These nuclear companies are leading the race to build advanced small reactors in the U.S.
Micha Pawlitzki | The Image Bank | Getty Images
The nuclear industry is racing to launch advanced small reactors by the early 2030s, aiming to meet the deep-pocketed technology sector’s growing need for electricity to fuel artificial intelligence.
The world has relied largely on the same pressurized-water reactor technology for the past 70 years, but those plants have proven incredibly expensive to build in the U.S. in the 21st century.
The first new nuclear plant completed in decades, reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, infamously cost about $18 billion more than expected and opened seven years behind schedule. Each of those reactors can generate 1,114 megawatts of electricity, enough for more than 800,000 homes.
“Doing these new builds with that older, high pressure technology is just unaffordable,” Chris Levesque, CEO of TerraPower, an advanced reactor company co-founded and backed by Bill Gates, told CNBC.
Despite growing interest in restarting closed reactors, such as Palisades in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, as a quicker and cheaper near-term solution, there remains “a whole lot of hesitation about a brand new plant,” Levesque said.
The advanced reactors under development promise to have smaller, lighter footprints that could make them cheaper and quicker to build when they are fully commercialized. But the industry is crowded with more than 90 different technologies in various stages of development around the world, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency.
The utility and tech sectors need to winnow down the field to five or 10 companies with the right technology, said John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, the largest power company by market capitalization in the U.S.
“A lot of them are under capitalized,” Ketchum said of the small nuclear startups designing advanced reactors. “So we’ve got to pick out the ones that we really want to get behind and make the bets,” the CEO said at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston earlier this month.
Ketchum sees the first advanced reactor coming online around 2031 in the U.S., with more units potentially on the way around 2035. Technology companies will serve as a catalyst, with Levesque saying they are a “huge force” that can drive the industry forward due to their immense demand for electricity coupled with their deep pockets. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft together are worth seven times the value of the entire S&P 500 utility sector.
The following are some of the leading players in the U.S. market to revive nuclear power, all three of them private but with significant financial backing — often from tech companies — and customers already lined up.
TerraPower
TerraPower is the first advanced reactor company in the U.S. to move from design to construction, breaking ground on its first plant near a former coal site in Kemmerer, Wyoming in the summer of 2024. The company aims to start dispatching power by the end of 2030 to Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp.
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor operates at atmospheric temperature, a feature that Levesque says will reduce construction costs.
The U.S. currently relies on reactors that operate at about 300 Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit) and are cooled by water. The system operates under high pressure — water boils at 100 degree Celsius — to keep the coolant liquid, and the plants need heavy, expensive components to contain the pressure, Levesque said.
TerraPower uses sodium, rather than water, as a coolant. Liquid sodium boils at 900 Celsius, much higher than the Natrium reactor’s operating temperature of around 500 Celsius. That means the plant does not need to be pressurized, Levesque said.
Using a low-pressure, lighter plant to avoid high pressure systems “reduces tons of steel, tons of concrete, labor hours, numbers of systems,” Levesque said. He estimates that Natrium plants will cost about half as much to build as a traditional nuclear plant, with prices coming down as more are built.
The Natrium reactor has a power capacity of 345 megawatts, enough for more than 250,000 homes. A plant will have the ability to ramp up to 500 megawatts for several hours by storing heat in a thermal battery made of molten salt, Levesque says. The idea is to be able to dispatch power on demand to the grid when renewable solar and wind power fade because the sun isn’t shinning or winds are slack.
TerraPower has the financial backing of its key founder Bill Gates, SK Group, one of South Korea’s largest energy providers, and ArcelorMittal, a steelmaker. Gates and SK Group led TerraPower’s $830 million funding round in 2022. The Wyoming project is backed by $2 billion from the Department of Energy, which TerraPower says it will match dollar for dollar.
TerraPower filed its construction license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2024 and expects the regulator will issue a permit in December 2026.
“We’re trying to show folks we’re inevitable,” Levesque said.
X-Energy
Of all the advanced reactor companies, X-Energy is the first to win a direct investment from a tech company, securing hundreds of millions of dollars from Amazon to build its Xe-100 reactor.
