Dylan

On April 30th, The Department of Energy's Idaho Operations Office (DOE-ID) approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, advancing Aalo into its final pre-operations phase, the Operational Readiness Review. The DSA is the authoritative safety basis for a DOE nuclear facility. It demonstrates that a facility can be operated safely across its full range of normal, off-normal, and accident conditions. In the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, Aalo will test its full-scale nuclear core. The reactor contains nuclear fuel, moderator, control rod drive mechanisms, shielding, and instrumentation systems that are direct analogs of what will operate in the 10 MWe Aalo-X reactor being built next door. To further the CTR as an on-ramp to commercial deployment, no components used to achieve this milestone were repurposed: - Fuel assemblies were designed and assembled in-house. - The entirely new, compliant reactor facility was completed in a matter of months. - The commercial fuel supply chain was excercised from mining through on-site uranium delivery. - The reactor was designed and built modularly in-house and transported on commercial trucks to Idaho. - The reactor was built to NQA-1, the standard for commercial reactor quality, rather than ANS 15.8, which governs prototype reactors. A regulatory milestone at this level is the output of many people doing difficult, detailed work over a long period. We want to thank DOE leadership and the review staff who executed the DOE-STD-1271 framework, along with the modernized NE orders. We also want to give a huge thank you to the team at Aalo who carried out this work, along with our partners and advisors. The final phase before criticality is the DOE-led Readiness Review, in which DOE verifies that the people, facility, and programs can be cleared to operate as documented. Today’s DSA milestone proves our team’s execution discipline, and we are looking forward to next steps. Onward to criticality.

Aalo has received DSA approval from DOE for our 10 MW reactor, zero-power criticality! This is the equivalent of an NRC license in DOE space. We've been working towards this milestone at Aalo for 2.5 years. This was a very ambitious project under the DOE reactor pilot program for a bunch of reasons: ➡️ 10 MW, commercial-scale system. This is a system with the full-scale amount of fuel, moderator, controls, etc, necessary for powering AI data centers. Proving out this supply chain is a big deal. In the coming weeks we'll be taking it to zero power criticality, and then going to full-power operation in the months that follow. We'll be getting the factory set up in parallel to mass-produce it. ➡️ Built everything ourselves, from scratch. We started with a green field, and within 4 months finished the building, facilities, policies & procedures, reactor, shielding, instrumentation, control, etc. People thought this would be impossible to do on this timeline for a reactor of this size, but we've done it. Hyperscalers care about speed, and we're showing that moving fast is possible at commercial scale. ➡️ Achieving criticality before July 4th. We set out to ensure we met the president's order, and we are on pace to do so. We only started hiring at Aalo 2.5 yrs ago. It was questionable how realistic it was to take on all of the above while being one of the younger nuclear companies, but we are on track to pull it off. Insanely proud of the team for all the hard work, nights and weekends that went into this. Full blog post will be linked in comments.

On April 30th, The Department of Energy's Idaho Operations Office (DOE-ID) approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, advancing Aalo into its final pre-operations phase, the Operational Readiness Review. The DSA is the authoritative safety basis for a DOE nuclear facility. It demonstrates that a facility can be operated safely across its full range of normal, off-normal, and accident conditions. In the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, Aalo will test its full-scale nuclear core. The reactor contains nuclear fuel, moderator, control rod drive mechanisms, shielding, and instrumentation systems that are direct analogs of what will operate in the 10 MWe Aalo-X reactor being built next door. To further the CTR as an on-ramp to commercial deployment, no components used to achieve this milestone were repurposed: - Fuel assemblies were designed and assembled in-house. - The entirely new, compliant reactor facility was completed in a matter of months. - The commercial fuel supply chain was excercised from mining through on-site uranium delivery. - The reactor was designed and built modularly in-house and transported on commercial trucks to Idaho. - The reactor was built to NQA-1, the standard for commercial reactor quality, rather than ANS 15.8, which governs prototype reactors. A regulatory milestone at this level is the output of many people doing difficult, detailed work over a long period. We want to thank DOE leadership and the review staff who executed the DOE-STD-1271 framework, along with the modernized NE orders. We also want to give a huge thank you to the team at Aalo who carried out this work, along with our partners and advisors. The final phase before criticality is the DOE-led Readiness Review, in which DOE verifies that the people, facility, and programs can be cleared to operate as documented. Today’s DSA milestone proves our team’s execution discipline, and we are looking forward to next steps. Onward to criticality.

I flew to Austin and made a 10 minute explainer on the company building nuclear reactors for AI. If you aren't familiar with modular nuclear power in America or Aalo Atomics, you should watch it. Opinions expressed are 100% my own.