Hope it is true though.

Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate. You can have it there for years, and with good design, it just springs up the next day.

This nuclear reactor has to be connected for fleet monitoring if you want to operate it. Which excludes it from many real life scenarios where diesel generators are used.

Maybe for remote locations where constant power is needed (Antarctica and such), but I see their uses being very limited.

But it being a 1.9mw(thermal) makes sense.

I wonder what the support requirements are, like how do you yeet the heat to make it efficient?

Also containing super heated helium seems hard for any length of time. I wonder what the operating lifespan is.

  What does it cost?
  How much power can it deliver?
  So what's the equivalent $/KWh?

I think there's a huge opportunity for nuclear power in the world today.

But: all these micro-reactor strike me as disastrously bad idea, that's all too likely to offload incredibly complex nasty gross problem to the future. Costs that alas will likely be handled as network externalities, as drains and damage against humanity and people and government, that the creators and purchasers of these device will skate through with comparatively little injury.

If you're a billionaire building your bunker this would be the ultimate off-grid power source :-).

Trying to make microreactors cheap is super hard. We've obviously tried it many times, the most relevant being the truck-mounted military microreactor ML-1 (the only closed-cycle direct gas turbine reactor ever operated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1.

Shielding is hard. Even a small reactor this size needs like 8 ft. of high density concrete on all sides, or equivalent, plus 4-6" of a heavy metal like tungsten to take down the gammas. You can't just put it underground because the neutrons activate the dirt. Driving it off afterwards is borderline impossible because you generally have to put the spent fuel in robust canisters that can handle collisions, rollovers, and RPG attacks.

But the hardest part is fuel cost. This reactor uses medium-enriched ('HALEU') fuel, which is super expensive, and then it packages it into TRISO form, which is about 100x more expensive to fabricate than regular UO₂ fuel. On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems. Those prices could both go down, conceivably, but the fab process is pretty intricate, and it's hard to bring down enrichment costs. In my analysis, the fuel cost alone nearly makes this kind of reactor uncompetitive with a diesel generator in almost all applications. So even if the reactor is free (because you build it on an assembly line?), you're still out of luck.

Then there's thermal strain. When you're a small reactor you have big gradients. This bends things. Neutrons make it worse. Then you have a tiny box with electronics in it getting absolutely hammered by neutron dose. That does bad things too.

I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down. I really like the people at this company, and I really like nuclear power and want to see it used in many new applications. I just don't quite see the path yet.

I'm sure there's a few catches or weed already have them back ordered globally but frankly anything that normalises using these self heating rocks to boil water gets my vote :)

“I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their sort of energy infrastructure.”

“Which allied country would that be?”

“I can't tell you. It's not public yet.”

From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The DOGE Alum Asking if Foreign Aid Is America’s Problem, Jul 31, 2025

This is admittedly napkin math, but it should be good enough to set expectations.

2. Why only refuelable 4 times?

3. Is it really safe to fly around with in an airplane? Can major airlines help distribute these via standard flight routes to reduce cost?

4. What happens when home base monitoring detects a problem with the reactor? (And why isn't this covered in the slides to put the audience at ease?)

It was even deployed to provide power to a remote Arctic outpost. It had to use an exotic coolant (basically, a rocket oxidizer) to make it work, and it had to be placed far away from anything else. The shielding was not enough to bring down the gamma radiation to a safe level when the reactor was active.

Well that's a relief.

Jokes aside, very cool tech.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg

[2] https://nuclear-news.net/2025/04/04/update-on-the-bankruptcy...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...

* no prices

* no dates, just "2026" (elsewhere 2028).

* no pictures even of prototypes just computer graphics.

* helium is notoriously hard to keep from leaking

* it's all just way too promising and convenient and appealing. Who doesn't want a reactor that fits in a shipping container? Who doesn't want reliable, clean energy? Who doesn't like hospitals and the military? Does it also release puppies and cure cancer?

> The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel [..] that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available.

>The NRC is legally required to ensure that, in the event of bankruptcy that the site is secure and the spent fuel remains safely managed before ultimately transferring over to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) possession

So basically like with all other nuclear, the tricky parts with unknown costs are handed over to future taxpayers. These costs are thereby removed from the estimates in Kaleidos business plan making it seem like it's a viable business, which is isn't otherwise.

Meanwhile the founders get rich today, since immense amounts of money has to be presented upfront, before any energy is produced at all.

The obvious replacement for diesel generators today is solar+batteries, which is evident in many countries that used to rely on small scale diesel generators already.