It appears that America is re-entering the nuclear age with the start of construction of the first ‘real’ new nuclear reactor built in decades. What makes this one even more groundbreaking is that construction will be completed and will reach criticality in July of 2026. One year from start of construction to the first nuclear reaction? We can only hope that it will happen in that amount of time.
U.S. startup Aalo Atomics has broken ground on the nation’s first experimental extra modular nuclear reactor (XMR), marking a new chapter for advanced nuclear energy in America.I think the day of One Big Nuclear Reactor/Power Plant is over. The Generation III and Generation IV reactor designs lend themselves to Small Modular Reactor (SMR) form factors which means the reactors are built in a factory on an assembly line rather than being custom-built on site with no two reactors being the same, even those built at the same time, side-by-side. (This was one factor as to why ‘traditional’ Generation II reactors cost so darned much to build...and took so long to build.)
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The groundbreaking comes just two weeks after the Department of Energy (DOE) selected Aalo to participate in President Trump’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, announced in June 2025.
The initiative is designed to fast-track the testing and approval of next-generation nuclear designs outside of national labs, clearing a quicker path toward commercial deployment.
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Aalo-X is just the beginning. The reactor is the forerunner to the Aalo Pod, a 50-megawatt modular power plant designed specifically for data centers. Each pod contains five Aalo-1 reactors, all factory-built, sodium-cooled, and fueled by low-enriched uranium dioxide.
The pod’s design makes it both scalable and flexible, with the potential to colocate directly at data center sites. Aalo says its modular approach avoids reliance on external water sources and allows facilities to expand power supply to a gigawatt scale without major infrastructure overhauls.
Whether future SMRs are clustered together are geographically dispersed will depend on a number of factors. In some cases clustered SMRs will make sense, particularly of they are located at an existing nuclear power station and can use the same high-capacity transmission lines as the existing power plant. In other cases, dispersed locations will work better because they won’t require new transmission lines, or at least nowhere near the length or number of transmission lines to get the power where it’s needed. That they can be “encapsulated”, meaning sealed in a single enclosure, makes it easier for them to be shipped to the site where it will be installed, connected to the grid, then turned on. When it comes time to service or refuel the SMR it will be disconnected, shipped back to the factory for the required work, and a new one installed in its place.
As we’ve been seeing from actual field results, renewables are a joke, are expensive, don’t supply anywhere near the amount of power needed, take up a lot of land, aren’t dispatchable, and aren’t reliable as they are far too weather dependent. So far one of them – wind – hasn’t been showing the service life promised, has required a lot more maintenance than expected, is a lot more expensive to build, takes up a lot of land area, is at the mercy of weather, and has a number of negative environmental factors – light flicker, infrasound, and wildlife kills – that are ignored because they don’t fit in the the renewables narrative.
Another thing I like about SMR technology is that it can use ‘depleted’ fuel from older generation nuclear reactors for fuel which can help eliminate the need for long-term nuclear waste disposal.
It looks like we’re finally seeing the nuclear renaissance we’ve been waiting for.