Company manufacturing nuclear fuel at LANL to expand in New Mexico

Sep. 19—As part of a New Mexico expansion, a Califonia-based energy company is building out a space at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Kairos Power LLC, a renewable energy and manufacturing company based in Alameda, Calif., announced this week it plans to build new manufacturing and development facilities for its Albuquerque location, adding 100 jobs in the process and generating an estimated $4.2 billion in economic development in the state over the next 10 years.

In 2019, the company announced it would be locating a new engineering center in the Mesa del Sol community in Albuquerque. At that time, the company anticipated it would be creating more than 65 jobs; now, it has invested more than $125 million in the campus and employs more than 130 people. It is currently hiring for several roles, including engineers, fabricators and welders.

What does that have to do with its neighbor to the north, Los Alamos National Laboratory?

Kairos Power is the first customer of LANL’s low-enriched fuel fabrication facility, where enriched uranium is converted into fuel for nuclear reactors, and is making “significant investments” to in the space, spokesperson Christopher Ortiz wrote in an email.

Kairos is working to commercialize a high-temperature, fluoride salt-cooled reactor.

In 2022, the national lab and the energy company inked a deal to supply a planned demonstration reactor with tri-structural isotropic particle fuel pebbles — nuclear fuel made up of uranium, carbon and oxygen — produced by Kairos at LANL’s fabrication facility.

The company started construction on the Hermes demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tenn., earlier this year.

The ring-shaped fuel pebbles will be manufactured at LANL using processes developed at the Albuquerque location. Special nuclear material, including plutonium, uranium-233 or enriched uranium, will not be housed in Albuquerque, according to a company news release.

As for how the fuel will be transported cross country, Ortiz said “those details are still under development.”

Both Alameda County, Calif., and Oak Ridge, where Kairos Power has another location, are home to national laboratories. The company’s fourth location is in Charlotte, N.C., which is home to a renewable power laboratory at the William States Lee College of Engineering.

Ortiz said Albuquerque was selected due to its proximity to LANL and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as California headquarters; an “existing ecosystem of clean energy innovation”; and a talent pipeline from the University of New Mexico’s nuclear engineering program and other educational institutions.