Terrestrial Power, a small nuclear startup, merged with an acquisition firm on Wednesday.
The Canadian firm is creating small modular reactors and expects to web $280 million from the deal. Earlier than the SPAC merger, Terrestrial Energy had raised $94 million, in line with PitchBook. The mixed entity expects to listing on Nasdaq beneath the image ISMR.
The ticker is a reference to Terrestrial Power’s taste of small modular reactor (SMR), which it calls an integral molten salt reactor. In such a tool, uranium gasoline is combined with varied salts, akin to lithium fluoride or sodium fluoride, that serve to droop the nuclear gasoline and act because the reactor’s major coolant.
Terrestrial Power’s reactor core is designed to be completely changed each seven years, partly to go off a few of the issues earlier molten salt reactors skilled like corrosion. The reactor core consists of not solely the gasoline and graphite modulators that regulate the pace of the fission reactions, but additionally the warmth exchangers and pumps that preserve the salt cool and flowing.
The startup is focusing on a variety of markets, together with electrical energy, knowledge facilities, and industrial functions that require warmth.
There are numerous extant proposals to construct commercial-scale molten salt reactors, however thus far, none has been constructed. The essential expertise was invented within the Nineteen Fifties, however two experiments from that period have been plagued with problems.
Nuclear energy has acquired renewed consideration as electrification of buildings and transportation, coupled with the rapid growth of data centers, has despatched electrical energy demand hovering.
Tech firms have change into more and more within the expertise as a attainable answer to the electrical energy necessities of AI coaching and inference. Google, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all picked a horse within the race to develop superior nuclear reactors.
Terrestrial Power isn’t the primary SMR startup to SPAC — the Altman-backed Oklo accomplished its deal in 2024 — and given present hype round nuclear energy, it’s attainable it received’t be the final.
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