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The fields surrounded by forested valleys and hills in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, once home to the Manhattan Project, could soon produce another nuclear first.

Concrete foundations and piles are being raised here for what are expected to be one of the first nuclear power plants of a new generation, known as small modular reactors. The company behind it, Kairos Power, has been developing its technology for almost a decade and is now immersed in construction.

Many companies are racing to build reactors that experts say could, over time, be cheaper than the type of large nuclear plants that have been in use for decades. According to what corporate executives and government officials say, the world is at the dawn of a new nuclear age that will provide cheap energy and satisfy artificial intelligence technology’s astonishing appetite for electricity.

At the heart of this promise is the idea of ​​reducing the vessels where nuclear reactions heat water to produce steam used to spin turbines. It is thought that the components of these smaller reactors can be mass produced and assembled more easily than conventional designs built by a small army of highly skilled workers.

The nuclear energy industry has long struggled to complete projects. Nearly all operating U.S. nuclear plants began generating power decades ago, most before Bill Clinton became president. In recent decades, high costs and long delays, coupled with safety concerns, have hampered nuclear power.

“I think a lot of people recognize the value of what nuclear power can bring, but they’re still a little nervous about whether it can actually be done,” said Mike Laufer, co-founder and CEO of Kairos Power, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Credibility can be very hard to gain, but it can be lost very quickly.”

The United States has more nuclear reactors than any other country, but lags far behind in building new ones. In the last decade, China has built more than three dozen reactors, while the United States completed only two. Those two, at the Alvin W. Vogtle electric generating plant near Augusta, Georgia, arrived years late and cost $35 billion, about triple original estimates.

President Trump wants the new reactors to be a signature achievement of his presidency. Your Department of Energy has awarded $800 million for new reactor technologies and billion dollars on loan guarantees to restart the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania. The government is expected to offer billions more.

The Trump family’s social media company is also getting into this business. In December, Trump Media & Technology Group said it planned to merge with a nuclear fusion company, TAE Technologies. Fusion energy is different from the fission energy used by all nuclear power plants today, and is probably many years away from being perfected, energy experts say.

During a recent visit to the Idaho National Laboratory, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, blamed regulatory hurdles for helping to stifle the growth of nuclear energy. He said the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission almost 50 years ago had led to excessive bureaucracy.

“Since that date, we have permitted, built and commissioned two reactors,” Wright said.

Some experts, however, argue that the main problem is an industry that has repeatedly struggled to comply. The obstacles facing advanced reactors are even greater, experts say, because they are novel and some require a new type of uranium fuel with which the industry has limited experience.

The new reactors will also require significant financial investments and federal aid. That may not be a problem given the current bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear power, but that goodwill could evaporate if the industry falters again.

“Once again it’s the shiny object,” said Peter Bradford, a former NRC commissioner and long-time critic of the high costs and delays that characterize new types of reactors. To be successful, a new design would have to be able to compete with other types of energy, he added. “Nuclear power has never been able to do that.”

The race to reduce costs

Nine years ago, the three founders of Kairos Power began developing their designs, pinning their hopes on a new approach. All three men studied nuclear and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, once taught.

Kairos executives said they had chosen to test each phase of the plant’s development as it progressed, rather than taking the approach more common in this line of work: design, build and hope for the best.

Unlike conventional nuclear plants, the Kairos reactor will not have large domed buildings made of concrete and metal. And the steam won’t come from huge water towers. Instead of water, the Kairos reactor will heat salt.

The reactor will rise a little more than about 32 feet. The complete commercial design includes two reactor buildings and one turbine with a total area of ​​60 acres.

The company, which has 540 full-time employees, designs and produces its own components. It manufactures many of the parts in Albuquerque, about 60 miles from Los Alamos, the final home of the Manhattan Project.

Nuclear projects have been hampered by the high costs and difficulty associated with building a one-of-a-kind project, Laufer said. “And recent experiences have only reinforced it.”

NuScale, a company once expected to deliver the first small reactor, in November 2023 had to cancel a project in Idaho after utilities pulled out of agreements to buy electricity from it because costs had risen too much.

The company said its technology was now advancing through a partnership with ENTRA1 Energy, a power plant owner and developer. In September, the two companies and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility, announced plans to develop nuclear reactors. The first NuScale units will be built in Oak Ridge and could supply power by 2030, the company said.

Other companies are carrying out similar projects.

GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy plans to build several smaller reactors starting in Ontario. TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates, is building a reactor in Wyoming.

Radiant, a new company, says it will build a portable microreactor this year that will produce enough electricity to power 1,000 homes. These devices are for special uses, such as providing power to data centers or the military.

“If you don’t need a grid connection, we’re a great solution,” said company spokesman Ray Wert.

Like Kairos, Radiant plans to manufacture its reactors in Oak Ridge, home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories.

Great sponsors and a new fuel

At its site in Oak Ridge, Kairos is working on a test reactor that is expected to be completed in 2028; a demonstration unit, capable of producing electricity, is planned for 2030. The company has a contract to supply 500 megawatts of power capacity (about half the capacity of a typical large-scale nuclear plant) to Google by 2035.

Google’s involvement could make a big difference. Tech companies investing in AI are bringing in the kind of money and interest that was missing in the early 2000s, when delays and rising costs thwarted ambitions for a nuclear renaissance.

Kairos declined to say how much his plant would cost. But the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit research organization, estimated in 2023 that the canceled NuScale project in Idaho, which would have been about the same size as the one Kairos is building, would cost about $9.3 billion.

David Schlissel, president of Belmont, Massachusetts-based Schlissel Technical Consulting, and author of the institute’s analysis, said the cost of building small modular reactors had likely increased since 2023 because everything now costs more, including concrete and construction workers’ wages. “It’s a different cost environment,” he said.

NuScale said the institute’s estimates for 2023 were too high and that its current costs were competitive with other energy projects.

Estimating costs is difficult because many of the small reactors are new, including their fuel.

The reactors being built by Kairos and others will run on something called TRistructural ISOtropic particle fuel, or TRISO, which was developed by the Department of Energy. TRISO particles are enriched uranium cores coated with multiple layers of carbon and ceramic.

Thousands of poppy-seed-sized particles are embedded in a graphite matrix to form pebbles the size of golf balls. The TRISO layer confines the radioactive uranium material as it decays and produces heat. With the built-in containment system for the fuel and molten salt coolant, the reactors will not need the same expensive reinforced containment buildings used in conventional plants, advocates say.

But some scientists aren’t sure this new fuel will dispel all safety concerns. Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear energy safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said TRISO particles can generate very high heat, justifying the use of containment buildings.

“In my opinion, the claims being made about TRISO are greatly exaggerated,” Lyman said. “We are really heading into a very dangerous experiment with the American people.”

But other experts are less concerned about new fuel and reactor designs.

Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is the founder and CEO of Oppenheimer Energy, a developer of nuclear energy projects. He said he was discussing an advisory role in plans to revive VC Summer, a more traditional large-scale nuclear power project in South Carolina that was canceled in 2017 after $9 billion was spent on it.

Oppenheimer is also hopeful about the Kairos project, in which he is not involved. “They’ve performed very well,” he said. “The other ones that make more noise don’t make it as much. In this game it never counts until you have it running.”