The Atomic Show

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was born in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station after the Atomic Energy Commission decided they needed a place to test controlled nuclear fission power systems. Before being taken over by the AEC, the land was controlled and used by the U.S. Navy to test refurbished weapons, up to and including the 16″ guns carried by battleships.

After a five decade long hiatus in building new reactors while also implementing a significant level of diversification into other research areas, the INL is regaining strength in its original purpose as a place to test and demonstrate complete nuclear reactor power plants. (The term “plant” is not really applicable to micro-reactors, but it will serve as a general term for now.)

This time through, the design, approval, construction and testing programs are not being led by a federal monopoly called the Atomic Energy Commission. It is not focused on developing reactors that can be used to test the ideas of scientists who don’t really care if anyone wants to buy the system they are developing.

Instead, the reactor development efforts underway and in planning for the future are more cooperative, distributed and commercially driven.

Josh Gillespie is the Chief Operating Officer of the National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC). He visited the Atomic Show to talk about NRIC and its role in helping the Nuclear Renaissance gain traction and success.

NRIC was created in 2019 as a result of directives and authorizations contained in the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA). Its purpose is to build bridges that enable private sector organizations to work with national laboratory scientists and physical resources to cross the “valley of death” between good ideas and commercially viable products. It is tasked with preparing facilities to serve as test beds for new reactor development and testing and to develop sites where new facilities can be built.

Though it can be a challenge for any government organization – like a national lab – NRIC has been tasked to be able to operate at the speed of a start-up. It is taking strides in that direction, though it is still limited in speed by the federal government budget cycle.

Josh described how NRIC is working closely with the Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office which is directly responsible for the DOE 1271 authorization process for both reactors and supporting facilities – like those that are in the fuel supply chain or involved in radioactive materials testing and evaluation.

NRIC helps private sector companies develop their plans, find suitable facilities, prepare required submittals and engage in readiness reviews. NRIC’s reach extends beyond the boundaries of the Idaho National Laboratory; has been contracted to support several of the Reactor Pilot Program developers that have built or are building their reactors in Texas or Utah.

Josh described DOME as the crowning jewel of NRICs facilities. It once served as the containment dome for the highly successful but prematurely retired Experimental Breeder Reactor II, the remains of which are encased in concrete and grout in the basement and foundations of the existing facility. DOME is designed to be able to host a test reactor that might be exercised to its limits while still preventing any release of radioactive materials. Radiant Nuclear was selected as the first tenant of the DOME. It is scheduled to complete its operational testing and to remove its equipment from the facility in a year to make room for the next tenant.

Top shield covering Antares Mark-0 in RACE facility

NRIC played an important role in the success of the Reactor Pilot Program. It helped to find and repurpose facilities for Antares (RACE – Reactor and Criticality Experiment), Deployable Energy (NRAD – Neutron Radiography Reactor)

Aside: Bit of INL Trivia – The building that is now RACE housed the Army’s ML-1 reactor development program from the late 1950s until the program was ended in 1964. End Aside.

Josh described NRIC’s role in the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad as similar to that of a subdivision developer. A 2,000 acre plot has been allocated. NRIC is responsible for developing basic infrastructure, including roads and common utility systems. It will arrange for site characterization studies in preparation for environmental assessments. Private sector developers will lease their sites and contract for any additional services desired from an available menu. These include additional security and fire services.

There will be similar services offered to developers who are building on sites that are not INL; that part of the program is called Launch Pad – USA.

Josh is an Idaho native who is happy to be involved in creating a winning partnership between private sector companies and government/national lab organizations. He believes that the new developments will help Idaho National Lab continue to thrive and lead in nuclear energy development. He is excited about helping to deploy abundant sources of clean electricity and heat that will contribute to a bright future for Idaho, the U.S. and the rest of the world.

You’ll enjoy this show. Listen carefully and comment via X if desired.

MARVEL, a creative acronym meaning Microreactor Applications Research Validation and EvaLuation, is a trail blazing reactor development program designed to help the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the nuclear industry remember how to build and operate small nuclear reactors for testing and demonstration. The program was initiated in 2020 and has created many opportunities to learn and improve.

The current MARVEL program lead, Dr. Abdalla Abou-Jaoude, joined me for Atomic Show #348 to talk about the program and its historic accomplishments. Even though the MARVEL reactor has not yet been completed, he and his team – both superiors and subordinates – consider the program to be a research and development success story.

MARVEL is a micro reactor designed to produce 85 kilowatts of thermal energy. Using Stirling engines, it will be able to produce approximately 20 kilowatts of electricity. That’s about the same generating capacity as a whole house generator for a 4,000 square foot American suburban home.

