Latest news with #EdwardBlandford
Associated Press
08-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Kairos Power Begins Nuclear Safety-Related Construction of Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor
OAK RIDGE, TN, UNITED STATES, May 8, 2025 / / -- Kairos Power has completed the first installation of nuclear safety-related concrete for the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor, marking the start of 'nuclear construction' on the project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Hermes is a scaled demonstration of Kairos Power's fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor technology and is the first advanced nuclear reactor to receive a construction permit from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Kairos Power first broke ground at the Hermes site in July 2024 and completed excavation in October. Safety-related construction activities, which are subject to oversight by the NRC and can only be performed with a construction permit, started on May 1 with a focus on the building's foundation. To ensure structural soundness, Hermes will have 51 six-foot-diameter drilled piers extending approximately 40 feet below grade to anchor the building to bedrock. The first safety-related concrete pour was the culmination of several months of preparation. Two earlier projects at the Oak Ridge site served as proving grounds to test the drilled pier installation process and refine Kairos Power's nuclear quality assurance program. The construction team, led by Barnard Construction Company, completed a full-scale test pier in November, known as 'Pier 52,' to demonstrate the process from beginning to end before drilling 70 piers for Kairos Power's non-nuclear Engineering Test Unit (ETU 3.0) facility over four months. The team became highly proficient, installing as many as six piers in a single day using quality control checklists similar to those that will be used for Hermes. 'The first safety-related concrete pour for a U.S. advanced reactor under an NRC construction permit is a major milestone and a significant accomplishment for the Kairos Power team and our construction partners,' said Kairos Power CEO and co-founder Mike Laufer. 'This achievement reflects the value of our iterative development process to meet the necessary nuclear quality standards and provide crucial real cost information that gives confidence to our customers. It is a testament to the hard work of our dedicated team and represents an enormous amount of learning and progress.' 'The Hermes project team continues to lead the industry as we forge a new path in advanced reactor construction,' said Kairos Power Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Edward Blandford. 'Working with our partners and in close communication with the NRC, we are committed to maintaining the highest standards of quality and safety to ensure the success of this project.' The Hermes reactor will leverage proven technologies that originated in Oak Ridge—a novel combination of TRISO coated particle fuel and 'Flibe' molten fluoride salt coolant, which yields robust inherent safety while simplifying the reactor's design. Hermes is supported by risk reduction funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Kairos Power is building the demonstration reactor as part of its iterative approach to mitigating technology, licensing, supply chain, and construction risks for the commercial fleet. About Kairos Power Kairos Power is a mission-driven nuclear technology, engineering, and manufacturing company singularly focused on commercializing the fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) – a clean energy solution that can be deployed with robust safety at an affordable cost to enable deep decarbonization. Founded in 2016, the company is unique in applying a rapid iterative development approach and vertical integration strategy to bring advanced reactor technology to market. In 2025, Kairos Power commenced safety-related construction of the Hermes demonstration reactor – the first non-water-cooled reactor approved for construction in the U.S. in over 50 years. Kairos Power's mission is to enable the world's transition to clean energy with the ultimate goal of dramatically improving people's quality of life while protecting the environment. Learn more at Contact: Ashley Lewis Corporate Communications [email protected] (510) 775-1685 Ashley Lewis Kairos Power email us here Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Kairos Power's reactors will include technologies based on ORNL innovations
This is the second of two stories on Kairos Power's plans for building test reactors in Oak Ridge this decade and nuclear power plants next decade using two technologies based on Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) innovations. The three Hermes demonstration reactors that Kairos Power plans to build in Oak Ridge's Heritage Center will incorporate two technologies based on innovations originating at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kairos Power scientists and engineers also are or will be meeting with ORNL experts on these technologies to acquire the knowledge they need for the Hermes reactor projects. The goal is to ensure successful demonstrations of their three planned test reactors' Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology. Those were two of the messages this volunteer reporter for The Oak Ridger heard in a conversation by Zoom