Google, Kairos Partner to Help Power TVA
Aalo Closes $100M Series B Funding
KHNP And Westinghouse Ink Nuclear Energy Agreement
Oyster Creek NJ Site Tagged to Host Four 320 MW SMRs
General Fusion Gets $22M Bump from Investors
Meralco Partners with South Korean Firms to Advance Nuclear Energy in the Philippines
Google, Kairos Partner to Help Power TVA
Google and Kairos Power to deploy first advanced nuclear plant in Tennessee Valley under order book agreement
Google, Kairos Power, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced on 08/18/25 a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos Power and TVA, Kairos Power’s Hermes 2 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will deliver up to 50 MWe (MW) of reliable, 24/7 energy to the TVA grid that powers Google data centers in TVA’s service area.
TVA is the first U.S. utility to sign a PPA to buy electricity from an advanced, GEN IV reactor. Hermes 2 is the first deployment under Kairos Power’s landmark deal with Google to enable 500 MWe of new, advanced nuclear capacity to come online by 2035 in support of Google’s load growth.
To accelerate the delivery of clean energy to Google, Kairos Power will increase Hermes 2’s output from 28 MW to 50 MW generated by a single reactor, which is scheduled to begin revenue operations in 2030.
Kairos said initially the units for Google will include a single 50-MW reactor, with three subsequent power plants that would each have two 75-MW reactors.
Through this agreement, Google will receive the clean energy attributes from the Kairos plant through the TVA system to further decarbonize its data center operations in Montgomery County, TN, and Jackson County, AL.
Google / Kairos Master Agreement
TVA will purchase electricity from Kairos Power’s Hermes 2 plant starting operations in 2030. In this initial phase of the collaboration, Kairos and Google will procure clean energy attributes from the plant through TVA to help power Google data centers in the region with locally sourced clean energy 24/7 365.
Under the agreement, Kairos Power will develop, construct, and operate a series of advanced reactor plants and sell energy, ancillary services, and environmental attributes to Google under Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs).
Google said by committing to a so-called order book framework with Kairos, instead of buying one reactor at a time, it is sending a demand signal to the market and making a long-term investment to speed development of SMRs. Milestone-based accountability is baked into the agreement will establish confidence in Kairos Power’s ability to deliver throughout the long-term partnership.
“Our partnership with Google will enable Kairos Power to quickly advance down the learning curve as we drive toward cost and schedule certainty for our commercial product,” said Mike Laufer, Kairos Power CEO and co-founder.
Kairos will have to navigate complex approvals through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but already has clearance to build a demonstration reactor in Tennessee, which could start operating in 2027.
The Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor is the first and only Generation IV reactor to be approved for construction by the NRC and the first non-light-water reactor to be permitted in the US in over 50 years. Hermes is a non-power version of Kairos Power’s fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor, the KP-HFR.
Kairos has also begun construction on a new reactor-grade salt production facility at its manufacturing development campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Kairos Power: The Reactor Technology
Kairos Power’s technology uses a molten-salt cooling system, combined with a ceramic, pebble-type fuel, to efficiently transport heat to a steam turbine to generate power. This passively safe system allows the reactor to operate at low pressure, enabling a simpler more affordable nuclear reactor design.
Instead of water, which is used in traditional reactors, Kairos uses molten fluoride salt as a coolant. The molten salts transfer heat away from the reactor core. The heat can then be used either to produce electricity or for industrial processes such as oil refining, desalination, and steel production.
These reactors have several inherent safety advantages. The first, and possibly the most important, is that the reactor is operated at low pressure because the coolants never approach boiling point. Even in an accident, there would be no force expelling materials from the reactor, and no high-pressure containment system would be required to prevent such a release.
The plant will use TRISO coated particle fuel. TRISO – or “tristructural-isotropic” – fuel particles contain a spherical kernel of enriched uranium oxycarbide surrounded by layers of carbon and silicon carbide, which contains fission products.
Other major data center users, including Microsoft and Amazon, have recently turned to nuclear power to support the energy intensive needs of data centers supporting artificial intelligence.