The reactor uses uranium-zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel rods with uranium enriched to less than 20% U-235 (HALEU). They are similar to those used in Triga research reactors. The reactor coolant is NaK (sodium potassium eutectic) that is naturally circulated through the reactor core and the system heat exchangers.

The early system design concept included directly-connected Stirling engines to convert reactor heat to electricity. That configuration was proven to be unworkable during a non nuclear thermal testing program called PCAT – Primary Coolant Apparatus Test. The Stirling engines vibrated enough to put the rest of the system at risk of rapid deterioration, so the design was changed to include a secondary, non radioactive NaK loop that then transferred its heat to a tertiary molten salt loop.

This choice allows the Stirling engines and the heat conversion system to be placed outside of the building. That design change had the added benefit of making it easier to use the MARVEL reactor system to test various direct heat applications; with the directly mounted engines, it would have been difficult to extract any product other than electricity.

A major benefit of a government funded research and development program like MARVEL is that it can provide widely accessible lessons learned. For a variety of commercial reasons, private sector programs are less likely to share what they have learned from their mistakes or dead end choices.

Private sector participants can be hesitant to be the first to move, especially in a field where everyone knows that the existing government approval process is a major barrier that needs to be improved. A government funded program has the ability to approach and overcome the barriers without incurring the risk that they are simply making the path easier and smoother for their competitors. The cliche “don’t fight city hall” applies; it’s a somewhat easier battle when you are part of the city hall machinery.

Abdalla explained how the MARVEL program leaders are happy to see how later projects are moving more quickly and even passing it to reach certain key development milestones. MARVEL leaders feel like they did their job by helping to exercise and improve the processes of review and approval. The program has also helped to give dozens of engineers more experience in the process of moving component and system designs off of computer screens and into real life fabrication.

Numerous entities from universities, governments and the private sector are queuing up to use MARVEL to test various concepts for taking advantage of nuclear fission heat. Some of the potential uses include desalination (especially produced water from oil and gas wells), hydrogen production, micro grids, remote operations and training AI for reactor control.

MARVEL is currently scheduled to achieve dry criticality in 2026. It should achieve full power operations in 2028. It is classified as a non capitalized asset, which limits its projected operating life to about 2 years. It has sufficient fuel to last longer if the decision is made to extend it past the two year point. Even if it operates a little longer, the plan is still to have it reach the decommissioning phase quickly enough to serve as a barrier breaker for that important life cycle phase.

You are sure to enjoy the show and to learn something in the process.

The U.S. military has a strong and growing interest in using small and micro nuclear reactors as a means of reducing logistics challenges and improving operational resilience. They like nuclear reactors for their ability to operate independently of the grid for years without needing any new fuel. Almost as important is their ability to be designed to retain byproducts and reduce heat signatures for improved stealth.

Dr. Jeff Waksman Is the U.S. Army’s go-to guy for pioneering nuclear energy projects. Though no military-related project can be completed by a single person, program success often rests on the effective leadership provided by a singularly skilled leader who combines organization, inspiration and deep knowledge of how to get things done in a purposely hierarchical system.

Before his current role for the Army, Waksman led Project Pele – the military’s first micro-reactor project in 50+ years – for the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office. He did well enough at that assignment to have been selected to lead a more expansive program to finally deliver nuclear fission capabilities to bases and units that need clean, reliable power that comes with a low logistics burden.

Fission’s characteristics are nothing new and the military’s interest dates to the earliest days of nuclear energy. The political, environmental and strategic situation has changed enough in the 50 years since the Army’s Nuclear Power development program was effectively cancelled to stimulate new efforts to address the economic and technical challenges that were never solved during the 1960s and 70s.

Waksman’s current role has the mouthful title of Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (PDASA) for Installations, Energy and Environment (IE&E). Though only one of his responsibilities, he is the Army’s point person for a subsequent reactor development program called Project Janus.

Dr. Waksman joined me on Atomic Show #347 to discuss the lessons taught by Project Pele and to provide insights on how those lessons are being incorporated into subsequent programs, both civilian and military. We covered a variety of topics, including:

Reasons why he was picked to lead Project Pele

Direction provided to the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office regarding program outcomes

Focus on building systems that work in the real world instead of just more models

Challenges of fitting inside tightly constrained boundaries (C-17 transport plane)

Limiting components – not surprisingly, it was the heat exchanger that transferred reactor heat from the coolant gas to the power conversion system

Importance of balance of plant compared to reactor

Streamlining Department of Energy approval process

Economic value of competition

Economic trade-offs with the potential to make TRISO a more economic fuel than other options

Project Pele’s influence on Reactor Pilot Program

Project Janus goals and status

Stretch goal timeline that includes the first operating reactor supplying a military base by the end of 2028

Expansion of the project beyond the Army to the Air Force and possibly the Navy

Unquantified description of the possible magnitude of military reactor program

Desire for military reactor program to stimulate a larger commercial reactor market

I learned a lot from the show. Dr. Waksman shares valuable experience, including ways to avoid some of the bruises that came with leading the first-of-a-kind project for a modern transportable nuclear reactor and the U.S.’s first nuclear project development project in decades. I hope this show will influence those who follow so that they can make their own mistakes instead of repeating those that have already been made and documented.

