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The nuclear industry is competing to launch sophisticated small nuclear reactors by the early 2030s, aiming to increase the need for increased power to fuel artificial intelligence.
The world has relied heavily on the same pressurized water reactor technology for the past 70 years, but these plants have proven to be extremely expensive to build in the US in the 21st century.
The first new nuclear plant was completed in decades, with reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia costing about $18 billion more than expected and opening seven years after the scheduled date. Each of these reactors can generate 1,114 megawatts of power, which is sufficient for over 800,000 homes.
Chris Levesque, CEO of Terrapower, a sophisticated nuclear reactor company co-founded and supported by Bill Gates, told CNBC.
Despite growing interest in reopening closed reactors such as Palisade in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, “there are a lot of hesitation about brand new plants,” Levesque said, as a quicker and cheaper short-term solution.
Advanced reactors under development promise to have a smaller, lighter footprint that can be made cheaper and faster when fully commercialized. However, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency, over 90 different technologies are crowded at various development stages around the world.
The utilities and the high-tech sector say the field needs to be blown away by five or ten companies with the right technology. nextera energyThe largest electric power company by US market capitalization
“Many of them are capitalized,” Ketchum said of the small nuclear startup that designs advanced nuclear reactors. “So we really have to get behind and choose what we want to bet on,” the CEO told the Cerawek Energy Conference earlier this month in Houston.
Ketchum has seen the first advanced nuclear reactors appear online around 2031, around 2031, appearing online midway around 2035. Technology companies act as catalysts. Levesque says it is a “huge force” that can drive the industry due to the enormous demand for electricity tied to deep pockets. alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Together, it is seven times more worth the entire S&P 500 utility sector.
Below are some of the major players in the US market to bring nuclear power back, all three of which are private, but often receive important financial support from high-tech companies, with customers already in line.
Terra Power
Terrapower is the first advanced reactor company in the United States to move from design to construction at its first factory near the former coal site in Kemer, Wyoming in the summer of 2024. The company aims to begin dispatching to Warren Buffett’s Passiccorp by the end of 2030.
Terrapower’s Natrium Reactor operates at atmospheric temperatures. This is a feature that Levesque says will reduce construction costs.
The US currently relies on nuclear reactors that operate at about 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit) and are cooled with water. The system works at high pressure – the water boils at 100 degrees Celsius – maintains coolant fluid and plants require heavy and expensive ingredients to reduce pressure, Levesque said.
Terrapower uses sodium as the coolant rather than water. Liquid sodium boils at 900 degrees Celsius, much higher than the operating temperature of a sodium reactor at about 500°C. That means there’s no need to pressurize the plants, Levesque said.
Using light, low-pressure plants to avoid high-pressure systems “reduces the large amount of steel, concrete, working hours and the number of systems,” Levesque said. He estimates that sodium plants will cost about half the cost to build traditional nuclear power plants, and prices have fallen as more are built.
The Natrium Reactor has a power capacity of 345 megawatts, and homes above 250,000 are sufficient. Plants can ramp up to 500 megawatts for several hours by storing heat in a heat battery made from molten salt, says Levesque. The idea is to allow on-demand electricity to be sent to the grid when renewable solar and wind power declines because the sun is not shining or the wind is not slacking.
Terrapower has financial support from Bill Gates, the leading founder of SK Group, one of Korea’s largest energy providers, and Steelmaker’s ArcelorMittal. Gates and SK Group led Terrapower’s $830 million funding round in 2022. The Wyoming project is backed by $2 billion by the Department of Energy.
Terrapower submitted a construction license application to the Nuclear Regulation Authority in 2024, and expects regulators to issue a permit in December 2026.
“We’re trying to show people inevitable,” Levesque said.
X-Energy
Of all advanced reactor companies, X-Energy was the first to win direct investment from high-tech companies, securing hundreds of millions of dollars from Amazon to build the XE-100 reactor.
“What this sector needs is risk capital to invest in plants because US utilities aren’t doing that today,” X-Energy CEO Clay Sell told CNBC.
X-Energy’s latest funding round raised $700 million, led by Amazon, and earned additional capital from Citadel founder Ken Griffin. ARES ManagementSegura Capital Management, Jane Street Capital, University of Michigan, and more.
“Companies larger than the entire Utilities sector owned by US investors, one of America’s biggest companies, wanted to move forward and promote a new nuclear future in the US.”
The cash will be primarily used to complete the reactor design, so construction is ready and the first phase of X-Energy’s fuel facility will be completed, Sell said.
The XE-100 is an 80-megawatt nuclear reactor sold in a pack of four units, with a total of 320 megawatts being built, the CEO said. Multiple units create redundancy, and the smallest size allows the largest component, the reactor vessel, to be shipped from the factory via road to the construction site.
The reactor uses helium gas as coolant rather than water. X-Energy has its own fuel, made from graphite pebbles containing uranium kernels wrapped in ceramic. Cell said that the plant is “inherently safe” because graphite does not dissolve.
Amazon’s investment will be built, owned and operated by Energy Northwest, a utility that funds four XE-100 reactors in Washington, and plants appear online in the early 2030s. Scaling up to 12 XE-100s in Washington, Cell said.
X-Energy is also linked Dow Inc. The company will deploy four reactors at a chemical company’s manufacturing facility in Sea Rift, Texas. The Department of Energy has awarded X-Energy up to $1.2 billion to develop and deploy Technoloy.
X-Energy aims to become the first company in the US to outsource advanced operational reactors, Sell said.
Kairos Power
Kairos Power signed a deal with Alphabet’s Google unit last year, aiming to deploy multiple advanced nuclear reactors and provide 500 megawatts of power to YouTube companies. The first reactor is expected to arrive online in 2030, with additional deployments being made through 2035.
The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, but the Google contract is “very important,” and Kairos “will allow infrastructure to be planned for not just one project but a series of projects,” CEO Mike Laufer told CNBC.
“This will expand our infrastructure, production and manufacturing capabilities,” says Laufer.
The 75 megawatt Kairos reactor is deployed in pairs to provide 150 megawatts of total power. Like Terrapower, Kairos reactors operate at pressures close to atmospheric pressure using molten fluoride salts instead of water as coolant. Like X-Energy, Kairos uses fuel that envelops ceramic and graphite pebbles uranium kernels that cannot be dissolved in high-temperature reactors, according to the company.
Kairos has built a low-power demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, showing its ability to “provide clean, safe and affordable nuclear heat.” Oak Ridge, a National Laboratory site about 25 miles west of Knoxville, was enriched with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project, which would build the first atomic bomb.
Today, Kairos CEO Laufer said there was a “natural thinning” in the number of reactor companies in advance.
