I am not against nuclear power – but I am constantly trying to bring reality checks to the people who stand up in meetings and say, “Why don’t we just build nuclear plants?”
Well, it’s not that easy, it won’t be cheap – and you can’t just stroll over to the Nuclear Plant store and pick up a nuclear plant. There’s a little more to it than that.
The story we’ve heard for over a decade is that the next wave will be “Small Modular Reactors” – SMRs – that will be built on assembly lines, trucked out to locations and bring mass production efficiency and lower prices to the industry.
Well….
BUTTE COUNTY, Idaho—One of the most hyped projects in the energy market is an excavation pit scattering dust in the high desert of the Snake River Plain, where nuclear startup Oklo OKLO -5.52%decrease; down pointing triangle is building one of America’s first new reactors in a generation.
Renewed interest in nuclear power is colliding with mania over artificial intelligence here at the Idaho National Laboratory’s desert campus, a remote site that spans an area nearly twice the size of Los Angeles.
Oklo and rival developers hope to drive an AI revolution and nuclear renaissance that powers the American economy for decades to come—but they have much to prove. No developers outside China and Russia have yet completed a commercial version of what’s known as a small modular reactor, or SMR.
“We’re finally in build mode and not kind of playing games around the edges,” said Jacob DeWitte, Oklo’s co-founder and chief executive.
Success in Idaho is a crucial step toward Oklo’s first major commercial project: sending electricity to the grid to support data centers operated by Facebook parent Meta Platforms. Eventually, Oklo plans to build more than a dozen reactors at an Ohio campus that could generate up to 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power 1,200 Walmarts.
In July, when Oklo selected Kiewit Nuclear Solutions as the lead constructor for the project, the company projected entering commercial operation in late 2027 or early 2028. With newfound DOE fast-tracking, Oklo may be aiming to accelerate that start date (potentially all the way to the July 2026 deadline ascribed by the DOE), though the company has not provided an updated timeline.
This ground-breaking represents a massive leap forward in what has been a long and at times fraught project runway. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Oklo first entered preapplication discussions in 2016 for a 1.5 MW version of the Aurora to be deployed at INL. The eventual license application for that project was denied by the NRC in 2022. This reenvisioned reactor is significantly scaled up in size from Oklo’s original Aurora design.
The hurdles are high. Revenue from power generation remains years away, and when it comes to building nuclear plants, the U.S. is rusty. America’s last new reactors, two big AP1000s from Westinghouse Electric, came online in 2023 and 2024 around $20 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule.
Ray Rothrock, an early investor in several advanced-reactor companies, including Oklo, said there is a narrow opening in the energy market for SMR developers that can squeeze through, but only a small number are likely to survive.
“It’s a single digit,” Rothrock said. “It’s not a double digit.”Many of the small reactors under development are backed by big technology companies trying to solve one of the most daunting challenges of the AI boom: how to secure power for data centers that can guzzle as much electricity as a city.
In addition to its deal with Oklo, Meta plans to buy electricity from TerraPower, a reactor developer founded by Bill Gates almost 20 years ago. Google has paired with Kairos Power. Amazon.com invested in, and is a customer of, X-energy, which went public earlier this year.
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Guggenheim Securities analysts project Oklo could have 1.1 gigawatts of assets by 2032, though they say free cash flow will likely be “further off as long as the company continues to add assets.”
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It won’t be easy. TerraPower received a construction license in March for a project in Wyoming after a shortened review period of about 18 months—but it took 1,000 engineers to make that happen, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said.
“Have you done the thousand-person design? There’s no shortcut,” Levesque said. “Because this is a smaller reactor doesn’t mean a smaller design effort because it’s still fission.”
Rothrock, the early-stage investor, says he expects large conventional reactors, such as the AP1000, to provide much of the nuclear power that will be built in the next few decades. SMRs are likely to occupy narrower markets, including those for heavy industry, he said.
“They’re not going to be the mainstream. There’s no way,” Rothrock said, comparing it with trying to power the entire grid with rooftop solar.
If there’s anything that we can be sure of – these new nuclear plants will not look like the Vacation home depicted in the video from just 3 years ago. Is nuclear energy making the same old mistake of over-promising and under delivering?
Really? I’m expecting to see Santa Claus pop up in this rendering.
