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Just don’t confuse them with SMRs.
When politicians tell the CEO of Radiant that they love small modular reactors, he groans inwardly and just keeps smiling.
Doug Bernauer’s Radiant is not trying to make SMRs. His company — a VC-backed startup currently in the pre-application phase with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — is designing a portable nuclear microreactor, which is intended to replace diesel generators. The politicians don’t always know the difference, Bernauer told me.
The SMR-microreactor confusion is common outside the world of nuclear. While they are both versions of advanced nuclear technologies not yet built in the United States (all of our nuclear power comes from big, old-fashioned plants), SMRs and microreactors have different designs, power outputs, costs, financing models, and potential use cases.
Unlike SMRs, microreactors are too small to ever become key energy players within a full-sized grid. But they could replace fossil fuels in some of the hardest to decarbonize sectors and locations in the world: mines, factories, towns in remote locations (especially Alaska and northern Canada), military bases, and (ironically) oil fields. For those customers, they could also make power supply and prices more consistent, secure, and dependable than fossil fuels, whose fluctuating prices batter industrial sectors and the residents of remote towns without discrimination.
Perhaps even more importantly, microreactors’ small size and comparatively low price could make them a gateway drug for new nuclear technologies in the U.S., helping companies and regulators build the know-how they need to lower the risk and cost for larger projects.
Heatmap Illustration/Radiant, IAEA, Getty Images
The big problem with this idea? No functional commercial nuclear microreactor actually exists. Industry experts cannot say with confidence that they know what the technological hurdles are going to be, how to solve them, or what it’s going to cost to address them.
“My crystal ball is broken,” John Parsons, an economist researching risk in energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said when I asked him whether he believed microreactors would make it through the technical gauntlet. “I’m hopeful. But I’m also very open-minded. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I really believe we need a lot of shots on goal, and not all shots are going to go through,” he said.
Recent advances in both technology and regulation indicate that in the next few years, we should have some answers.
Private companies are expecting to conduct their first tests in about two years, and they are in conversations with potential customers. Radiant is hoping to test at the Idaho National Laboratory in 2026; Westinghouse and Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation have contracts to test microreactors there as well. BWX Technologies is currently procuring the parts for a demonstration reactor through the Department of Defense’s prototype program — called Project Pele — and plans to test in about two years; X-energy signed an expanded contract in 2023 to build a prototype for Project Pele as well. Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska is commissioning a pilot microreactor. Schools including Pennsylvania State University and the University of Illinois have announced their interest as potential customers. Mining companies and other industry players in Alaska regularly express interest in embracing this technology.
The government is also quietly smoothing the way, removing barriers to make those tests possible. On March 4, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a new draft of licensing rules that will shape the future for these microreactors, and early March’s emergency spending bill included more than $2.5 billion repurposed for investment in a domestic supply chain of the type of nuclear fuel most advanced reactors will require.
“If we are truly committed as a nation to sticking to our climate goals, then we will absolutely get to a place where there are a bunch of microreactors replacing otherwise difficult to decarbonize sectors and applications,” said Kathryn Huff, the head of the office of nuclear energy at the Department of Energy.
Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Energy Innovation, was a microreactor skeptic until about a month ago. His own recent research has made him far more optimistic that these microreactors might actually be technologically feasible, he told me when I reached out for an honest critique. “If they can make (the microreactors) work, it’s attractive,” he said. “There are a lot of industrial players that are going to want to buy them.”
“If your goal is to produce power at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, why would you buy any power that’s way more expensive than what you need? You do it because if that adds diversity to the portfolio and less variance, then you can get an overall portfolio that is lower cost or a lower risk for the same cost,” he told me.
Everyone I spoke to in the industry began our conversation with the same analogy: In the world of nuclear, full-size power plants are to airports what microreactors are to airplanes. Just as it's easier to build and regulate an airplane than an entire airport, in theory the microreactors should be built in a factory, regulated and licensed in the factory, and then rented out to or sold to the end user. An airport requires approvals specific to the construction site, a huge team of people employed for a long time to construct it and then another team to maintain it, and complicated financing based on the idea that the airport could be used for 50 or more years; a full-scale nuclear plant is the same. An airplane can basically be ordered online; a microreactor should be the same.
