Radiant Nuclear Pebble Bed Shipping Container Sized Reactor
Radiant is developing Kaleidos, a portable 1.2-megawatt gas-cooled microreactor, as a potential replacement for diesel generators. It is a pebble bed high temperature gas reactor.
by Brian Wang
Radiant is developing Kaleidos, a portable 1.2-megawatt gas-cooled microreactor, as a potential replacement for diesel generators. It is a pebble bed high temperature gas reactor.
All the components of the compact design would be packaged in a single shipping container, making rapid deployment to remote locations or for disaster relief locations possible.
The company is currently working with Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory through a GAIN voucher to develop computational analysis tools to advance the reactor’s design.
Kaleidos is one of three microreactor designs that could potentially test in the Department’s NRIC DOME — the world’s first microreactor test bed.
Testing could start as early as 2026 and commercialization is targeted for 2028.
In 2023, Radiant Industries, raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total capital raised to $54 million with an additional $2.3M in government awards. Founders Fund, Decisive Point, McKinley Alaska, Draper Associates, Cantos, and BoostVC also participated in the round. They will firm up siting the factory and the first five reactors, developing microgrid controls and electricity generating turbomachinery, de-risk fuel sourcing, and shorten the timeline between fueled test and production scale up. Radiant is targeting commercial unit production in 2028.
China has a commercial reactor, HTR-PM. It has been operating since commercially since 2023. They built a 10 MW prototype that started running at full power in 2003. The HTR-PM is a high-temperature gas-cooled (HTGR) pebble-bed reactor, the world’s first power plant of this kind. It is a generation IV design. The technology is based on the HTR-10 prototype reactor.
X-energy is another US pebble bed reactor startup. X-Energy has a lot of funding and has grants and funding from the DOD (Dept of Defense) and the DOE (Dept of Energy). There are concerns that nuclear small modular reactors are not able to meet the low cost goals
Radiant reached a latest technical milestone in June 2024. They are performance testingthe Kaleidos helium circulator at full pressure and temperature. The helium circulator is a centrifugal impeller machine powered by a hermetic motor. Helium was chosen as the primary loop coolant gas thanks to its high specific heat capacity and safety benefits, including a its zero neutron absorption cross-section. The circulator and Kaleidos have been designed to operate for 20 years, with a maintenance interval aligned to core refueling at Radiant’s factory.
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