A company with a vision of installing “discreet, bespoke,” small, nuclear reactors 1 mile underground for data centers and other electricity-hungry industries plans to put its first reactors in Kansas, Texas and Utah.
Deep Fission, which says its technology could meet the “explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” has signed letters of intent with undisclosed partners in each of those states.
In email exchanges, the company said it will not currently disclose the partner and location in Kansas, but would “share more information soon.”
The Kansas News Service asked Deep Fission whether it intends to engage in community outreach and what forms that outreach would take.
“Our approach to community engagement always involves early, open conversations,” Vice President for Strategic Affairs Chloe Etsekson Frader wrote, “with the opportunity for people to ask questions, share feedback, and understand the project in detail.”
“We focus on listening, sharing clear information, and understanding local priorities,” she wrote, “to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with these communities.”
The Kansas News Service asked whether the company is in touch with any Kansas state agencies about its intentions, and which state and local agencies it will need to liaise with or report to, in order to install an underground nuclear reactor in Kansas.
Deep Fission didn’t answer but said its approach “is built on collaboration and compliance from the outset.”
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration didn’t respond to questions last week about whether it has any information about the project.
Deep Fission is one of two nuclear companies that have announced plans related to Kansas in the past month. The other is TerraPower.
These two companies’ plans are very different. While Deep Fission envisions small reactors tailored to provide on-site power to a data center or other user, TerraPower has reached out to Kansas seeking to build a utility-scale nuclear plant delivering energy in Evergy’s service area.
TerraPower has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kansas Department of Commerce and Evergy to explore the prospects.
Deep Fission enters the scene
Deep Fission is a new company working toward installing its first sites.
The company wants to create “scalable onsite power” by putting nuclear reactors into 30-inch boreholes drilled 1 mile deep.
It says this ensures “billions of tons of natural shielding and passive containment” that add to the reactor’s safety. Plus, it takes up less surface area and lowers costs.
In a recent filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its model is “uniquely suited to meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence (“AI”) workloads, energy-intense manufacturing, and energy-constrained regions.”
It suggests its approach can help with potential public opposition to nuclear installations.
“With site flexibility and no above-ground reactor visibility, Deep Fission Reactors overcome many of the siting and public acceptance challenges facing traditional nuclear power solutions,” the filing said.
Deep Fission was founded by energy and environment entrepreneur Liz Muller and her father, Rich Muller, a physics professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 1982 winner of what is commonly called the MacArthur “Genius Grant.”
The pair also founded a nuclear waste disposal company based on the same idea of using deep boreholes, albeit in that case to contain nuclear waste rather than reactors.
Deep Fission’s advisory board is stacked with high-profile names, including physicists and energy experts. Among these are two Nobel laureates in physics, one of whom is former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who served during the Obama administration.
The company’s vice president of engineering is a former executive at Kairos Power, one of the industry leaders in the race to commercialize next-generation nuclear energy designs.
Deep Fission was one of 11 projects picked in August for President Donald Trump’s nuclear pilot program. The program doesn’t fund the companies but aims to expedite their testing and ultimately offer a fasttrack to commercial licensing. And it aims to get at least three reactors operating at a state of steady fission before the Fourth of July next year.
But to make this happen, Deep Fission will need to climb a steep financial hill. And the Trump announcement has significantly sped up the company’s timeline.
A month after the Trump announcement, the company went public in a nonstandard maneuver called a reverse merger, that involves using a shell company and that requires disclosing less information to regulators in the process. It’s generally a faster, cheaper way to go public than the traditional initial public offering route.
Asked why Deep Fission chose a reverse merger, given that this form of going public can raise some questions for investors, Frader replied that the pilot program altered Deep Fission’s timeline.
“Initially, we were targeting 2029 for our first reactor, but the program allows us to build one in 2026,” she said. “The reverse merger gave us a faster path to align our financing with this accelerated timeline.”
Deep Fission’s shares sold for well under typical prices and raised $30 million, Tech Crunch reported, and the company plans to list on a lesser known stock exchange for smaller firms.
