OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Kairos Power is bringing new energy and new partnerships to Oak Ridge. The company, based in Alameda, California, is branching out to Oak Ridge with its new Hermes Reactor.
The plant is being developed where the old K-33 plant was on the K-25 site.
The reactor uses a combination of new technology and development but keeps close to the roots of technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"Our technology does have a very strong historical connection to Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Mike Laufer, CEO of Kairos Power, said. "The program to work on the Molten salt reactors in the 60's, we're using a lot of that foundation that gave us the confidence that we knew that the technology could work and we've been kind of building on that,"
The new plant is in stages of early construction and finishing up design, but Laufer said the company hopes to get it up and running soon.
"There is a learning experience and so we're working through the schedules now in terms of construction but it will be up and running within the next few years," he said.
And the plant will come to impact the local community as well.
"We've projected at least 50, that's part of what we've said publicly," Laufer said. "That said, we see a huge amount of potential for growth in Oak Ridge, and we're excited to see where our future projects take us there as well."
The company said it's excited to work with Google to try and get more reactors like Hermes Online.
"It's the first corporate agreement for the deployment of multiple iterations of the same reactor technology," he said. "What this really does is it sets the stage for Kairos' transition from the design, development and demonstration phase to really the deployment phase."