On August 26, Radiant Industries announced a contract worth up to $750 million with the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit to build and deploy 15 Kaleidos nuclear microreactors at military installations by 2030. It's the largest single award under the Army's Janus Program, whose purpose is exactly what the name of Radiant's product implies: energy that a base can rely on when the grid can't be.
I've been waiting a long time to write this post.
In 2020 I met Doug Bernauer. He had just left SpaceX, where he'd spent years working on the problem of how you generate power on Mars, and he had concluded that the answer — a small, transportable nuclear reactor that doesn't need water and can be moved by truck — was something the world needed here on Earth first, and that nobody was building it. He was starting a company to do it. I wrote the first check. Not the first institutional round, not the first "priced" round — the very first check into Radiant, before there was much more than Doug, a couple of fellow SpaceX engineers and a conviction.
That conviction has been remarkably consistent. Kaleidos today is a 1 MW helium-cooled reactor running on TRISO fuel, ceramic-coated particles that tolerate temperatures above 3,000°F. It's passively air-cooled, fits in a shipping container, runs for five years between refuelings and is designed to be built in a factory rather than on a construction site. That last point is the whole thesis. The nuclear industry has spent seventy years building one-of-a-kind cathedrals. Doug wanted to build a product.
The proof is arriving in sequence. In July, Radiant took delivery of its first commercial-grade TRISO fuel. On August 12, the first Kaleidos left El Segundo on a flatbed for Idaho National Laboratory's DOME test bed — the first new reactor design selected to run there — where it will go from zero-power criticality to full power and a 150-hour continuous autonomous run. Two weeks after it hit the road, the Army signed. The reactors headed to Army bases are the same design as the one being tested in Idaho and the same one that will go to Buckley Space Force Base under Radiant's Air Force agreement.
Six years from a first check to a $750 million order for a nuclear reactor product line. The founders who get there are the ones who know precisely what they're building on day one and refuse to let it drift. Congratulations to Doug, Tori, Mike and the whole team in El Segundo and Oak Ridge. This is a milestone for Radiant, and a meaningful one for American energy resilience.