Santa Clara, California-based Oklo’s Groves Isotope Test Reactor reached criticality on Aug. 5 at the company’s plant in Lockhart, Texas, and will produce isotopes for medicine, advanced manufacturing, scientific research, space exploration, and national security needs.
Unlike massive cement-siloed, utility-scale reactors such as the Westinghouse AP1000, the Groves reactor is a circular 22.5-foot-diameter nuclear generator that can be shipped by truck or rail and planted in a 35-foot-deep reinforced concrete cavity, making it a distinct entry in an expanding range of small, portable reactors on the cusp of being retail ready.
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One of those 5 new reactors has actually generated a small amount of electricity. The Valar Atomics Ward 250 reactor provided the heat for a thermoelectric generator, which produced enough electricity to power a computer.
From the link:
On stage at the San Rafael Energy Lab outside Orangeville, a Valar team member plugged an Nvidia Spark desktop unit, running the company’s Blackwell architecture, into a circuit fed from the reactor hall.
Inside that hall sits Ward 250, a TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactor cooled with pressurized helium instead of water. The hot helium feeds a thermoelectric generator, and usable current comes out the other end.
Valar says the reactor was running at 37% of its intended output during the show, which founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor put at roughly 100 kilowatts of thermal energy. The current, Taylor told the crowd in remarks carried by Tom’s Hardware, was at that moment “powering Nvidia’s Blackwell chip, which is currently serving this website.”
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Thermoelectric generators are used on certain NASA spacecraft to provide electric power. The rovers currently on Mars have such generators. They do produce electric current, but the efficiency is not very good, at around 5 to 7% efficient.
Valar’s full sized reactor will very likely use a more conventional method of converting heat to electricity.
_ Pete
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