The Atomic Show

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is best known for its nuclear engineering and pioneering reactor testing programs. Somewhat lesser known is the Lab’s cutting edge research in all other energy sources including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, biomass and batteries.

The Energy and Environment, Science & Technology (EES&T) Directorate, one of five directorates at the Lab, focuses its research on understanding available energy sources and melding them into coherent and maximally effective systems. The Directorate’s R&D programs seek to take advantage of the special characteristics each energy source adds to the mix.

Dr. Shan...

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was born in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station after the Atomic Energy Commission decided they needed a place to test controlled nuclear fission power systems. Before being taken over by the AEC, the land was controlled and used by the U.S. Navy to test refurbished weapons, up to and including the 16″ guns carried by battleships.

After a five decade long hiatus in building new reactors while also implementing a significant level of diversification into other research areas, the INL is regaining strength in its original purpose as a place to test an...

MARVEL, a creative acronym meaning Microreactor Applications Research Validation and EvaLuation, is a trail blazing reactor development program designed to help the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the nuclear industry remember how to build and operate small nuclear reactors for testing and demonstration. The program was initiated in 2020 and has created many opportunities to learn and improve.

The current MARVEL program lead, Dr. Abdalla Abou-Jaoude, joined me for Atomic Show #348 to talk about the program and its historic accomplishments. Even though the MARVEL reactor has not yet been completed, he and his team – both superiors and subordinates – cons...

The U.S. military has a strong and growing interest in using small and micro nuclear reactors as a means of reducing logistics challenges and improving operational resilience. They like nuclear reactors for their ability to operate independently of the grid for years without needing any new fuel. Almost as important is their ability to be designed to retain byproducts and reduce heat signatures for improved stealth.

Dr. Jeff Waksman Is the U.S. Army’s go-to guy for pioneering nuclear energy projects. Though no military-related project can be completed by a single person, program success often re...

Shine Technologies is a unique nuclear fusion company.

The conventional path for nuclear fusion projects is to raise and spend billions of dollars and decades of research and development in efforts to successfully find a path over, around or through the technical barriers that have prevented nuclear fusion from becoming a large scale energy production source.

Until relatively recently, that path was almost completely dependent on government grants. In cases like the ITER – International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – the effort has involved tens of billions of dollars (current estimate is $25 B), thousands of scientists, engineers, constructors and...

Deployable Energy is a young company with a guiding principle. They believe that nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Founded in 2025 after a period of intensive study and design work, the company has developed a product branded as the Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB).

It’s a 1 MWe (3 MWth) micro reactor whose general features arise from a unique combination of nuclear fuel, reactor coolant and neutron moderator. The choices the company made arise from a desire to move fast using materials that are affordable and available for use today. That criteria requires the materials to be...

There are few industries in the world that have a greater need for skilled communications than the nuclear industry. It’s a challenging technology to understand and to explain to those who are not really interested in the nitty gritty details. There is a significant portion of the industry that believes in silently going about its tasks, partly because there are so many parts of the field that are classified. The influence of the Silent Service is deep and wide within the nuclear sector.

There is a growing group that has a different point of view. They br...

Aalo Atomics is a three year old company that is focused on designing, manufacturing and deploying nuclear reactors. Their stated goal is to achieve an electricity production cost of less than $0.03 (3 cents) per kilowatt hour.

It’s moving fast. It built a 40,000 ft² pilot scale manufacturing plant in Austin, TX in just one year.

It plans to achieve initial criticality for Aalo-X, its first commercial scale reactor, in July 2026. That’s less than four months from now. The facility at the Idaho National Laboratory is completed, the reactor and primary systems have been installed. The react...

LIS Technologies (LIST) is a young company with deep historical roots. CRISLA (Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation), its laser isotope separation concept was developed and tested during the late 1980s and early 1990s under the leadership of Dr. Jeff Eerkens. Unfortunately, the path towards commercializing the technology hit a multi-decade detour as the result of terrible timing and a slow analytical process.

At the same time that the CRISLA development effort began producing intriguing results, there was a major effort to consume excess enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons complex. The solution wa...

Ho Nieh, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, visited the Atomic Show for a wide ranging discussion about the agency, its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy, the importance of its mission to the energy future of the United States, the benefits of having organization led by a five person commission of decision makers and the ways in which the NRC is evolving to better serve the needs of the United States in an era of rapid technological change.

Chairman Nieh’s father worked as a nuclear qualified welder. His experiences during sp...

Energy is Life begins with an alternative timeline – Zion Lights describes what her life would be like if her parents had not made the decision to emigrate from their village in India to become factor workers in the burgeoning Manchester manufacturing area before she was born.

