Technology

Growing from a broad research effort at U.S. universities and national laboratories, Kairos Power was founded to accelerate the development of an innovative nuclear technology ...

Kairos Power is focused on reducing technical risk through a novel approach to test iteration often lacking in the nuclear space. Our schedule is driven by the goal of a U.S. demonstration plant before 2030 and a rapid deployment thereafter. The challenge is great, but so too is the opportunity.

So basically academics finding people to fund a large scale lab experiment, they want to get working by 2030. It sounds like they sold Google on an idea (for funding) and now have to move their idea from the lab to the real world. It does sound safer than water cooled plants of old at least.

Will energy prices become negative when the AI bubble bursts?

These are the small, buried reactors right? The ones that we tested on paper but haven't gotten NRC/DOE to sign off on?

I know they are MSRs but still...

This makes it sounds like Google is building their own nuclear plants

This is good news, relatively speaking.

SMR technology is one of the most promising pieces of technological development in the nuclear power space.

Standardized factory production and completely sealed, so refueling is only at the factory, never on-site. Their also, small, but scalable depending on the needs of each site.

I'm not sure of the design this company is using, but I'm assuming they're leveraging a fail safe reactor, as in, it requires properly running systems to generate fission, but if those systems fail, the fission process stops. There are no secondary systems that have to kick in, it's a simple as either it's running properly, or it can't run it all.

As opposed to systems like Chernobyl, or 3 Mile Island, that required separate active safety systems to guard against catastrophic failures. But if those failed, they're backups failed, etc., well, meltdown.