Together, the fuel and molten-salt cooling system should mean Kairos’s reactor is passively safe, so that even if power is interrupted (as it was at a fission reactor in Fukushima in 2011, to disastrous effect), the reactor will remain stable.
Key indicators
- Industry: Nuclear power
- Founded: 2016
- Headquarters: Alameda, California, USA
- Notable fact: Just one of the golf ball–sized fuel pebbles used in Kairos’s reactor will generate as much energy as four tons of coal.
Potential for impact
There is an ever-growing appetite for electricity to power low-carbon essentials of modern life, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles. Renewables like wind and solar are cheap and can come online quickly, but they can’t easily provide the 24-7 consistent power that coal and gas deliver.
Nuclear reactors can provide consistent baseload power, but the number of traditional nuclear fission reactors coming online has slowed to a crawl, with new reactors barely replacing their aging predecessors. A new generation of safe nuclear reactors that deliver carbon-free power at lower costs could revitalize this flagging sector and provide a foundation of consistent electricity for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Caveats
TRISO fuel uses a special type of enriched uranium that had been sourced largely from Russia before the country invaded Ukraine in February 2022. After the invasion, the US banned uranium imports from Russia. Now the US has less than three years’ supply remaining and is scrambling to kick-start alternative uranium mining and enrichment supply chains. Delays or fuel shortages could threaten to slow or stall projects like Kairos’s reactors, although the company says it will also partner with a European consortium to source uranium.
While the US is reducing the red tape for next-generation nuclear reactors, new systems still face a mountain of paperwork, and diverse international standards mean that selling the technology overseas could take longer still.
