Terrestrial Power, a small nuclear startup, merged with an acquisition firm on Wednesday.
The Canadian firm is growing small modular reactors and expects to internet $280 million from the deal. Earlier than the SPAC merger, Terrestrial Power had raised $94 million, in keeping with PitchBook. The mixed entity expects to checklist 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 gas is combined with numerous salts, equivalent to lithium fluoride or sodium fluoride, that serve to droop the nuclear gas and act because the reactor’s major coolant.
Terrestrial Power’s reactor core is designed to be totally changed each seven years, partly to move off a few of the issues earlier molten salt reactors skilled like corrosion. The reactor core contains not solely the gas and graphite modulators that regulate the velocity of the fission reactions, but additionally the warmth exchangers and pumps that preserve the salt cool and flowing.
The startup is concentrating on a spread of markets, together with electrical energy, knowledge facilities, and industrial functions that require warmth.
There are a lot of extant proposals to construct commercial-scale molten salt reactors, however up to now, none has been constructed. The fundamental know-how was invented within the Nineteen Fifties, however two experiments from that period had been plagued with issues.
Nuclear energy has obtained renewed consideration as electrification of buildings and transportation, coupled with the speedy development of information facilities, has despatched electrical energy demand hovering.
Tech firms have develop into more and more within the know-how as a attainable resolution 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.
