Seems like a good place for them.
Kansas, that is.
No one has tried operating a commercial nuclear reactor deep underground—until now. The so-called Gravity Reactor is the creation of Liz Muller and her father, Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley and an inventor. They founded Deep Fission, a three-year-old California startup that has raised around $150 million in the past year, including $40 million last month through an initial public offering, largely to fund the work in Parsons.
Parsons, with a population of 9,600, sits about midway between Kansas City and Tulsa, Okla. Deep Fission drilled a first test hole this spring on 100 acres at a mostly overgrown industrial park dotted with old munitions bunkers just outside town.
Deep Fission’s is using a common, scaled-down, reactor design; its innovation is putting it underground.
The key to the plan is avoiding the need for hulking containment buildings. Instead, the mile-deep hole will provide the necessary pressure, cooling and containment. A single reactor will generate just 15 megawatts, enough to power about 12,000 homes, but Muller envisions an array of 100 or more, providing more than a gigawatt, enough for a data center. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would oversee approval of commercial licensing, needed to sell electricity.
Not everyone is thrilled.
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Elected officials and some others see a chance to create jobs and lure data centers and manufacturers to a rural patch whose economy has been flatter than the surrounding cornfields. Another group is effectively saying “not under my backyard.”
“I put $125,000 into my house, and now a nuclear reactor is coming to town,” said Jerel Johnson, an IT professional who planned to retire in Parsons. “I can’t think of a worse idea.”
They call it a “common reactor design” but it isn’t, really. They’re talking about merging reactor design with geothermal-industry style heat exchange (one mile to bring steam to surface turbines) in a three or four-foot wide hole lined with concrete and steel – all of which would need to work and the combination which is unproven, especially as it becomes a hot water tube running at elevated temperatures for years.
That the project is part of the current administration’s tendency to shorten environmental and safety reviews and willingness to rush things isn’t a confidence builder. The site is just a bit outside the zone of Oklahoma and Kansas that’s had a good amount of seismic activity in recent years, and the New Madrid Fault is powerful and close enough to deserve consideration as to how strong everything should be built.
Oh, and the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Muller family’s “Deep Isolation” company – yes, they developed a plan to store spent waste in deep boreholes. Ms. Muller is quoted saying (though not necessarily for actual implementation purposes) that if one of these nuclear plants suffered an earthquake they could just plug the reactor at the bottom and leave it there. So, again, careful consideration is needed.
My concern about the A.I. data center rush is that a lot of things are going to get started and maybe even built due to rush, and to official dislike of renewables, and I think novel nuclear plants would not be the kind of stranded asset we want. Which reminds me, you can bet the taxpayers would be the insurer for this too.
Add in that we have companies planning to work with nuclear materials, but getting their financing the Tech Industry way.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/nuclear-startup-deep-fission-goes-public-in-a-curious-spac/
then they ‘officially’ go public
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nuclear-startup-deep-fission-says-145000606.html
Not saying no. Just go carefully.
IEEE Spectrum last December discussing some pros and cons of the approach:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/underground-nuclear-reactor-deep-fission
Kansas Geological Survey’s earthquake map visualizer (note you need to adjust date range in left panel) Parsons is in the far southeast on the map, in Labette County close to Joplin Missouri, out of the area seeing direct earthquakes.
https://maps.kgs.ku.edu/earthquake_mini_viewer/