with Edward Blandford, Kairos Power's co-founder and chief technology officer. He is responsible for all engineering and technology development functions at Kairos Power. These include hardware demonstrations, fuel and salt supply infrastructure, manufacturing, supply chain and procurement, environmental health and safety, construction management and engineering operations. In the 1960s, ORNL ran a successful Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) that showed the advantages of using a molten salt containing lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride (FLiBe) instead of water for cooling a reactor that can operate at a high temperature but under low pressure. Kairos Power will use FLiBe salt to cool its Hermes reactors and carry away their heat, which for the second and third reactors will produce steam for generating electricity. The MSR technology was championed by ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg, who co-invented the pressurized water reactor (water-cooled reactor run at high pressure), which is at the heart of two-thirds of the nuclear power plants operating in the world today. ORNL researchers working in a program to develop the high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor were the first to invent TRISO (tristructural isotropic) nuclear fuel. For the Kairos Power reactors, the TRISO fuel will be embedded in graphite pebbles, each containing thousands of coated uranium fuel particles the size of poppy seeds. The spherical TRISO particles feature a robust, triple-layered ceramic shell that withstands high temperatures and prevents the release of radioactive fission products. Blandford said Kairos Power is working with the Low Enriched Fuel Fabrication Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to manufacture HALEU TRISO fuel pebbles for the Hermes reactors. HALEU stands for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium. This nuclear fuel is enriched in uranium-235 at a level between 5% and 20%, higher than the level for traditional reactor fuel Kairos Power partnered with Materion Corp. in Elmore, Ohio, to commission the construction and operation of the Molten Salt Purification Plant (MSPP). In 2022 it produced unenriched FLiBe for the Engineering Test Unit (ETU) series. Kairos Power is now integrating lessons learned from MSPP into a Salt Production Facility that will produce reactor-grade FLiBe enriched in lithium-7 for the Hermes reactor series. Blandford was asked how ORNL researchers are helping the Kairos Power staff with the Hermes reactor projects. He answered that Kairos Power is acquiring information from ORNL in four main areas: the characterization of TRISO fuel, safeguards approaches, the lab's advanced manufacturing methods and capabilities, as well as the know-how and knowledge contained in documents from the lab's historical MSRE program, including ORNL's experience with the FLiBe salt coolant. 'Knowledge transfer is something that Kairos is looking for from Oak Ridge,' he said. Kairos has committed to investing at least $100 million and creating more than 55 full-time jobs in the Oak Ridge area to support the construction and operation of the Hermes 1 reactor. DOE is investing up to $303 million through a performance-based milestone contract funded by the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program to support the reactor's design, construction and commissioning. In May 2021, Kairos established a cooperative development agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority, which will provide engineering, operations and licensing support for the Hermes 1 reactor. Successful operation of the three demonstration reactors, including the two reactors that will generate up to 28 megawatts of electricity for the grid, should enable Kairos Power to reach the next level in the early 2030s, Blandford said. That step would be building in a not-yet-determined location the KP-X commercial demonstration plant, he added. It would house a single reactor with a power output of 50 megawatts (50 MWe) operating at near-atmospheric pressure and a reactor outlet temperature of 650 degrees Celsius made of stainless-steel structural material. The uranium fuel will be enriched in fissionable uranium-235 at a level of 19.75%. Following KP-X, Kairos Power will deploy commercial plants with a standard configuration of two 75-MWe reactors connected to a shared power generation system for a total output of 150 MWe. The company is partnering with Google to deploy reactors for power-hungry data centers that the search engine company will need for training artificial intelligence models. In October 2024, according to a news release, 'Kairos Power and Google signed a Master Plant Development Agreement, creating a path to deploy a U.S. fleet of advanced nuclear power projects totaling 500 megawatts by 2035.' In a Feb. 4, 2025, news release, it was announced that 'Kairos Power, the Texas A&M University System and prospective customers have agreed to explore the potential to site one or more commercial Kairos Power nuclear power plants at the Texas A&M-RELLIS campus as part of the university's initiative to build a proving ground for the next generation of nuclear reactors. 