Shine Technologies is a unique nuclear fusion company.

The conventional path for nuclear fusion projects is to raise and spend billions of dollars and decades of research and development in efforts to successfully find a path over, around or through the technical barriers that have prevented nuclear fusion from becoming a large scale energy production source.

Until relatively recently, that path was almost completely dependent on government grants. In cases like the ITER – International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – the effort has involved tens of billions of dollars (current estimate is $25 B), thousands of scientists, engineers, constructors and technicians and a construction schedule that stretches out over 29 years. The funding partnership includes six individual countries plus the European Union, which is supplying approximately 45% of the budget. Parts and materials for the project are being supplied by 35 different countries.

Greg Piefer, Shine Technologies CEO and Founder, chose a different path. He is a technical expert and fusion researcher who was inspired by the same dreams of unlimited fusion energy that drive others to study and work in the field, but he also has a commercial side that knows that investors, even governments, do not have the patience and the depth of resources needed to undertake and successfully complete projects whose characteristics are similar to ITER and don’t produce profits along the way.

He knew several known ways to stimulate and control a nuclear fusion reaction. The equipment used to produce those reactions doesn’t work fast enough to produce the energy needed to sustain the reaction and have enough left over to capture and sell to a commercial energy market. They are useful devices for teaching researchers about fusion and they are precise and reliable neutron generators for valuable tasks like remote logging of the materials in oil and gas wells.

Piefer’s valuable insight was that neutrons from fusion had special characteristics that could produce commercial value long before the equipment could produce energy at a competitive cost. He and the team that he inspired became convinced that they could create a sustainable path to commercial fusion energy by building, using and refining equipment and techniques that use fusion to produce neutrons for successively larger markets that require ever lower unit costs.

They established a four phase development program that remains their guiding development strategy. The first phase sells precise testing and measuring services that use Shine neutron generators where the neutrons supply their material penetrating power. Unlike the gamma rays used in conventional radiography – X-rays for materials and equipment – neutrons penetrate dense materials and are scattered by light elements. The critical nature of the components that benefit from neutron imaging leads customers to pay extraordinary prices for Shine’s specialized services. The neutrons produced by Shine’s imaging fusion devices sell for $100,000 – $1,000,000 per kilowatt-hour of energy released – which is a calculated metric derived from fusion reactions per second per dollar. (Those numbers do not have any misplaced zeros.)

The second phase, with a far larger Total Addressable Market (TAM), is medical radioisotope production. Using a process of continuous refinement and practice, Shine has been able to improve its devices to the point where they can profitably enter the market with neutrons that cost the equivalent of $100 per kWh (a factor of 1000 improvement over the first phase) that can be reduced to $20/kWh as the process is scaled up using their NRC licensed Chrysalis facility. That facility, located in Janesville, WI, was carefully sited next door to a regional airport that enables Shine’s medical isotopes to be rapidly delivered throughout the United States and competitively delivered almost anywhere.

Chrysalis is expected to be completed within the next two years. As Piefer describes during our conversation, it will be the highest capacity isotope production facility in the world. Piefer also described the invested effort that gives Shine the ability to produce isotopes that meet the stringent purity requirements for medical applications. The company’s radio chemistry skills are being exercised every day as they are already shipping isotopes created in a smaller facility.

The third step, which is still in the R&D phase is to use more capable Shine fusion devices that can produce neutrons for about $1/kWh to help recycle used nuclear fuel. During the conversation, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how this application will work. There are some nuances that are worth hearing.

The fourth step in the plan is to produce clean energy with a target price for neutrons of about $0.01-$0.02/kWh. That is the dream and the application that unlocks a TAM measured in the trillions of dollars.

Here is the company’s distillation of their four phase plan:

The framework: value per kilowatt-hour of fusion output
SHINE force-ranks fusion markets by unit economics, not market size — starting with the customers who pay the most per unit of fusion output, and using each market as commercial practice to drive costs down for the next. The metric: fusion reactions per second per dollar, a proxy for cost per kilowatt-hour.
The cost curve, by the numbers

>$1,000,000 per kWh — what one deployed SHINE fusion system is worth to its customer: it scans every nuclear fuel rod the customer manufactures, and hasn’t skipped a beat since deployment.

~$100,000 per kWh — typical value in the testing market (e.g., neutron imaging of F-35 turbine blade cooling channels that only neutrons can see).

