They had us in the first half

One to go

Let’s imagine the last year in SMR-land as a football game and start where we’re at now.

Fourth quarter. Last Thursday, Ward 250 went critical — the moment a reactor’s chain reaction becomes self-sustaining — making Valar Atomics the 2nd of the DOE’s 11 pilot reactor projects to fire — two weeks behind (PA friend) Julia DeWahl’s Antares, whose Mark-0 microreactor hit criticality on June 4.

First quarter. A ~year ago, with the ink still drying on EO 14301, this felt like a longshot… or, if you talked to someone in the nuclear establishment, a pipe dream. When we put it to a reader vote in April (#049), a plurality of you voted the field would come up short — which, quite honestly, was a fair (and still in-the-money) bet:

• Until recently, there was very little cause for hope in nuclear, given American public opinion, the decadal $10M+ licensing pathway, Vogtle’s cautionary tale, and more.
• America’s nuclear stagnation didn’t inspire confidence that anything involving fission could move fast or on budget. Critics called out all of the ways that novel form factors and the new licensing pathway/pilot program wouldn’t work.
• VCs weren’t as hot, initially, either — but not for the reason you might think. Last fall (#022) we mentioned Isaiah Taylor’s account of fundraising in the early days, where the Valar cofounder attributed initial VC no’s to one fear: that a nuclear startup could never keep raising the ever-bigger rounds a scale-pilled megafund treats as the price of entry. We love a founder with a chip on their shoulder.

With two down, one to go, and nine days til July 4, we’re in true nail-biter territory now. Two we’re watching for that third slot are Aalo-X at Idaho National Lab and Oklo’s reactor down in Prototown, Texas. Hopefully we get a clean sweep by the Fourth, but regardless, a few things are already clear to us:

1. For the ones out front, the hard part is still ahead. Going critical proves the physics, but production — at volume and on budget — is a separate beast. (“The factory is the product” is a hard tech cliche for a reason!)
2. And, mind you, these are micro- and small modular reactors (SMRs). They have a long, safe track record in the Navy’s subs and carriers, where the customer will pay a handsome premium for megawatts and doesn’t need the unit economics to pencil against a merchant power market. Commercial buyers won’t be that forgiving.
3. But in some sense, what we see from this ‘race’ is that we’ve all already won. Competition and innovation are a great thing, especially in a corner of energy that has gone 40+ years without ‘em.

YOUR TWO CENTS… We need an update on how you’re all thinking, given the developments since our first poll:

Will we get three critical by July 4?

🎯 Clean Sweep or 📉 It ends at two?