“We are proud to play a major role in America’s nuclear renaissance, going from breaking ground to a sustained chain reaction in just eight months, one of the fastest reactor builds in modern American history,” said Yasir Arafat, president and chief technical officer of Aalo Atomics, in the company’s announcement of its achievement.
"This is exactly what a nuclear renaissance looks like: American companies, moving at American speed, proving novel reactor designs real one after another,” INL Director John Wagner said in a news release congratulating the Aalo team.
About Aalo's criticality: According to Austin, Texas–based Aalo, criticality was achieved on Saturday at 12:20 a.m. MT. The test reactor includes a full-scale core, intended to demonstrate the nuclear components of a 10-MWe reactor. Aalo’s ultimate objective is to include multiple full-scale power reactors in a 50-MWe commercial "Aalo Pod" to power AI data centers.
"We took on the largest scope within the Reactor Pilot Program: We built, licensed, and operated the reactor facility from scratch. We stood up our own safety programs, built 10 MW worth of fuel assemblies, and manufactured and quality-controlled commercial-scale systems in-house," the company said of its achievement.
Work is already underway on a second reactor for Aalo’s Project Ascension. This endeavor will house a commercial-scale 10-MWe reactor at Aalo’s INL site that will produce electricity and power an on-site data center in 2027.
"Criticality has validated our supply chain, reactor physics, control systems, and fueling procedures at commercial scale. We are now expanding into a one-million square-foot factory to apply assembly-line manufacturing to reactor production, which will open the door to mass-producing the Aalo Pod, our fully modular nuclear plant purpose-built for AI data centers," the company said.
A whirlwind 2026: In March, Aalo announced that it had signed fuel fabrication contracts with Global Nuclear Fuel. That same month, Aalo said that Urenco USA had completed enriching the uranium hexafluoride feedstock needed for its fuel and had delivered it to GNF for fuel rod fabrication. The company also announced it had selected Baker Hughes for a 10-MWe steam turbine generator set and associated ancillary systems.
And the others: Four DOE-authorized test reactors have now hit criticality. But what of the other reactor participants in the Reactor Pilot Program and the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad? Nuclear News provided an update on the statuses of their respective reactor technologies last week.
