Aalo Atomics discusses the road ahead

New updates: At the core of Aalo's plans is a 10-MWe, low-enriched uranium-fueled, sodium-cooled reactor design. The first full-scale, demonstration deployment of that design is the Aalo-X. The company has been racing toward a criticality goal of July 4, 2026, set by the Reactor Pilot Program, of which it is a part. In August 2025, the company announced it had broken ground at Idaho National Laboratory on the Aalo-X facility.

Aalo's latest wave of announcements kicked off on February 18 with the release of its 2026 plan, a roadmap charting its path to criticality and beyond. In that plan, Aalo said that it will meet the July 4 criticality goal set by the DOE. However, the company also said that the Aalo-X will not be completed until the end of 2026. While the roadmap is not entirely clear on the details of Aalo's next steps, the company likely intends to achieve zero power criticality by July 4 with its separate Aalo-X Critical Assembly.

On March 3, Aalo announced that it had signed fuel fabrication contracts with Global Nuclear Fuel, an affiliate of GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy. Aalo has designed the fuel rods that GNF will fabricate and deliver in "early 2026." On March 10, Aalo said that Urenco USA had completed enriching the uranium hexafluoride feedstock needed for its fuel and had delivered it to GE Vernova for fuel rod fabrication.

On March 4, Aalo announced that it had selected Baker Hughes to supply it with a 10-MWe steam turbine generator set and associated ancillary systems. These systems will be used for the energy island of the Aalo-X. Baker Hughes will deliver the turbine by the end of 2026.

Also on March 4, Aalo said that its Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis (PDSA) had been officially approved by the DOE. PDSA approval represents DOE validation of the company's safety case for its reactor. The next step in regulatory approval for Aalo is the approval of a final documented safety analysis and readiness assessment. In January, Aalo completed a final design review with DOE and NRC reviewers. It is now incorporating the feedback from that review into its final assessment.

RIC talk: At the RIC, Arafat participated in a session titled "One Government, One Mission: Advancing Safe Deployment of Nuclear Energy." He talked about many of the updates covered above, discussed the future of reactor regulation, and dove deeper on Aalo's big-picture goals and near-term plans.

While Aalo currently has a completed pilot factory constructing its prototype projects, Arafat said that the company plans to bring a new, full-scale, 1-million-square-foot factory on line by 2028 named the GigaWatt Factory. There, Aalo plans to be "spitting out at least a hundred reactors a year when it reaches its max capacity," Arafat said.

Arafat also set an "audacious" goal of having 1 gigawatt on line by the end of this decade. To that end, he said, "we are gearing up towards submitting our first commercial license [application] this year" to the NRC, a plan that was previously unknown to the public. That application would build on substantial NRC collaboration that has taken place throughout the DOE authorization work in the Reactor Pilot Program.