DOE’s Hyperspeed Reactors

As the rate of data center development rises, more states should be following the Texas example, where each data center must have its own “behind the meter” onsite power generation. Instead, it appears data center development will continue to grossly outpace the rate of production for on-site electricity generation in most states.

To prevent skyrocketing electric bills, every state has to follow the Texas example: each data center must have its own “behind the meter” onsite power generation.

“We believe data centers should pay for the full cost of their power,” Dominion Energy spokesperson Aaron Ruby… https://t.co/0u1owTeAs8 pic.twitter.com/8W421s3rzV

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 23, 2025

With power demand surging, driven heavily by new AI data centers, more people are starting to realize the best means for addressing future demand will be through clean nuclear energy. Unfortunately, decades of atrophy currently afflict today’s nuclear industry, and nuclear engineers are in desperate need of a “nuclear iteration playground” to quickly develop their advanced reactor designs to the commercial stage.

And then there is the issue of where the US gets 300,000 engineers to build all this missing power supply by 2030 https://t.co/a18crhqZ4v pic.twitter.com/tinW8SHDwM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2025

The current framework of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not allow for efficient iteration of reactor design. The licensing process, which used to take several years and has recently been reduced to a comparatively shorter timeline, would need to be heavily repeated for changes to reactor and secondary systems, reopening reactor developers to lawfare attacks from anti-nuclear activists like the Sierra Club and Beyond Nuclear. This leads to the million dollar question: “How do we enable efficient nuclear reactor iteration?”

Enter the Department of Energy

The American nuclear renaissance isn’t talk. It’s action.

— Office of Nuclear Energy | US Department of Energy (@GovNuclear) September 23, 2025

Derived from the Executive Orders issued by President Trump on May 23, 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) launched the Reactor Pilot Program (RPP). Under this program, multiple companies were chosen to work with the DOE under an expedited licensing pathway to enable faster timelines to reach reactor construction, bringing reactor developers closer to the desired stage of design iteration to achieve economic and commercial scale at a faster pace.  The DOE also initiated the Fuel Line Pilot Program (FLPP) to rapidly progress technology within the nuclear fuel chain.

The primary goal of the RPP was to facilitate three new reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026, which was the specific directive given by the Executive Orders. The expedited path to actual steel in the ground is a massive secondary benefit. We recently highlighted one of the program’s successes with Valar Atomics achieving cold criticality with Project NOVA.

The FLPP‘s biggest win to date came with the recent announcement of Oklo receiving approval for their Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (NSDA) for the Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility, approved in just under two weeks.

Concern was expressed by many as to the amount of technical rigor applied to the NSDA review. How could the DOE review in two weeks what would’ve taken the NRC several months, or years? The answer we think others are missing lies in the six years of collaboration between Oklo and the DOE national laboratories. Oklo has been coordinating with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) on multiple projects, including their fuel fabrication facility and their fuel reprocessing technology, since 2019.  The DOE was able to use those two weeks to verify if there were any outstanding questions with the research and coordination that have occurred over those several years, instead of having to take several months or years to perform an independent review of data that had already been coordinated and verified by government laboratory scientists and staff (what the NRC would have to do).

Companies like Oklo will continue to enjoy benefits like these for the remainder of their time under the DOE. Eventually, they will also be able to utilize the recent addendum signed between the DOE and the NRC to very easily and rapidly transition their already approved Aurora reactor design to the NRC license review process for quick commercialization. 

Another under-discussed benefit to working with the federal government on federal land, is the lack of absolute nonsense that reactor developers no longer have to deal with.

• Oklo doesn’t have to sit at a local town meeting and listen to grandma complain about how she doesn’t want Chernobyl in her backyard
• Atomic Alchemy doesn’t have to wait for state and local lawmakers to finish bickering and dragging their feet over changes to zoning laws
• Terrestrial Energy doesn’t have to be subject to the weaponization of environmental regulations by the Sierra Club to force them to spend $900 million to protect salmon

The head of the UK nuclear regulatory taskforce says the country is…

“… spending £700m (~$900m) on systems to protect one salmon every ten years…”

… for the UK newest nuclear power plant. https://t.co/pfbL0uElGM

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) November 24, 2025

To a large extent, the federal government gets to do what it pleases on federal land. For now, it seems like the federal government is finally ready to give reactor developers what they have been in desperate need of – a nuclear iteration playground.