It’s a sobering and enlightening depiction of the daily struggle for sustenance and survival in a place that is plagued with dire energy poverty.

During her education and early career, Zion was deeply embedded in the environmental movement and accepted many of its tenants. But as she repeatedly hear...

Abandoned uranium mine waste has been a big deal for decades, but almost no one had an inkling about what we should do to solve the problem. The scale of the challenge is huge, with various estimates ranging between 1 and 8 billion tons of uranium mining waste rock spread over more than 10,000 sites, nearly all of which are in western states and Native American sovereign nations. The Navajo Nation is the jurisdiction with the biggest burden – a substantial portion of the waste is on Navajo lands and spread over 500 or more sites.

Some have dismissed or minimized the pr...

Oklo is rapidly becoming a household name, at least among households with members who pay attention to energy industry developments and/or the headliners in the financial press.

Oklo is in the process of designing and permitting a family of small modular reactors that it plans to own and operate to produce electricity, heat and isotopes that it will sell to its end customers under long term power purchase agreements (PPA).

The specific type of SMR that Oklo has chosen as the one with the best chance to economically meet its needs as a power...

NexGen Energy is a uranium mining company that is nearing the end of a long transition from a successful exploration entity to a uranium producing company.

The company is in the final stages of hearings and approvals needed from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to allow it to begin constructing the mine infrastructure for its Rook 1 project. In a term that might be familiar to petroleum energy geologists, Rook 1 is a supergiant resource.

Aside: In the petroleum business, a supergiant field is one that contains at least 5 billion barrels of oil. There are more than 250...

Dr. Hash Hashemian has been an inspiring leader in the nuclear industry for half a century. He was recently inaugurated as the President of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) after serving for a year as the Vice President/President Elect.

His company, AMS Corporation, provides key services and products to nearly every nuclear power plant in the United States and a growing portion of those located outside of the United States. He founded AMS with a partner in 1977 and became the sole owner in 1986. Even though it is a relatively small company with an average head count...

Blue Wave AI Labs has been creating and supplying artificial intelligence tools – mainly in the form of machine learning – to operating nuclear power plants since 2016. Their initial set of tools focused on improving boiling water reactor core reload designs.

The company was formed to address the chosen problem because it was a time consuming – aka expensive – data-driven task with a large number of variables, each with a significant amount of uncertainty that was mitigated by inserting large margins. Though operating with those large margins provided safety and operational reliability, the extra margins led to increased costs/reduced revenues...

Standard Nuclear emerged from the start-up stealth mode in early June 2025 with the announcement of successfully raising $42 million from a group of venture capitalist led by  Decisive Point with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Washington Harbour Partners, Welara, Fundomo and Crucible Capital.

Though Standard Nuclear is young enough to have a single page web site, it owns and operates the largest TRISO – tristructural isotopic – fuel production facility in the world outside of China. That facility was purchased during the Chapter 11 reorganization of Ultra Safe Nuclear (USNC), a formerly sprawling advanced nuclear company that outran its financing. Along with the facility...

Copenhagen Atomics is an ambitious Danish company with a bold, potentially world-changing vision. They’re driven by a goal of manufacturing one reactor per day from a high quality, certified factory. If they achieve that goal, they would be adding an additional 37 GW/year of heat to the global energy supply. They want to help make affordable, reliable, clean and abundant energy available to everyone on the planet.

Thomas Jam Pedersen is a co-founder and the CEO of Copenhagen Atomics. He recently visited the Atomic Show to describe his company, its history, its vision and its technology. He...

The University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne (UIUC) is planning to build a uniquely capable micro reactor project on its campus. For decades, the university hosted a traditional research reactor that supported important research projects and provided operating experience. But, like the majority of university research reactors, it did not produce any useful heat or electricity.

Kronos MMR has a different focus. In its FAQ on the project, UIUC describes the purpose of the project as follows:

[The project will] shape the future of nuclear research, move [our] campus to a cleaner energy future, create unique educational...

The Nuclear Company (TNC) describes itself as “a fleet-scale American nuclear deployment company.”

TNC is a young, visionary company driven by what business author Jim Collins describes as a BHAG – “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” – in his best-selling book titled Built To Last. TNC’s intermediate goal is to deploy 6 large nuclear reactors in the U.S. while developing a complete platform that enables repeated projects using a design once, build many approach.

For a company that was just formed in 2023, that qualifies as an enormously audacious goal.

One of the examples Collins used for a BHAG was...