Frader said the company intends to start there and then switch to the NASDAQ Stock Market.
Tech Crunch reported that the details of Deep Fission’s go-public maneuver “suggest that Deep Fission wasn’t able to raise cash from new or existing shareholders, who first capitalized the company with a $4 million check last year.”
BloombergNEF, which researches and covers the energy sector, wrote last week that the industry is seeing a spate of nuclear companies going public through reverse mergers. It has documented six examples that are complete or are in the works.
BloombergNEF says a flurry of these maneuvers also happened in 2021 with climate tech startups. Most of those companies’ stocks didn’t fare well, but BloombergNEF sees initial signs that this new round might pan out differently. It says a few of the nuclear companies are seeing initial boosts to their stock prices amid the interest in finding energy sources for AI.
Deep Fission’s underground design
Deep Fission says its underground design could be scaled up to provide a lot of energy with little space. It says, for example, that it could nestle 100 nuclear reactors into 1-mile-deep holes on less than 3 acres of land and generate 1.5 billion watts of electric power.
For reference, the U.S. Department of Energy says it takes 294 wind turbines of the typical size installed nowadays to generate 1 billion watts.
Parts of Kansas experience earthquakes. The Kansas News Service asked the company what kind of analysis it has conducted on the geological stability of the site in Kansas.
“Deep Fission always conducts rigorous geological analysis when evaluating potential sites,” the company said, “including seismic activity and other environmental factors.”
The company’s federal filing last month said it plans to build its first reactor sites at locations “with existing industrial use and limited environmental sensitivity.” Its goal is to qualify for a streamlined environmental regulatory process or exemptions.
Since Trump wants to see three reactors up and running by the Fourth of July, the Kansas News Service asked Deep Fission whether this is the timeline for its work in Kansas.
The company said it is aiming for that date at one of its sites, but wouldn’t say whether this means the Kansas location.
TerraPower and its Kansas plan
TerraPower, the other nuclear company eyeing Kansas, was cofounded by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
This summer it broke ground on a $4 billion nuclear facility in Wyoming as a demonstration project that is cofunded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The company’s technology envelops uranium in liquid sodium instead of water. This liquid has a far higher boiling point, which the company says adds to the reactor’s safety.
The company’s design also would also allow for scaling up and down the plant’s power output. That function appeals to utility companies.
It would make it possible to adjust to the ebb and flow of electricity demand and to the sunny and windy days when solar and wind farms churn out lots of power. Traditional nuclear power plants, such as Evergy’s Wolf Creek Nuclear Generating Station, cannot do that.
Its goal in Kansas is to explore the prospects for a utility-scale advanced nuclear facility, search for appropriate reactor sites and gauge the interest of those communities in having such a facility. TerraPower is looking for sites on the Kansas side of Evergy’s two-state service area, which would mean somewhere in eastern or central Kansas.
The push for advanced nuclear power
Advanced nuclear power and small, modular reactors represent a new chapter in U.S. nuclear energy that remains largely in the design and testing phases.
The next-generation designs are meant to address key challenges with nuclear power plants, including the fact that traditional facilities were so large and complex to build.
Companies working on the newer designs argue that these will be safe yet faster to build. The vision has received support from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal level, including both the Biden and Trump administrations.
NucNet, an independent news outlet covering the nuclear industry, reports that state governments are interested, too.
Several states are considering legislation or incentives for advanced nuclear power. This includes Kansas’ neighbor, Oklahoma, which passed a law this year directing its utility and energy regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, to explore the prospects.
Kansas currently has one traditional nuclear power plant, Wolf Creek, about 60 miles south of Topeka. Wolf Creek generates about one-fifth of the state’s electricity.
Although nuclear facilities don’t churn out emissions, the idea of bringing more nuclear power is already meeting with tough questions from Kansas-based clean energy advocates that have lobbied for years to grow the state’s wind and solar power.
They’re concerned that nuclear energy is expensive, and Evergy’s rates continue to rise. The groups argue that Kansas needs to provide more affordable, clean energy because many low-income households are already struggling to pay their utility bills and climate change promises worse summer heat waves.
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
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