Oklo Secures Greenlight for Microreactor Site Inspections

Oklo, a nuclear startup, has received the greenlight from the Department of Energy to conduct site investigations, bringing them closer to their first commercial microreactor.

Current plans will have the microreactor constructed at the IDaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls. The site investigations will focus on infrastructure planning, environmental surveys and geotechnical assessments. At present, the company hopes to break ground in 2026.

Oklo, however, still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the plant after its first application was rejected in 2022. The CEO acknowledged there’s a risk the 2027 start date gets pushed out depending on how long the NRC review takes.

Oklo, which aims to build, operate and directly sell power to customers under long-term contracts, went public in May through a merger with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s SPAC, AltC Acquisition Corp. Altman serves as Oklo’s chairman.

The company said its microreactors, called Aurora, will have smaller and simpler designs that will range from 15 megawatts to as much as 100 megawatts or more. The average nuclear reactor in the U.S. currently is around 1,000 megawatts, according to the Department of Energy.

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