Kairos appoints Mike McGuire to oversee Oak Ridge operational growth
Kairos Power has named Mike McGuire as its vice president of operations and site delivery. The former SpaceX and U.S. Army Special Operations leader will be responsible for delivering the Hermes 2 demonstration plant now taking shape in Oak Ridge.
The hire signals a shift from Kairos as a nuclear development organization that designs and licenses reactors to one that builds, commissions, and actually operates them. Oak Ridge, where Kairos broke ground on Hermes 2 in April, sits at the center of that transition.
In the new role, McGuire will oversee plant delivery from construction through installation, commissioning and startup, coordinating operations across Kairos sites in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Oak Ridge; and future deployment locations. His new role will manage site milestones and operational readiness as the company scales up.
“I’m honored to join Kairos Power and to work with people who are deeply committed to building physical hardware and embracing iteration,” McGuire said.
According to Kairos, McGuire brings more than 30 years of leadership across the aerospace, advanced technology, and defense sectors. He most recently served as a senior director of launch and recovery operations at SpaceX, and earlier spent 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a master’s degree in management from Stanford University.
Ed Blandford, co-founder and chief technology officer of Kairos Power, said McGuire’s track record leading teams on complex technology projects will help the company move from development into commercial operation.
His experience will “strengthen our transition from a development organization to a company actively commissioning, operating, and maintaining commercial reactor facilities,” Blandford said.
A steadily growing Oak Ridge footprint
Kairos has been a fixture of East Tennessee’s nuclear revival since Co-Founder and CEO Mike Laufer first revealed the company’s plans at a December 2020 meeting of the East Tennessee Economic Council (ETEC). By late 2021, Kairos had detailed a $100 million investment and 55 jobs tied to the demonstration reactor, drawn to the region by its collaborations with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The company purchased the former K-31 and K-33 sites at the East Tennessee Technology Park.
The project has advanced in iterative steps since.
Kairos started construction on Hermes 1 in July 2024, making it the first Generation IV reactor cleared for construction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the first non-light-water reactor permitted in the United States in more than 50 years.
Along the way, the company has worked through a series of non-nuclear Engineering Test Units, installing the reactor vessel for its second such unit in early 2025 at its manufacturing campus in Albuquerque.
The urgency around operations ties directly to commercial commitments; for example, in August 2025, Kairos, Google and TVA announced a power purchase agreement under which Hermes 2 will deliver up to 50 megawatts to the TVA grid to help supply Google data centers in Tennessee and Alabama. It was the first agreement by a U.S. utility to buy electricity from a Generation IV reactor, and the first deployment under a broader Kairos-Google deal to bring 500 megawatts of advanced nuclear online by 2035.
The test now for Kairos is execution, and that’s where McGuire’s appointment strategically comes into play.
With a construction permit in hand and a commitment to put electrons on the grid by 2030, Kairos has to prove it can build and run reactors on schedule. McGuire’s job is to make sure it does!
Learn more about Kairos Power.
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