“What this sector needs is risk capital to invest in plants because U.S. utilities aren’t doing it today,” X-Energy CEO Clay Sell told CNBC.
X-Energy’s most recent financing round raised $700 million, led by Amazon and with additional capital from Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Ares Management, Segra Capital Management, Jane Street Capital and the University of Michigan, among others.
“One of the largest corporations in America, a company that is in size larger than the entirety of the investor-owned utility sector in the U.S., was stepping forward and saying we want to facilitate the new nuclear future in the United States,” Sell said of Amazon’s investment.
The cash will largely go to completing the reactor design so it’s ready for construction, and finishing the first phase of X-Energy’s fuel facility, Sell said.
The Xe-100 is an 80 megawatt reactor sold in a pack of four units to construct 320 megawatts in total, the CEO said. The multiple units create redundancy and the small size allows the biggest component, the reactor vessel, to ship from a factory via road to the construction site, Sell said.
The reactor uses helium gas as a coolant rather than water. X-Energy has its own proprietary fuel made of graphite pebbles that contain uranium kernels encased in ceramic. Sell said the graphite can’t melt, which makes the plant “intrinsically safe.”
Amazon’s investment will finance four Xe-100 reactors in Washington state that will be built, owned and operated by Energy Northwest, a utility, with plants coming online in the early 2030s. The intent is to scale up to a dozen Xe-100s in Washington, Sell said.
X-Energy is also working with Dow Inc. to deploy four reactors at the chemical company’s manufacturing facility in Seadrift, Texas. The Department of Energy has awarded X-Energy up to $1.2 billion to develop and deploy its technoloy.
X-Energy aims to become the first company to commission an operational advanced reactor in the U.S., Sell said.
Kairos Power
Kairos Power signed a contract with Alphabet’s Google unit last year to deploy multiple, advanced reactors, aiming to supply the YouTube company with 500 megawatts of power. The first reactor is expected to come online in 2030, with additional deployments through 2035.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the Google contract is “immensely important,” allowing Kairos to “plan the infrastructure not just for one project but for a series of projects,” CEO Mike Laufer told CNBC.
“It allows us to scale our infrastructure, production — our manufacturing capabilities,” Laufer said.
The 75-megawatt Kairos’ reactor will be deployed in pairs to provide 150 megawatts of total power. Similar to TerraPower, Kairos’ reactor operates at near atmospheric pressure using molten fluoride salt instead of water as coolant. Like X-Energy, Kairos uses fuel that encases uranium kernels in ceramic and graphite pebbles that can’t melt in high-temperature reactors, according to the company.
Kairos is building a low-power, demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to showcase its ability “to deliver clean, safe, and affordable nuclear heat.” Oak Ridge, site of a national laboratory about 25 miles west of Knoxville, was where uranium was enriched as part of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs.
Today, there will be a “natural thinning” in the number of advance reactor companies, Kairos CEO Laufer said: “It’s going to be driven by who can actually be in a position to execute projects,” he said.
Last year we reported on the storied e-bike brand Juiced Bikes falling on hard financial times and eventually closing down. Now, in a video announcement just posted to the seemingly defunct Juiced Bikes YouTube channel, the charismatic young founders of Lectric Ebikes have announced their purchase of Juiced Bikes along with their intention to revive the brand to its former glory.
Juiced Bikes was founded in 2009, making it one of the first major electric bicycle brands in the US. Operating continuously until its closure in 2024, its decade and a half of high-performance electric bicycle building created a massive fan base and a reputation for pushing the industry towards power and speed built around innovative designs instead of mere cookie-cutter copycats.
In a candid video posted to the brand’s previously abandoned YouTube channel, Lectric Ebikes founders Levi Conlow and Robbie Deziel openly shared several details about their lengthy bid to purchase Juiced Bikes and their plans to revive the company.
Now to achieve their goal, the pair will have to rely on the lessons they learned in building their own brand, Lectric Ebikes, into the largest electric bicycle company in North America.