'Texas A&M selected Kairos Power's proposal as the largest commercial project to anchor an expansion of the RELLIS campus that would advance new nuclear technologies to supply clean, firm electricity for data centers and other commercial applications.' One Texas A&M aim is to enhance students' education by providing unprecedented access to the latest advanced reactor technologies. Blandford was asked about the success of the Kairos Power staff's interactions with the Nuclear Regulatory Comission (NRC) staff in obtaining construction permits for the Hermes reactor series. He said the Kairos Power staff engaged with the NRC staff during each step of the construction permit application. He compared the application process to a book report. Instead of submitting a 10-page report on a book all up front, he said, the Kairos Power staff prepared the equivalent of a short report on various sections and obtained feedback from NRC. These smaller reports, called Licensing Topical Reports, allowed the NRC staff to take formal licensing positions and parallelize the review. Blandford was asked whether building and operating a few commercial 150-MWe KP-FHR power plants would be more economical than a 1,000-MWe pressurized water reactor used in many of the world's nuclear power plants. He said that building and operating a new 1,000-MWe nuclear power plant incorporating a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor is 'a big investment for utilities to make. "A large utility needs a substantial market capitalization to make that level of investment," Blandford said. He added that water-cooled reactors are 'a more mature technology, but at such a large size and a scale that there's a lot of project risk in translating the design of a nuclear power plant to a particular site.' In addition, it takes at least 10 years to build such plants 'and the people that built those plants are no longer there waiting for new work.' Blandford argued that the KP-FHR technology is at a smaller scale, 'allowing us to bring down the cost curve quicker and sooner' than can be done by megaprojects. Also, he added, because the Kairos Power innovation is a high-temperature, low-pressure reactor, it does not require the huge, expensive pressure vessel and containment structure used by each water-cooled reactor to ensure its safe operation. 'Our reactors, which rely on what is called functional containment, are designed to have very little stored energy in the system,' he said. 'In the large, light-water reactors, accidents can evolve relatively quickly, so stored energy must be appropriately managed through active and passive means. The FHR safety case is built on removing those accident sequences from the design.' He added that reactor costs and construction time will decrease if standardized reactor parts can be built in a factory environment and transported to multiple locations where nuclear power plants using Gen IV reactors like KP-FHRs are assembled on site. But, he stated, Kairos Power will be building and demonstrating a first-of-a-kind technology, so there will be some upfront costs in showing when the KP-FHR power plants are ready to be standardized, modularized and commercialized. This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Kairos Power reactors will include tech based on ORNL innovations
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kairos Power's reactor plans for Oak Ridge and beyond
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of two stories on Kairos Power's plans for building test reactors in Oak Ridge this decade and nuclear power plants next decade using two technologies based on Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) innovations. Three construction permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for three proposed advanced nuclear reactors that will be cooled with molten salt instead of the water used in conventional reactors. A partnership with Google, which wants nuclear power as a reliable source of electricity for its power-hungry data centers to be used to test artificial intelligence chatbots and other models. A completed excavation of an Oak Ridge site for the new reactors that will use uranium fuel, located where a gaseous diffusion plant once produced enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. Those were some of Kairos Power's achievements in the past year or so, starting in December 2023 when the first construction permit was granted to the company based in Alameda, California. An update on Kairos Power's progress in 2024 and timelines over the next decade for its advanced Generation IV nuclear reactor projects in Oak Ridge and elsewhere was provided by company officials during a recent Zoom call with a volunteer reporter for The Oak Ridger. Edward Blandford, Kairos Power's co-founder and chief technology officer, and Ashley Lewis, senior marketing communications manager, were on the call from California. On Dec. 12, 2023, the NRC voted to issue a construction permit to Kairos Power for the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor. Kairos Power said that its first test reactor will show the company's capability to deliver nuclear heat as part of its quest to provide safe, affordable, carbon-free nuclear power to meet growing demands for electricity and to delay climate change. The 35-megawatt-thermal (35 MWt) high-temperature nuclear reactor, which will be cooled by a molten fluoride salt, was the first U.S. non-water-cooled reactor to receive a construction permit in more than 50 years. The company calls its concept the Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology. In September 2023, the NRC accepted for review Kairos Power's