Kairos Power to invest $100 million, create 55 jobs in Oak Ridge
Almost seven months to the day after the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kairos Power shared preliminary plans for a major investment in Oak Ridge during the annual meeting of the East Tennessee Economic Council, state and company officials announced on Friday that the project is going forward.
The privately-funded company will invest $100 million and create 55 jobs to deploy a low-power demonstration reactor at the East Tennessee Technology Park or Heritage Center in Oak Ridge. That’s the former site of the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Kairos Power‘s reactor, named Hermes, will demonstrate the company’s capability to deliver low-cost nuclear heat. The reactor is a scaled version of Kairos Power’s Fluoride Salt-Cooled High Temperature Reactor (KP-FHR), an advanced reactor technology that aims to be cost competitive with natural gas in the U.S. electricity market in order to provide carbon-free, affordable and safe energy.
Scheduled to be operational in 2026, the Hermes reactor will move forward Kairos Power’s iterative development process from prototype toward commercial scale by demonstrating complete nuclear systems, advancing Kairos Power’s manufacturing capabilities for critical components, testing the supply chain and facilitating licensing certainty for the KP-FHR.
Kairos Power received $303 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and Office of Nuclear Energy’s program for risk reduction projects to support the design, licensing and construction of the Hermes low-power demonstration reactor.
Here’s a link to Friday’s news release.