Founded in 2009, Juiced Bikes was the epitome of old school in the e-bike industry. On the other hand, Lectric Ebikes and its two charismatic “e-bike bro” founders are the full embodiment of young e-bike whipper snappers. But despite bursting onto the scene relatively recently in 2019, Lectric Ebikes rocketed past hundreds of other e-bike brands to snatch the title of most annual e-bike sales by 2023. Clenching the title again in 2024 and likely on track for a three-peat in 2025, Levi and Robbie obviously know a thing or two about building up a successful e-bike company.
Lectric has now become known as the go-to source for the best bang-for-your-buck electric bikes, from folding e-bikes to off-road adventure-style rides, cargo e-bikes, and more. But despite Lectric Ebikes’ success, it doesn’t look like its founders intend to merely bring Juiced Bikes into the Lectric family. Instead, the duo seems to be focused on reviving the brand as it is – or at least as it was.
“What drew us into Juiced is the same thing that drew many Juiced customers into the brand in the first place,” explained Levi Conlow, CEO of Lectric Ebikes. “That high performance, that torque, that acceleration, the thing you love about Juiced. That is our full intention, to preserve and continue that beautiful performance into the future, and carry Juiced into its next 15 years. It’s had this hiccup now, but I hope that everyone has seen what we’ve done with Lectric Ebikes and has a great level of confidence in what we’re going to do.”
As Robbie and Levi explained, the process of purchasing the Juiced Bikes brand and attempting to revive it was a long and complicated journey that still seems to be taking shape. Lectric originally placed a winning bid when the brand’s assets were put up at auction in an attempt to pay back Juiced Bikes’ creditors, but the winning bid was rejected, leaving Juiced’s future in limbo. As Levi detailed, eventually he and Robbie were able to salvage a deal where they purchased nearly all of Juiced’s assets outside of its physical inventory. That means the branding, the website, the intellectual property, and pretty much everything else that was once part of the Juiced Bikes company… other than the bikes that used to line the shipping department of its Chinese factory.
And while the pair didn’t explicitly say it, we’ve since seen much of Juiced’s inventory siphoned off by a Chinese-backed e-bike brand called VeloWave, which has been selling it seemingly dropshipped online, so it doesn’t take a lot of internet sleuthing to see why they couldn’t get everything at once.
That means there’s a lot of hard work ahead of Levi and Robbie to rebuild supplier relationships and get bikes moving again. There’s also a number of disappointed Juiced customers who had placed orders for e-bikes just before Juiced collapsed last year and never received them. Levi explained that the company had hoped to fulfill those orders, and may still be able to help those customers out, but that it would take some time to get things moving again.
But while they admit that they may not be able to immediately help many of the frustrated customers or support the larger Juiced Bikes owner community with spare parts until they can build up some inventory, they appear focused on bringing the same commitment to customer service and support to Juiced that they’ve built at Lectric Ebikes.
This is of course still a developing story and we’ll be learning more soon about the backstory to Lectric’s purchase of the Juiced Bikes brand and their plans to return Juiced to its heyday. If you have questions, put them in the comments below and we’ll be sure to find out more when we sit down with Robbie and Levi soon.
Electrek’s Take
This is fascinating. We all thought that there was a chance Juiced Bikes could be saved, but it was a long shot. It meant finding someone who could convince investors that there was still hope, and not that many still saw the hope. But if there ever was, it’s with Levi and Robbie. These guys built the modern-day equivalent of a garage startup into the biggest e-bike company on the continent and almost single-handedly brought previous titans of the industry to their knees. Yet instead of merely forcing other e-bike brands out, here they are trying to save them.
And what I love about this is that it comes from a place of genuine love for the game. If you watch the video above (which you should), you can see Levi and Robbie nerding out about how great Juiced Bikes’ e-bikes were. And they’re right. Those were awesome bikes. Saving the company isn’t just about offering another revenue stream in the high-performance market that Lectric hasn’t previously focused on, but also saving an important part of the history of the nascent American e-bike market. Juiced Bikes WAS the American e-bike market for a long time, back when it was basically just those guys and Pedego… and a few weird chainstay-mounted brush motor e-bikes that looked like they had toaster-shaped batteries strapped to their rear racks.
All of this is to say that this is a really cool story, one that is currently being written, and for which we likely won’t really know how well it will work for many months to come. But damn, am I here for the ride!
