Aalo breaks ground in Idaho

More details: In Aalo’s funding announcement, the company said it would break ground by the end of August, and it kept to that deadline, sharing news of the milestone in an August 28 press release. Aalo’s accelerated timetable has been set by its selection for the recently created Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.

It is one of 10 companies racing to bring a pilot reactor on line within a year, and it appears to be pulling ahead of the pack, being the only company in the group (so far) to officially announce ground-breaking on a site. Aalo’s pace is noteworthy, considering the Department of Energy’s selections for the Reactor Pilot Program were unveiled only 16 days before Aalo broke ground.

The site: The Aalo-X site is adjacent to INL’s Material and Fuels Complex (MFC). INL provisionally granted this land to Aalo in December 2024. Because the MFC site has already undergone in-depth environmental and seismic review, Aalo has been able to “move forward without extensive preliminary assessments typically required for undisturbed land,” Aalo said in December.

At first blush, this site seems to rift from the DOE’s parameters for the Reactor Pilot Program. The DOE has specified that reactor projects should be at “sites that are located outside of the national laboratories.” However, in a July funding opportunity announcement Q&A, the DOE clarified that companies in the program have the option to pursue siting at a DOE site, potentially opening the door for other companies to partner with national laboratories.

The reactor: Aalo-X will be the precursor power plant for the Aalo Pod, which the company pitches as being “purpose-built for data centers.” Each pod will contain five Aalo-1s, the 10-MWe sodium-cooled reactor at the core of the company’s plans. Aalo-X will be manufactured at the company’s recently unveiled 40,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas.

The company defines the Aalo Pod as an extra-modular reactor (XMR). In a blog post, Aalo explained that the XMR fills a gap left between microreactors, which are generally below 10 MWe, and small modular reactors, which are generally below 300 MWe.

For them, the XMR is “a crossover between microreactors and SMRs,” blending the “factory‑manufacturing techniques from microreactors, the higher power levels of SMRs, and the economic targets of large reactors.”

Quotable: "When Aalo-X achieves criticality next year, it will become the first new sodium-cooled reactor to start operation in the U.S. in over four decades,” commented Yasir Arafat, cofounder and chief technical officer at Aalo Atomics, who previously led the MARVEL project at the INL. “Aalo-X is just the beginning as we are poised to deploy nuclear power on a scale that far exceeds the first atomic age.”