Texas-based modular nuclear reactor developer Aalo Atomics has unveiled the prototype of its first modular nuclear plant, which the company says is “purpose-built” for AI and data centers.
The Aalo-1 reactor is the central component of the company’s Aalo Pod XMR, which is a 50MWe modular reactor. The Aalo Pod consists of five Aalo-1 reactors and, according to the company, can be scaled to gigawatt levels.
Aalo Pod XMR is a generation IV reactor, which is sodium-cooled and can be powered by enriched uranium fuel. The design means that the reactor requires no external water sources and has a very small physical footprint, which the company says allows for easy colocation with a data center.
In addition to the launch of the prototype, the company also unveiled a new 40,000 sq ft (3,716 sqm) manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas.
Matt Loszak, CEO of Aalo Atomics, claims that the Aalo pod “blends the benefit of the factory manufacturing of microreactors, the power levels of SMRs, and the economic targets of a large reactor. We call this category XMR, with the 'X' representing extra flexibility and modularity.”
The company has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with municipal electric utility Idaho Falls Power to deploy seven factory-built Aalo-1 reactors, totaling 75MW of power generation.
Following the milestones, the company aims to break ground on its first nuclear reactor in the next year.
“We are aiming to do for nuclear reactors what Henry Ford did for cars,” said Loszak. “Currently, many utilities are shying away from building large nuclear plants, because of the uncertainty in cost and schedule. By making reactors in factories, we make the process fast, repeatable, and predictable, decreasing costs without sacrificing quality or safety.”
Aalo was founded in 2023 and has so far secured more than $36 million in funding from a range of investors. It was recently selected as one of four companies that were tasked with developing 1GW of nuclear capacity at the Texas A&M RELLIS Campus.
US DOE to distribute uranium to advanced nuclear developers
In other nuclear news, the US Department of Energy has made conditional commitments to provide high-assay, low-enriched uranium to five US nuclear developers to meet near-term fuel needs.
The five companies to receive conditional commitments include Triso-X, Kairos Power, Radiant Industries, Westinghouse Electric Company, and TerraPower.
Kairos, TerraPower, and Westinghouse have all signed agreements with data center firms over the past 12 months.
In October, Kairos inked an agreement with Google to supply 500MW of power from their molten-salt cooled SMR, with deployments expected to commence in the 2030s.
Following this, in January, TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) signed a MoU to explore the deployment of Terra’s 345MW sodium-cooled microreactor across SDC’s current and future data centers.
Finally, in March, Westinghouse signed an MoU with Data4, a European data center developer, to explore the use of Westinghouse’s 330MW AP300 SMR to power future data centers in Europe.
