If you're a California energy technology company building a nuclear reactor in Tennessee, does it make sense to set up — and expand — research, development and manufacturing in New Mexico? If you're Kairos Power, then the answer is 'yes.'
Headquartered in Alameda, Calif., Kairos Power wants to revolutionize how nuclear power is produced. To do that, it's building a low-power, fission-based demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
But to build and run the Hermes reactor, Kairos Power needs components, fuel and a place to test. It chose New Mexico for all of those things.
Some two years after it broke ground on a 128,000-square-foot campus at Albuquerque's Mesa del Sol master-planned development, Kairos Power finished its engineering test unit there in November 2022. The company is now working on two new facilities at Mesa del Sol — a 22,000-square-foot development lab and a 30,000-square-foot facility to create modular components for the Tennessee reactor.
High-quality talent, closeness to its California headquarters and proximity to two national labs pushed Kairos Power toward Albuquerque, Edward Blandford, the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, told Albuquerque Business First.
"It's a high-value manufacturing capability to have in the state," Blandford said. "It's great to be able to stand up that manufacturing in New Mexico."
The company signed a partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in December to produce what is known as TRISO fuel pebbles. The pebbles, made with robust particles used in nuclear fuel that can't melt in reactors, will be created at LANL's Low Enriched Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Combined, Kairos' Albuquerque facilities — the engineering test unit, the development lab for TRISO fuel and the facility to create components — are all part of Kairos' plans for The Volunteer State.
"While [the Hermes project] is in Tennessee, a lot of the manufacturing and a lot of the vertical integration effort is actually in Albuquerque," Blandford said. "A lot of our manufacturing activity and focus is really to enable us to be able to stand up that capability in Tennessee."
New Mexico supported Kairos' Mesa del Sol development with $4 million in Local Economic Development Act incentives. The City of Albuquerque, too, put $1 million in LEDA incentives behind the development, and Kairos secured an additional $1 million for building in an opportunity zone, per previous Business First reporting.
Kairos currently employs 88 people at its Mesa del Sol campus, Blandford said — 23 more than it originally committed to.
"We tend to like to over-deliver and under-promise," he said. "It was important to us that we didn't go the other direction."
More hiring could continue to support these two new facilities, Blandford said. Kairos didn't share the total number of new employees it plans to hire, but the company currently has more than a dozen listings for jobs in Albuquerque that range from business operations to regulatory affairs to technology development.
Kairos doesn't post salaries for those open positions on its website.
"We are trying to really disrupt the industry with a rapid development approach," said Lou Martinez Sancho, the vice president of strategy and innovation at Kairos Power. "That is what we are doing in Albuquerque with our non-nuclear iterations, but also with a strong committed vertical integration strategy."
The company ultimately wants to commercialize its novel advanced reactor technology, which uses TRISO fuel in combination with low-pressure fluoride salt coolant, Blandford said.
And it wants to have the Hermes reactor operational by 2026 in order to demonstrate that tech, according to its website.
"One of the singular biggest challenges that the nuclear industry faces right now is really being able to show that they're cost competitive," Blandford said. "We believe that our Hermes demonstration reactor is the appropriate vehicle to demonstrate that we're able to control costs for nuclear construction. We believe it's an integral component to get into that commercial demonstration."