~$100 per kWh — where SHINE had to get costs to make medical isotope production work.

~$20 per kWh — expected for Chrysalis at full capacity, coming online in the next 18–24 months.

~$1 per kWh — the target for spent fuel recycling, feasible because the business stacks four revenue streams: recycling service fees, recycled uranium/plutonium fuel, separated isotopes, and electricity sold at market rates.

10–20¢ per kWh — typical value of electricity, the final market. From recycling, SHINE estimates roughly a factor of 10 remains to put pure fusion energy economically on the grid.

Disclosure: Nucleation Capital, the sponsor of Atomic Insights, is an investor in Shine Technologies. We believe their vision and their execution elevates their commercial prospects above a number of companies whose primary selling point is an attractive, but distant dream.

Deployable Energy is a young company with a guiding principle. They believe that nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Founded in 2025 after a period of intensive study and design work, the company has developed a product branded as the Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB).

It’s a 1 MWe (3 MWth) micro reactor whose general features arise from a unique combination of nuclear fuel, reactor coolant and neutron moderator. The choices the company made arise from a desire to move fast using materials that are affordable and available for use today. That criteria requires the materials to be in commercial service from suppliers that can provide a price list or firm quote given delivery terms and conditions. Where appropriate, it also means that the materials are qualified for use in nuclear reactors and for exposure to neutron and gamma flux.

Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB) Steps of Utah Capitol Salt Lake City

UNB designers determined that they would use regular fuel – uranium enriched to < 5% U-235 and in the form of uranium dioxide (UO2) in sintered pellets mass manufactured by an established vendor. Zirconium alloy tubes separate the fuel from the coolant and moderator and retain fission products that might be released by the ceramic UO2 pellets during and after operation. The heat transfer fluid, more frequently referred to as reactor coolant, is inert helium gas that is blown through the core at high velocity and a pressure of approximately 50 bar (~725 psi). The neutron moderator is water at atmospheric pressure and a temperature that is roughly equal to residential hot water.

The reactor vessel that is needed to contain the chosen combination of functional core materials is small enough and light enough to be transported in the back of a short-bed American pick-up truck with a crew cab.

A full nuclear heat source system with transportation level shielding will fit into a 20 foot shipping container with a mass of about 20 tons. The additional shielding and physical protection layers added on site will add another 40 tons to the nuclear heat source portion of the system.

The system will be shielded with sufficient materials to reduce neutron and gamma radiation to below regulatory standards both during and after operation.

The pressurized helium will transfer the heat generated in the reactor to heat exchanger(s) where either water or supercritical CO2 will pick up the helium’s heat for either steam or hot sCO2 production. Steam or sCO2 will go to the balance of plant, which will be housed in a 40 foot transportation container. Depending on application, hot fluids can be used in industrial applications or used to turn turbine generators. The ultimate heat sink is the atmosphere with air coolers mounted on top of the balance of plant container. Many of Deployable Energy’s target customers and applications value low water use.

Unity Battery conceptual layout

Knowing that permissions required for construction, manufacturing, transportation and operating are key milestones, Deployable Energy began its pre-application engagement with the NRC in October 2025, within months of its corporate founding.

The company also began engaging with the Department of Energy regarding its initial demonstration unit. It wasn’t ready to compete for the Reactor Pilot Program, but it was one of four companies selected for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, which is the DOE’s follow-on to the foundational Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program. Deployable Energy plans to catch up to the Reactor Pilot Program participants and achieve initial criticality by July 4, 2026.

To learn more about Deployable Energy and their Unity Nuclear Battery, I talked with Bobby Gallagher, Deployable Energy’s CEO and Chief Technical Officer. Bobby’s background in the Australian military, oil and gas, shipbuilding, offshore development and successful technology start-up founder might seem to be a rather odd path towards designing a product using a nuclear fission heat source, but he explains how he arrived at his current position rather well.

During our discussion, Bobby described the decision criteria and process used to determine the UNB’s final combination of fuel, heat transfer fluid and moderator. He provided some of the historical background from other nuclear reactor designs that inspired the decisions.

But more of our conversation’s content was on the company’s choices related to manufacturing and deployment. We talked about Deployable Energy’s choice to put the center of its operations in Houston, Texas where the local manufacturing base for vessels, tanks, valves, tubes, skids, and other key components is well established and has been honed and expanded during the past several decades of world-leading “unconventional” oil and gas development.

Houston is an energy town with a deep understanding of the value and risks associated with providing power to the population. The city’s residents know how to manufacture, build and heavy equipment and they know how to create and finance innovative companies.

We had a fascinating conversation. I’m confident that you will learn something by listening to the show at least once. We no longer accept comments here for a number of reasons, but you can ask questions and make comments to @atomicrod on X.