“This challenge will create jobs, spur native innovation, and advance American management in power know-how,” Urvi Parekh, head of world power at Meta, mentioned in an announcement. “By investing in baseload nuclear power, we’re serving to construct a resilient and sustainable future for our communities.”
It’s commonplace for utilities to barter long-term contracts for gas for reactors. However that is the primary recognized incident the place a hyperscaler is buying the gas that may generate the electrons it plans to purchase, says Koroush Shirvan, a researcher on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how.
“The Oklo mannequin that they’ve marketed is that they construct, personal, and function,” says Shirvan. “However I’m making an attempt to consider some other prospects who present gas apart from the U.S. authorities. I can’t consider any.”
Oklo emerged previously 12 months because the poster baby for a potential revolution within the US on how nuclear vegetation are constructed. Till just lately, the US hadn’t began and accomplished any new reactors in a technology. By the point the one new machines got here on-line at a Southern Firm energy plant in northern Georgia in 2023 and 2024—a pair of 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000s, the main design for a standard reactor within the US—the challenge was billions of {dollars} over price range and greater than half a decade late. However the second unit got here in roughly 30 p.c cheaper than the primary, an indication of the efficiencies gained by repeating the identical design.
To repair this drawback, a rising faction within the nuclear business proposed shrinking the scale of reactors, in order that constructing a 1,000-megawatt plant would require setting up a number of reactors of the identical dimension, in the end bringing down the associated fee. A lot of these firms, together with NuScale Energy and GE Vernova-Hitachi Nuclear Vitality, centered on constructing shrunken-down variations of the water-cooled reactors that make up all of America’s fleet of 94 items. However Oklo and rivals equivalent to X-energy, Google-backed Kairos Energy, and Aalo Atomics as a substitute seemed for a completely clear slate, looking for to commercialize experimental reactor fashions that use coolants equivalent to sodium, molten salt, or high-temperature fuel reasonably than water.
That sort of design required a unique sort of gas like HALEU, one that would dissipate extra of the power locked within the uranium than conventional reactors might. The difficulty was that the one business distributors for HALEU have been in Russia and China. The Meta deal will enable Oklo to finance manufacturing of the gas it wants as enrichers race to construct the infrastructure to generate HALEU domestically.
The settlement solves a key problem Oklo confronted, however not the one one. The corporate has been a darling of retail traders since going public by way of a SPAC merger with a blank-check agency in Might 2024, hovering to a market capitalization value tens of billions of {dollars} final 12 months as merchants seemed to guess on the way forward for knowledge facilities powered by atomic power. However Oklo has but to generate any actual revenues, the corporate’s Securities and Change Fee filings present, and it hasn’t resubmitted its software to the Nuclear Regulatory Fee. In October, an nameless former NRC official who oversaw the final try at gaining approval in 2022 advised Bloomberg Business that the corporate “might be the worst applicant the NRC has ever had.” Oklo has, in flip, leveled fierce criticisms in opposition to the NRC for standing in the best way of latest applied sciences and mentioned it plans to resubmit its software quickly.
Nonetheless, the Meta deal reveals “we’re lastly shifting right into a state of affairs the place we deal with a few of the elementary issues,” mentioned Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst on the consultancy BloombergNEF.
“It’s about time,” he mentioned. “Both means, they’re an organization to concentrate to.”
