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Nuclear startup Kairos Power I got approved From the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin construction of two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This statement represents a milestone for Kairos, which in October signed a deal with Google to provide 500 megawatts of electricity to its data centers.
High-temperature reactors cooled with fluoride and salt are miniature versions of what Kairos The company hopes to eventually supply electricity to Google starting in 2030. Although the new reactors are technically testbeds, Kairos intends to connect the power plant to the grid, company spokesperson Ashley Lewis told TechCrunch.
The Hermes 2 reactors will be able to produce 35 megawatts of heat each, and they will be connected to 20 megawatt turbines to convert that heat into electricity. The commercial-scale power plant at Kairos will also contain two reactors capable of generating 150 megawatts of electricity.
Kairos’ design differs from existing nuclear reactors in two main ways: The fuel is made of uranium encased in carbon-ceramic casings, which are intended to be durable enough to contain fissile material in the event of an accident. The reactor is not cooled by water, but by molten salt.
Small Modular Reactor (SMR), which received a $303 million award from the US Department of Energy, has been working for years to improve its molten salt cooling system. The extremely high boiling points of fluoride salts allow the coolant to flow under low pressure. This means that in the event of an accident, there will not be any high-pressure radioactive material waiting to explode if the pumping systems fail. plus, Oak Ridge National Laboratory If power to the pumps goes out, he says, molten salt reactors can rely on negative convection to move the salt through the reactor to cool it.
Altogether, these features are enough to qualify Kairos designs as “Generation IV” reactors, a classification system created by an international organization supported by national nuclear agencies. The classification system is both Vague and vastso it’s hard to know exactly how the Hermes 2 would score on the rubric.
Kairos has been slowly moving toward approval of the reactor design over the past year and a half. Hermes 2 passed a safety review with the Norwegian Refugee Council in July and an environmental assessment in August. Finally, it took 18 months for the NRC to issue a construction permit, a relatively quick timeline compared to previous reactor permits.
Now the pressure is on Kairos to deliver on its promises. The company says it hopes to get the first reactor under the Google deal online in 2030, with the rest of the reactors completed by 2035. In the world of nuclear power, a decade is not a long time at all.
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