Atomic Age Goes Smaller: Austin Company Unveils Next-Generation Nuclear Power Plant

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Energy experts gathered in southeast Austin on Monday to discuss the future of the nuclear power industry and the launch of a new modular nuclear reactor.

The event, put on by Aalo Atomics, showcased the company’s first nuclear reactor, Aalo Pod, and its new manufacturing space. A video introduction by Gov. Greg Abbott started off the evening, followed by a presentation from industry experts with McKinsey Consulting.

Aalo presented two products. The first is the Aalo Pod, a 50 megawatt electric nuclear power plant “purpose built for powering AI data centers,” CEO Matt Loszak said.

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“The second product is the factory, and the factory is putting out dozens of these Aalo Pod power plants every year, and that’s enough to provide a gigawatt per year to these data centers,” Loszak said. He added: “When you do this all under one roof, it essentially allows you to streamline the whole process and make sure that you can move very fast, very efficiently.”

The Aalo Pods act as modular reactors. They are cooled using liquid metal sodium, as opposed to a traditional water system. Each of the companies’ power plants uses five of these reactors to power one turbine.

This amount of power is equivalent to about three hundred wind turbines, according to the Department of Energy.

Texas and the push towards nuclear

Obtaining this power and keeping it on is essential to the state’s plans. Last year, Gov. Abbott announced a focus on expanding two things: nuclear energy and the electric grid. One of the reasons for this push is to supply energy to the growing number of data centers coming to the state.

Read: Transporting oil, natural gas from the Texas Panhandle through the United States

“When you have issues around energy sources (cut) that may fail, nuclear is a way to get around that,” said Mike Blankenship, a Houston-based attorney with Winston and Strawn.

He said that concerns following the 2021 winter storm and the lower reliability of renewables has led many of his clients to see nuclear as the future.

“Right now we’re kind of more in the infancy, because it’s not completely built out on the modular side,” Blankenship said.

Loszak sees modular reactors as the path forward for the industry. By building all the components to the nuclear power plant in house, he hopes to speed up the industry.

“It usually takes around 10 years to deploy a single gigawatt power plant, but when you do things so repeatable and kind of parallelize the construction and manufacturing of these components, you’re able to do a much higher throughput,” Loszak said.