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Aalo Closes $100M Series B Funding
Aalo, an Austin, TX, developer of microreactors announced that Aalo has closed a $100M Series B financing led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from new and existing investors including Fine Structure Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Crosscut, NRG Energy, Vamos Ventures, Tishman Speyer, Kindred Ventures, 50Y, Harpoon Ventures, Crescent Enterprises, Alumni Ventures, MCJ, Gaingels, Perpetual VC, and Nucleation Capital, among others.
In a press statement the firm said, “We now have the capital to build our first nuclear power plant, the Aalo-X, which we’re aiming to bring to zero-power criticality next summer. This could be the first advanced nuclear power plant to turn on in the US in decades. This is not just a test reactor, but rather a full plant that will produce electricity.”
A unique aspect of the use of the funding is that Aalo is planning to put an experimental data center right next to it. This will be the first time a nuclear plant and data center are built together.
The firm also noted that in the past year, the firm finished the build-out of a 40,000 sqft pilot factory, and our full-scale non-nuclear prototype.
Aalo’s Master Plan
Serve the data center market.
Build Aalo-X to prove product-market fit: speed, reliability, and economics for data centers. Then build thousands of Aalo Pods (five Aalo-1 reactors and one turbine per Pod), to power data centers at scale.
Bring the cost down and expand.
Enter many more markets, e.g. municipal utilities (for whom GW-scale reactors are too big), desalination, industrial process heat, and more. Data centers are only 1% of the power market globally, so there are a lot of other markets to go after.
Make a more powerful reactor.
Our next reactor will be approximately 10x more powerful, in a similar physical form-factor to the Aalo-1 (still with a focus on mass manufacturability and road transportability). This will bring down the cost of electricity further, getting us closer to our mission of 3 c / kWh.
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KHNP And Westinghouse Ink Nuclear Energy Agreement
(NucNet) According to multiple news media reports published in South Korea, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) and Westinghouse have set up a joint venture for US and European projects as they move on from a legal settlement that has been criticized by politicians in Seoul. Top level political leaders in South Korea immediately criticized the deal as being “unfair.”
The proposed joint venture paves the way for South Korean nuclear firms to expand in the US. The South Korean 1400 MW PWR completed the NRC’s safety design review n April 2019. The NRC approved a rule to certify the APR-1400 standard design. In September 2018, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the APR-1400 Standard Design Approval, and in September 2019 it received a design certificate valid for 15 years.
The agreement with Westinghouse comes after KHNP was awarded a 26 trillion won (€16 billion, $18 billion) contract in June to build two nuclear power plants at Dukovany in the Czech Republic,
According to the news media reports, KHNP ceded leadership of nuclear projects in Europe to Westinghouse when it settled the dispute in order to secure the Dukovany contract.
As a result, KHNP is said to be barred from entering the nuclear markets of European Union member states – except the Czech Republic – the US, the UK, Japan and Ukraine. This means it is restricted to pursuing projects in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, South America, and Turkey. In effect the two firms carved up the potential global market for PWR reactors.
According to press reports, KHNP and its parent company Korea Electric Power Corporation also agreed to pay Westinghouse $825 million in goods, services and royalties per exported reactor over the next 50 years.
Westinghouse had accused the South Korean company of infringing on its intellectual property, claiming KHNP’s APR1000 and APR1400 plant designs use its licensed technology.The January settlement removed a major hurdle for a KHNP-led consortium to sign the final Dukovany contract in June.
KHNP has withdrawn from bidding for nuclear deals in the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden in the past year. The company also said this week it had pulled out of a potential Polish project.
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Oyster Creek NJ Site Tagged to Host Four 320 MW SMRs
The Asbury Press (NJ) and the Associated Press report that Holtec International proposes building four small modular reactors (SMRs), a solar field, and battery storage at the former Oyster Creek nuclear plant site in Lacey, NJ.
The firm, which has a Camden, NJ, SMR manufacturing plant, wants to build four 300 MWE SMRs, a solar energy field and utility-scale battery storage at the site of the former Oyster Creek Generating Station.
