Kairos Power Breaks Ground on First Power-Producing Gen IV Reactor Under Google Fleet Deal

New updates have been reported about Kairos Power.

Kairos Power has started construction of its Hermes 2 demonstration plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, marking its first commercial-scale reactor and the first power-producing Gen IV reactor to obtain a Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction permit. Hermes 2 is the company’s initial deployment under its fleet agreement with Google and is designed to deliver up to 50 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority grid to help decarbonize Google data centers in Tennessee and Alabama.

Building directly on experience from the low-power Hermes 1 reactor now under nuclear construction on the same campus, Hermes 2 will be the first fluoride-salt-cooled high-temperature power reactor of Kairos Power’s KP-FHR line, using TRISO fuel and molten fluoride salt to simplify design, reduce capital costs, and enhance inherent safety. The project is intended as the immediate precursor to Kairos Power’s full-scale commercial plants and will be used to de-risk technology, licensing, supply chain, and modular construction, with reactor modules fabricated at the company’s Albuquerque manufacturing campus and shipped to Oak Ridge, where precast concrete and a seismically isolated foundation will support a repeatable, factory-built SMR model that aims to compress schedules, lower nuclear build costs, and underpin a scalable advanced nuclear fleet.