It’s just transformative — throw away the transition plans!

A year ago Donald Trump decided to reignite nuclear power research –– his goal in June 2025 was to develop three new advanced nuclear reactors and get them to reach criticality by July 4th this year for the 250th celebrations. In the end they got four across the line. One of them, created by an Australian Bobby Gallagher, was a latecomer to the race, but managed to build a new microreactor design, with some help from the US Energy Department,  in an awe-inspiring 150 days.

Australia is such a backwater, his work wouldn’t even be legal here.

We have more uranium than any country on Earth, but it’s buried under ten million square kilometers of stupid red tape.

The microreactor on the ute in the photo is 1 megawatt with a target cost of 15 cents per kilowatt hour. It is expected to run for five years before refueling, and is called the Unity Nuclear Battery. The plan at the moment is to sell them commercially starting (wow) in 2028. With mass production and fine tuning the team at Deployable Energy hope to get the cost of electricity down eventually to as little as 5 cents a kilowatt hour.

All those batteries, the transmission lines to pointless solar arrays and windmills we don’t need are being superseded even as they are being built. 

Bobby Gallagher sees the next grid moves as “fire to fission” where natural gas is the bridge to small nuclear. The 1MW microreactors can be used for mines and remote communities to replace diesel generators.

Even if only a quarter of this goes to plan, the mass production of microreactors will wipe out any feeble pretense that we need “low emission” unreliable generators when there are near zero emission, cheaper and more reliable alternatives. At this point, the only sensible thing to do is pause our entire grid redevelopment, repair the coal plants, and wait a few years. The last thing we want is to invest $200 billion on an outdated, fire-prone, unreliable, expensive disposable renewables grid destined for landfill. Venezaustralia, here we come?

Graham Lloyd wrote about this in The Australian 

Nuclear power on the back of a truck moves closer to reality in the US

A fleet of reactors can be used depending on whether you need 1MW, 10MW, 100MW or 1000MW of power. It does not require water for cooling, can be buried underground, can replace gas to back up renewables and uses only a tiny fraction of the land needed for other power sources to generate the same output.

Gallagher’s company, Deployable Energy, boasts its microreactor has been designed to use standard fuels, materials and industrial processes already available at commercial scale. The result is a system that can be produced in volume, deployed quickly and operated reliably across a wide range of applications at what the company says will be a competitive cost.

The timeline from here includes full power operations under US Department of Energy authorisations at the INL in 2027, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of a commercial licence in 2028, with 1GW of manufacturing capacity annually from 2030 and initial production facility essentially booked through 2035.

Gallagher says the company has more than $100bn in commercial interest.

The Unity Nuclear Battery is a small reactor not “a battery” but it has the convenience of working like one, except that instead of being a 2, 4 or 8 hour battery, it’s a five year one. 

This may well be the nuclear Armageddon the renewables industry has quietly feared for years.

There have been no new nuclear power designs launched since 1973.

The “Dawn of the Second Nuclear Age” 

By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge

What restarted it was a deadline. In May 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” which directed the DOE to stand up a Reactor Pilot Program and get at least three new test reactors to criticality by July 4th, 2026. When that goal was announced, most of the industry called it a fantasy. The conventional wisdom is that a new reactor takes at least a decade. The order gave them roughly just twelve months. They didn’t just hit the target. They beat it. Four companies reached criticality:

      • Antares Nuclear — the Mark-0, a 500-kilowatt sodium heat-pipe microreactor, critical at INL on June 4th.
      • Valar Atomics — the Ward 250, a 100-kilowatt helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactor, critical in Emery County, Utah on June 18th.
      • Deployable Energy — the Unity Nuclear Battery, a roughly 1-megawatt shipping-container reactor whose founder famously drove the core to Idaho in the bed of a Ford F-150, critical on June 30th.
      • Aalo Atomics — the Critical Test Reactor went critical at INL in the wee hours of July 4th, the very deadline itself.

The DOE was entitled to its victory lap: for the first time in history, a single country brought four distinct advanced-reactor designs to criticality inside one month’s time. That’s never happened before in world history.

For over fifty years the pace of American reactor innovation was zero. Then, on a presidential dare, four companies did the impossible in four weeks. That is the real headline — and it deserves to be spread far and wide.

In one podcast Bobby Gallagher was describing Deployable Energy as more of a “shielding” company than a nuclear generator. His point was that most of the material they built and designed was for shielding, not generation.

Remarkably, he praised the Department of Energy officials in Idaho, and talked about how helpful they had been with arranging approvals and with procurement of essential items. It’s strange to hear someone saying nice things about bureaucrats. It shows what an astonishing effect the right leadership can have (which is a credit to Donald Trump and Chris Wright). Clearly the public servants were as excited about the ambitious goals as the private companies were. Bowl me over… it seems so unheard of?

This article originally appeared at JoNova