Holtec, one of the world’s largest nuclear energy component manufacturers, purchased the former nuclear plant and its property in 2019 and has been decommissioning the 1960s-era nuclear facility. Now Holtec sees the property as an excellent location for a new power project, because of the Lacey, NJK, existing transmission line connections to the larger electrical grid.
Holtec is currently deploying its small modular reactors, or SMR-300s, at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, MI. The company said Oyster Creek’s project, if permitted and approved, would follow the Michigan project.
Oyster Creek’s four modular reactors would each produce 320 MW of electricity, or 1,280 MW. By comparison, twice that of the old Oyster Creek plant generated 637 MW. Being four separate units, the design has an advantage compared to one large nuclear reactor: each unit can be powered down and refueled independently, without powering down the entire system.
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General Fusion Gets $22M Bump from Investors
General Fusion, a Canadian nuclear fusion energy startup, announced that it had been thrown a lifeline in the form of $22 million in fresh funding. The firm’s burn rate caused it face cash crunch.
Last May the company laid off at least 25% of its employees in May in a bid to shore up its stretched finances. At the same time, CEO Greg Twinney wrote an open letter pleading for funding. The additional cash will give General Fusion some breathing room, though not much.
According to the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, a subset of General Fusion’s existing investors ultimately was a “pay to play” round. This is a financing structure where existing investors must participate to maintain their ownership stakes — that included Chrysalix Venture Capital, Gaingels, Hatch, MILFAM, JIMCO, PenderFund, Presight Capital, Segra Capital Management, and Thistledown Capital. PenderFund and Segra gained board seats as part of the deal. General Fusion was founded in 2002 and before this round had raised $440 million, according to PitchBook.
Though the company described the round as “oversubscribed,” the $22 million falls far short of the $125 million that the company was reportedly seeking. Adam Rodman, chief investment officer at Segra Capital, told The Globe and Mail that the $22 million was “the least amount of capital possible” to help the company hit the next scientific milestone.
Just months before signaling a cash crunch, General Fusion activated its latest device, Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), a half-scale prototype of a commercial-scale reactor. The new funding will give the company more time to run LM26 as it attempts to hit key scientific milestones. The fact that the company met an important internal technical milestones helped boost investor confidence in the fusion project.
General Fusion is pursuing what’s known as “magnetized target fusion.” Inside its reactor, electricity flows through deuterium-tritium fuel — heavy hydrogen isotopes — generating a magnetic field to contain the plasma. That plasma is then compressed by a liquid lithium wall that is pressed inward by steam-driven pistons. The combination should drive the temperature and pressure inside the plasma high enough to trigger a fusion reaction.
General Fusion said it is still pursuing scientific breakeven, though it didn’t provide a timeline. The company also listed two intermediary goals: heating plasmas to 10 million degrees Celsius and 100 million degrees Celsius.
Investors told the news media that given the limited size of the fresh funding, it seems likely that General Fusion will shoot for the most achievable milestones to convince investors to cut a new round of checks. The company may have bought itself a few precious months, but unless it can deliver promising results, it may find itself back in the same tight spot it was in during May.
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Meralco Partners with South Korean Firms to Advance Nuclear Energy in the Philippines
The Manila Times reports that MANILA Electric Co. (Meralco) said that it had signed agreements with several South Korean firms to advance its push for nuclear energy in the Philippines via the development and use of small modular reactors (SMRs). Meralco believes that SMRs are a future-ready energy solution, particularly for off-grid areas in the country.
South Korea has several SMR designs under development. In June 2024 the 100MWe SMART100 small modular reactor design has been granted standard design approval by South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission.
According to a report by World Nuclear News, SMART is a 330 MWt pressurised water reactor with integral steam generators and advanced safety features. The unit is designed for electricity generation (up to 100 MWe) as well as thermal applications, such as seawater desalination, with a 60-year design life and three-year refuelling cycle.
While the basic design of the SMART is complete, development has been stalled by the absence of any orders for an initial reference unit. It was developed by KAERI, which had planned to build a demonstration plant to operate from 2017.