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
It’s about the size of a Tesla Model Y, loaded with technology, and designed as a midsize family mover — Meet BYD’s new Tai 3 electric SUV. The Tai 3 is the most affordable EV from BYD’s luxury off-road brand, Fang Cheng Bao, starting at under $20,000.
Meet BYD’s new Fang Cheng Bao Tai 3 electric SUV
BYD’s Fang Cheng Bao brand opened pre-sales for the Tai 3 on Monday, a “high-tech trendy” electric SUV built for families.
Starting at 139,800 yuan, or about $19,300, the Tai 3 is the cheapest vehicle under the sub-brand. Unlike other Fang Cheng Bao brand models, the new electric SUV is designed as a family vehicle rather than a hardcore luxury off-roader.
The five-seater is 4,605 mm long, 1,900 mm wide, and 1,720 mm tall, or around the size of Tesla’s Model Y (4,790 mm long, 1,982 mm wide, and 1,624 mm tall).
All versions are rated with a CLTC driving range of up to 501 km (311 miles). It’s available in single (RWD) and dual-motor (4WD) versions.
A 72.96 kWh battery powers the base RWD Intelligent Driving Pro Edition, while the flagship “Drone” Version has a 78.72 kWh battery. And yes, it actually comes with BYD’s Ling Yuan drone system, complete with a roof docking station.
For under $20,000, the Tai 3 is packed with tech and cool features. The interior features wing-style instrument display, 15.6″ infotainment, and “Chariot gear lever” crystal buttons. It even has a built-in refrigerator.
A multifunctional smart island includes charging on top, storage on the bottom, lighting on the left, and on the right… passengers get karaoke.
The AI smart cockpit features BYD’s “God’s Eye” C driver-assist system for smart functions like highway navigate on autopilot, remote control parking, and more.
The Tai 3 is available in five variants, with prices ranging up to 203,800 yuan ($28,000) for the Drone version. That’s not bad for an electric SUV with a roof-mounted drone system. Deliveries are expected to begin in April.
| BYD Tai 3 trim | Pre-sale price |
| 501 km RWD Intelligent Driving Pro | 139,800 yuan ($19,300) |
| 501 km RWD Intelligent Driving Max | 149,800 yuan ($20,700) |
| 501 km 4WD Intelligent Driving Max | 163,800 yuan ($22,600) |
| 501 km 4WD Intelligent Driving Ultra | 173,800 yaun ($24,000) |
| 501 km 4WD Drone Version | 203,800 yaun ($28,000) |
BYD’s new model kicks off a new “Tai” series under its Fang Cheng Bao brand. It follows the Bao 5 and Bao 8, both hybrid SUVs.
What do you think of the Tai 3? Would you buy one for under $20,000? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
Source: CnEVPost, Fang Cheng Bao
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
A Tesla Cybertruck was split in half after another vehicle crashed into it in Frisco, Texas, a few days ago. Images of the aftermath are impressive.
On Friday, the driver of a Mercedes-Benz G Wagon lost control and crashed into seven vehicles parked on the side of the road.
The G Wagon driver was taken to the hospital in an unknown condition. He is believed to have had a medical emergency, which led to the loss of control. He was the only one injured, as no one was in the parked vehicles.
The accident is getting some attention for the aftermath.
It looks like the first vehicle hit by the driver was a Tesla Cybertruck, and it appears to have been cleanly cut in half at the bed from the impact:
At short of 6,000 lbs, a G Wagon is undoubtedly heavy, and it’s not clear at what speed it was going at the time of the impact.
There’s no doubt that it had a significant impact, but it is still surprising to see the Cybertruck’s bed ripped straight off the truck’s frame.
Some are pointing to Tesla’s use of aluminum in the Cybertruck’s frame.
Despite Tesla’s claim that the Cybertruck is “bulletproof” and made out of an “exoskeleton,” the electric vehicle’s build is actually much closer to a traditional unibody system rather than an “exoskeleton.” Most of the visible body parts, which would be part of the chassis in an exoskeleton build, are actually trims attached to the body.
Furthermore, while Tesla touts its “ultra-hard stainless steel exoskeleton,” it mostly uses stainless steel on external parts, while many parts of the frame are made of aluminum.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports12 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway