuclear check reactor. That facility will generate a small quantity of warmth—about 35 megawatts’ price—to reveal the know-how.
Final week, the corporate introduced it obtained a building allow for the subsequent iteration of its system, Hermes 2. This plant will share a location with Hermes, and it’ll embody the infrastructure to rework warmth to electrical energy. That makes it the primary electricity-producing next-generation nuclear plant to get this approval within the US.
Whereas this information wasn’t an enormous shock (the corporate has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Fee for years), “any day that you just’re getting a allow or a license from the NRC is an uncommon and big day,” Kairos CEO Mike Laufer informed me in an interview.
The corporate is growing a plan to work on building for each Hermes and Hermes 2 on the similar time, he added. Once I requested if Hermes remains to be on monitor to start out up in 2027 (as we reported in our profile of the corporate in October), Laufer mentioned that’s an “aggressive timeline.”
Whereas building on check reactors is rolling, Kairos is forging forward with business offers—in October, it introduced an settlement with Google to construct as much as 500 megawatts’ price of energy crops by 2035. Underneath this settlement, Kairos will develop, assemble, and function crops and promote electrical energy to the tech large.