Welcome to Nuclear Update, the only newsletter where "breaking ground" means breaking ground in two different states in the same week.

This is what I’ve got for you this week:

• ⚛️ TerraPower Breaks Ground at Kemmerer

• 🌡️ Kairos Power Breaks Ground on Hermes 2

• 🤖 Oklo, NVIDIA, and Los Alamos Team Up on AI Factories

• 🇧🇩 Bangladesh Goes Nuclear

But first, this week’s trivia question:

Last week, I asked: 

What type of radiation can be stopped by a sheet of paper?

You said:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️ Alpha (79.68%)

🟥⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Beta (8.6%)

🟥⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Gamma (8.02%)

🟥⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Neutron (3.7%)

Now, let’s dive into the good stuff! 💥

🚀 TerraPower Breaks Ground at Kemmerer

On April 23^rd, TerraPower officially started construction on Kemmerer Unit 1 in Wyoming. The first utility-scale advanced nuclear plant ever built in the United States.

The plant uses TerraPower’s Natrium design, which is a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor paired with a molten salt energy storage system that can temporarily boost output to 500 MWe when the grid needs it. Enough to power around 400,000 homes.

Here’s an explanation of how their reactor will work.

Advanced nuclear reactor is the catch all term for any reactor that isn't a traditional light water reactor.

Light water reactors make up nearly the entire U.S. fleet today.

Advanced reactors use different coolants (sodium, molten salt, helium, lead), run at higher temperatures, and often operate on a fast neutron spectrum instead of a slowed-down (thermal) one.

They’re more efficient, safer by design, and able to do things light water reactors can't. Things like burning nuclear waste as fuel or load-follow with built-in energy storage.

Bechtel is the EPC contractor. Roughly 1,600 workers will be on site at peak construction, with about 250 full-time jobs once the plant is running. They’re targeting to be operational by 2030.

A few details to note:

• Wyoming is the country's #1 uranium producer

• The NRC review wrapped in 18 months, 9 months ahead of the original 27-month schedule

• The plant sits on the footprint of a soon-to-retire coal plant, an energy-transition story in and of itself

• Meta is already lined up as an anchor customer for follow-on Natrium units, with an agreement covering up to 8 plants by 2035

Chris Levesque, TerraPower's CEO, called it the moment the industry has been working toward for a generation.

He's not wrong. The U.S. has not started construction on a utility-scale advanced reactor in nearly five decades.

Vogtle 3 and 4 finished in 2023 and 2024, and they were AP1000s. Light water. The "old" technology, just newer.

Kemmerer is something different.

Sodium coolant. Fast spectrum. Energy storage built in.

If TerraPower hits its 2030 target, the U.S. will have its first sodium cooled fast reactor operating since the Fermi 1 shutdown in 1972.

Wyoming used to power America with coal. The plan now is to keep doing it with the uranium underneath the same ground.

🌡️ Kairos Power Breaks Ground on Hermes 2

On April 17^th, Kairos Power broke ground on Hermes 2 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The first power-producing Generation IV reactor ever to receive an NRC construction permit.

Hermes 2 will deliver up to 50 MWe to the Tennessee Valley Authority grid, helping decarbonize Google's data centers in Tennessee and Alabama. It is the first delivery under Kairos' landmark deal with Google to develop an advanced reactor fleet.

The technology is a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) running on TRISO pebble fuel and FLiBe molten salt coolant.

Hermes 2 is actually being built on the footprint of the former Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Manhattan Project enrichment facility. From making bomb material in the 1940s to making clean electrons for AI in the 2030s.

Kairos is also doing something different on the construction side. Reactor modules are built at a factory campus in Albuquerque, then shipped to Tennessee for assembly. Precast concrete, seismically isolated foundation, modular everything.

Hermes 2 is targeting commercial operation by 2030. The same year as Kemmerer.

For an industry that spent two decades being told it would never build again, that's a lot of ground being broken.

🤖 Oklo, NVIDIA, and Los Alamos Team Up on AI Factories

A few months back I wrote about the Genesis Mission which is the federal initiative to combine AI and nuclear energy into one national-priority program.

This week, the first major partnership under that umbrella showed up.

On April 23^rd, Oklo, NVIDIA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory announced a three-way agreement to build out nuclear-powered AI infrastructure at LANL.

Each partner brings a different piece:

• Oklo brings its sodium-cooled fast reactor (the Aurora powerhouse) and recycled-fuel expertise.

• NVIDIA brings the AI compute platform that data centers actually run on

• Los Alamos brings 80 years of materials science and nuclear fuel R&D

The collaboration covers physics-trained AI models for fuel validation, materials science work on plutonium-bearing fuels (relevant to Oklo's Pluto reactor selected under DOE's Reactor Pilot Program), grid stabilization studies, and full-stack designs for nuclear-powered "AI factories."

The market noticed. Oklo stock surged on the announcement.

A few things worth pulling out of this.

The phrase "AI factories" is doing a lot of work here. NVIDIA has been using it for a year to describe data center campuses purpose-built to train and serve frontier AI models.

Powering them is the question nobody has answered. This deal puts a sodium fast reactor at the center of the answer.

The plutonium-bearing fuel piece is huge.

Oklo has been pushing for years to unlock recycled-fuel reactors in the U.S. (fuel made from the spent material currently sitting at every reactor site in America).

This agreement gives them a national lab partner with the facilities to actually do the materials work.

And the Genesis Mission framing matters.

This isn't just three companies announcing a deal.

It's three players plugging into a federal program that explicitly ties nuclear deployment, AI infrastructure, and national security into a single mission.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh Goes Nuclear

Bangladesh is about to join the nuclear club.

On April 16^th, the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority issued the operating license for Unit 1 of the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, the country's first nuclear reactor.

Fuel loading is scheduled to begin tomorrow April 28^th.

Rooppur is a VVER-1200 pressurized water reactor, built by Russia's Rosatom under a $12.65 billion contract signed back in 2015.

The site sits about 160 km outside Dhaka.

Once both units are online, the plant will deliver 2,400 MW of clean baseload power to a grid that today runs on roughly two-thirds natural gas.

Here’s the timeline:

1. Fuel loading begins April 28^th

2. First criticality follows shortly after

3. Trial electricity to the grid by late July or early August

4. Initial output around 300 MW, ramping up over 8 to 10 months to full 1,200 MW

5. Unit 2 fuel loading later in 2026

For Bangladesh, this is huge.

It's the country's first nuclear plant, the largest infrastructure project in its history, and a major step toward energy independence.

For the global nuclear story, it's a reminder that while everyone is debating SMRs and fast reactors in the U.S., Russia is quietly delivering large-scale gigawatt-class reactors around the world.

Egypt has VVERs under construction.

Turkey, Hungary, India, China, all running or building Russian designs.

The country that was supposed to be isolated from the global nuclear market in 2022 is the country actually building reactors in 2026.

Worth thinking about.

⚡ Quick Hits

✈️ Air Force picks 3 companies for base microreactors. First reactor on a base targeted for 2030. [Read more]

🇨🇿 Czech Republic signs Rolls-Royce SMR deal. The country's first SMR, to be built at the existing Temelín site. [Read more]

📜 Robinson gets the fastest license renewal in NRC history. Duke Energy's H.B. Robinson Unit 2 in South Carolina was approved to operate to 2050 in record time. [Read more]

🛠️ Orano locks in union labor for $5B enrichment plant. Orano USA signed an MoU with NABTU on April 22 for Project Ike, its planned centrifuge enrichment facility in Oak Ridge. [Read more]

💪Review of the Week

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