“They are sized to be similar to that kind of scope, where you could really consolidate a lot of the chemical and manufacturing oversight to a single location rather than moving thousands of people to a construction site,” Huff told me.
Microreactors should produce relatively small amounts of power (a maximum of 10-20 megawatts) and lots of heat with a tiny amount of nuclear fuel. They are usually portable, and if they aren’t portable they require a limited amount of construction or installation. Because it should not be possible to handle the fuel once it leaves the factory (most of the proposed reactor designs set the fuel deep into a dense, inaccessible matrix), these reactors wouldn’t require the same safety and security measures on site as a nuclear power plant. They’re easily operated or managed by people without nuclear expertise, and their safety design — called passive safety — should make it technically impossible for a reactor to meltdown.
“The excess reactivity is so small that you actually can’t get the reactor hot enough that you could start damaging the fuel. That’s something unique about the microreactor that would not necessarily be true for other types of nuclear,” Jeff Waksman, the program manager for the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office, told me.
Microreactors should also cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds. That’s low enough that a company, university, town, or other similarly-sized entity could buy one or more of them. Because they’re cheaper than traditional nuclear, they don’t require lenders to take big risks on money committed over a very long period of time. If a mining company wanted to replace a diesel generator with one of these, they should be able to finance it in exactly the same way (a loan from the bank, for example). This makes their financial logic quite different from SMRs, which can suffer from some of the same problems as full-size nuclear power plants (see: NuScale’s recent setbacks).
“All of the things that contribute to a faster innovation cycle are true for microreactors compared to larger reactors. So you can just — build one,” said Rachel Slaybaugh, a partner at DCVC and a board member at Radiant, Fervo Energy, and Fourth Power.
Because microreactors max out at around 20 megawatts of energy, the economies of scale that eventually bring down energy prices for full-scale nuclear power can’t be replicated. While Jigar Shah, the director of the loan programs office at the DOE, speculated in a recent interview that costs might eventually go just below 10 cents per kilowatt hour, Parsons is skeptical that anyone could provide a practical cost estimate. It’s absolutely going to cost more than either large reactors or SMRs, Parsons said.
But cost comparisons to other types of nuclear technology aren’t practical, according to Slaybaugh. “You are going to be able to command a cost parity with diesel generators. It’s easy to get to a point where they make financial sense,” she said. “You can see why someone would pick one: This is not making noise, it’s not making local air pollution, you don’t have to deal with the diesel logistics complexity. You sell it at price parity, and maybe the first few customers pay a premium because they are excited about it.”
That premium price for the initial technology is the largest hurdle raised by every single person I spoke with, from the DOE to analysts and researchers to the different microreactor companies.
But there is one customer already inclined to pay a substantial premium: the Department of Defense. The U.S. military has greater resiliency and security needs than other consumers when it comes to its power supply, making the cost of microreactors more palatable. (And it doesn’t hurt that the taxpayer already foots the bill for enormous defense contracts, including for aircraft carriers and submarines powered by nuclear reactors). It’s common for technological innovations (think the internet, GPS, advanced prosthetics) to begin with the military and then expand outward to the consumer. Project Pele and the requests for proposals at Eielson Air Force Base both indicate that the pathway might be one for microreactors, according to Parsons.
For the president of BWXT Advanced Technologies, the Department of Defense’s decision to commission his company’s microreactor for Project Pele removed his last doubts that these microreactors would eventually be built. “The DOD being the first mover has extreme advantage for the country, and for eventually the commercial industry,” Joseph Miller told me. “The first mover was the barrier, and now it’s just 1,000 things that we’re working on all day every day to make it real, and there’s no gotcha out there that I see. That wasn’t the case when we were doing the design work, but now we’re making procurements to be able to assemble and deliver the reactor.”
Regardless of whether Miller’s optimism is well-founded, the experience gained in trying to make them happen is invaluable for a nuclear industry that’s been stuck in the mud for far too long.
“I've been talking with the federal government about the fact that there’s broader value in terms of getting wins on the board for the nuclear sector and getting the industry more experienced with building new things in a way that isn't quite so complicated,” Slaybaugh said. “Let’s have them build a thing that’s small and kind of cheap, and then they can go build a bigger thing that’s a little more expensive and a little more complicated. Let’s get some real reps in with microreactors.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.