construction permit applications for the Hermes 2 Demonstration Plant, which were submitted in July 2023. The demonstration plant would consist of two FHRs with power generation systems for producing steam to generate electricity that can be fed to the grid. On Nov. 21, 2024, Kairos Power received two construction permits from the NRC for the two 35-megawatt (35-MWt) reactors to be housed in the Hermes 2 Demonstration Plant in Oak Ridge. The heat from the reactors is carried by the molten salt coolant to the steam generation system. All three reactors will be built on the K-33 site, where a gaseous diffusion plant for enriching uranium was built in 1954, operated until 1985 and decommissioned and demolished in 2011. The site, known by many people as the "K-25 Site," is part of the Heritage Center industrial park, located in the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge. In 2024, the K-33 site was excavated by a Kairos Power contractor, Barnard Construction Co. Inc., of Bozeman, Montana. Blandford, who lives in Oakland, California, said he spent part of the year in Oak Ridge, overseeing the excavation and working with other partners to 'repurpose the brownfield site.' Blandford is responsible for all engineering and technology development functions at Kairos Power. These include hardware demonstrations, fuel and salt supply infrastructure, manufacturing, supply chain and procurement, environmental health and safety, construction management and engineering operations. Asked about the excavation, Blandford said that the contractor, along with the environmental remediation support of Los Alamos Technical Associates (LATA), had to remove considerable amounts of underground concrete and electrical duct banks left over from the historic gaseous diffusion plant. Duct banks that protect underground electrical wires, footer pedestals and foundation footings below the surface soil were removed by Barnard staff. 'The concrete and other material, such as lead and asbestos, must be managed appropriately,' Blandford said. 'We are coordinating with the Department of Energy to ensure proper removal of material from the Hermes footprint. That's a process we're working through now.' A Kairos Power video provides 'excavation by the numbers' information on the work at the K-33 site: 4,900 cubic yards of topsoil, stripped and stockpiled on the site; 182 remnant concrete footers removed from the Hermes reactor footprint; 2,119 feet of remnant electrical duct banks removed; 52,900 cubic yards of soil, excavated and stockpiled onsite; 7,901 tons of densely, graded aggregate placed, and 17,000-plus staff hours completed by Kairos Power and its contractors. In July 2024, Barnard and Kairos Power began collaborating on the excavation and preparation of the K-33 site for the 2025 pouring of concrete for the foundations and construction of two buildings. They are Kairos Power's third non-nuclear, molten salt Engineering Test Unit (ETU 3.0), which should be complete by late 2025 or early 2026, and the structure for the Hermes 1 Demonstration Reactor, which will follow it. Kairos Power has projected that the Hermes 2 Demonstration Plant housing two reactors and a shared turbine will be built and ready to operate 'toward the end of the decade,' Lewis said. Results from the non-nuclear Engineering Test Unit series will inform the construction and operation of the Hermes reactors. Engineering Test Unit 1.0 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, demonstrated the largest FLiBe salt system ever built after the unit was loaded with 14 tons of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2), the salt coolant that the Hermes reactors will use to remove heat from TRISO fuel pebbles. In February 2024, ETU 1.0 completed its pumped salt operations using surrogate non-nuclear fuel pebbles. In a Jan. 30 news release, Kairos Power announced it had completed the design, fabrication and installation of the first internally produced reactor vessel for ETU 2.0, which is being completed in Albuquerque. 'It is the first reactor vessel to be fabricated in-house at Kairos Power's Manufacturing Development Campus in Albuquerque,' the news release stated. 'With ETU 2.0, the company is ramping up output of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) U-stamped pressure vessels, advancing the production of specialized reactor components and gaining proficiency in modular construction methods.' ETU 3.0 and Hermes reactors will be built in Oak Ridge using modular construction techniques piloted at Kairos Power's Manufacturing Development Campus in Albuquerque. The reactor modules will be fabricated in Albuquerque and shipped to Oak Ridge for on-site assembly. This year, Blandford said, the next phase of construction involves putting in 51 drilled concrete piers on the K-33 site. Each pier of this deep foundation system consists of a large-diameter concrete cylinder formed by pouring fresh concrete and installing reinforcing steel into a drilled shaTft. Each pier will support an above-ground structure by transferring its weight to more stable soil or rock. Blandford said the drilled piers being currently built are for the non-nuclear ETU 3.0 building. The experience that the Barnard-Kairos team gains from that construction will help them put in the drilled piers for the Hermes 1 reactor later this year. This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Kairos Power's reactor plans for Oak Ridge and beyond