“The upgraded model is now ready for global export, particularly to Saudi Arabia, a key partner in the development of this technology,” KAERI said.
In September 2019, South Korea and Saudi Arabia agreed to collaborate on the commercialization of the SMART SMR. Under the memorandum of understanding, the two countries agreed to work together to refine the design of the SMART reactor.
Korea will also assist in gaining Saudi design approval of the reactor, as well as cooperating in the construction and operation of a SMART reactor in Saudi Arabia. The partners will also promote the SMART design to other Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries considering the use of small reactors.
Domestic Collaborations in South Korea
A key domestic partnership is with DL Engineering & Construction to explore the deployment of SMRs in the Philippines and conduct feasibility studies, site assessments, and long-term strategic planning. The distribution utility also conducted site visits and strategic dialogues in South Korea with its existing partners, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, Samsung C&T Corp., and LG Energy Solutions.
Through its energy education unit, Meralco Power Academy, Meralco also signed a memorandum of understanding with Kepco International Nuclear Graduate School, where Meralco will be sending scholars beginning March 2026.
This initiative is part of Meralco’s Filipino Scholars and Interns on Nuclear Engineering program through which the company aims to build a skilled workforce.
Meralco also discussed potential collaborations with Korea Electric Power Corp. on smart grid modernization, storm hardening, and energy transition strategies, particularly on advanced metering infrastructure rollout, grid automation, data analytics, and distributed energy resource integration.
“Our strategic engagements in South Korea underscore our commitment to the responsible development of nuclear energy,” Meralco Executive Vice President and COO Ronnie Aperocho said.
Prior Coverage on this Blog
Future of Nuclear Power in the Phillipines
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Nuclear Waste Could Provide Fuel For Fusion Energy
Expensive and rare tritium means ‘breeding’ techniques are needed
(American Chemical Society) Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have unveiled simulations showing how radioactive nuclear waste could be repurposed to generate tritium, the rare hydrogen isotope that fuels nuclear fusion.
Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Almos, will present his findings at the American Chemical Society’s autumn 2025 meeting. His research suggests that decades of stored waste might help unlock a cleaner, virtually limitless energy.
Nuclear fusion that uses the isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel is seen as a promising pathway for generating energy, mainly because it requires lower energy input compared to other fusion reactions.
However, because tritium is rare and expensive, “breeding” techniques will be needed to provide enough of it for sustainable fusion power generation.
Current global supplies, largely sourced from Canadian CANDU heavy-water reactors, amount to around 25 kg, worth about $33 million (€28m) per kg.
Tritium is produced in CANDU reactors as a byproduct of neutron interactions with the heavy water that is used as both moderator and coolant. According to ScienceDirect.com, approximately 130 grams of tritium are generated annually in a typical CANDU reactor.
Globally, the size of installed CANDU reactors varies some as small as approximately 200 MW (India) to 800 MW in Canada. Romania is currently completing two 700 MW PHWR type reactors at its Cernavoda site.
Nuclear fusion does not always require tritium. While the most commonly discussed fusion reaction, deuterium-tritium fusion, does involve tritium, other fusion reactions are possible. Deuterium-deuterium fusion, for example, can occur without tritium, although it requires higher temperatures and is less efficient.
Without a reliable tritium pipeline, commercial fusion plants cannot scale up. A single 1,000 MW fusion reactor would require more than 55 kg of tritium per year, far beyond current supply.
Tarnowsky’s proposal centers on accelerator-driven systems that bombard spent nuclear fuel with particles. This process triggers reactions that generate neutrons, which can then be harvested to produce tritium through a series of nuclear transitions.
Computer simulations suggest that a 1,000 MW system could produce about 2 kg of tritium annually, rivalling the total yearly output of all Canadian reactors. A key advantage to Tarnowsky’s system would be the efficiency of tritium production. He projects that the design would produce more than 10 times as much tritium as a fusion reactor at the same thermal power.
Tarnowsky now plans to work out the cost for tritium production, and evaluate the efficiency and safety of the hypothetical reactor design.
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