Startup Velar Atomics Said on monday That it achieved criticality – an essential nuclear milestone – with the help of one of the country’s top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which announced last week that it had secured a $130 million funding round with the backing of Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar, claims it is the first nuclear startup to create a significant fission reaction.
It is, more specifically, the first company in the Department of Energy’s special pilot program, which aims to get at least three startups to critical status by July 4 next year, to announce that it has achieved this response. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order signed in May by President Donald Trump, has overturned US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones such as criticality at a faster pace.
“Zero power criticality is the first heartbeat of a reactor, the proof of which is in physics,” Velar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. “This moment marks the beginning of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale, and private sector execution coupled with close federal partnership.”
Criticality is the term used when a nuclear reactor is sustaining a chain reaction – the first step in providing power. The enriched nuclear fuel releases neutrons, which collide with other atoms, which then break apart; The neutrons from that process then collide with other atoms, and start the reaction. This process is known as fragmentation. A properly functioning reactor has enough reactions to continue that fission chain and reach critical state.
“Think about a long chain of dominoes,” says Adam Stein, director of the nuclear energy innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, an eco-modernist policy center. “If you have those dominoes too far apart, one domino won’t hit the next one. If they’re spaced just right, one hits the next, hits the other, and you get the reaction you’re hoping for.”
There is a gap between the type of criticality the Velar reached this week—known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality—and what is actually needed to make nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to make electricity, but in the cold severity that is used to test the reactor’s design and physics, the reaction is not strong enough to produce enough heat to make electricity.
The reactor that reached critical condition this week is not actually Velar’s own model, but a blend of the startup’s fuel and technology with key structural components provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of DOE’s research and development laboratories. The combination reactor builds on a separate fuel test conducted at the lab last year, which will use the same fuel as Velar’s reactor.