Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics
@MattLoszak • 28,625 subscribers
Cofounder & CEO @AaloAtomics. Building mass-manufactured nuclear plants to create superabundance for humanity.
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Very excited to announce that at 12:20am on the 4th of July, Aalo achieved criticality on our first full-scale reactor. We cut it close, but we pulled it off!! Working towards this goal with such an incredible group of humans has been the most fulfilling period of my life. This moment has been three years in the making. Last year, Executive Order 14301 called for at least three new reactors to go critical before July 4th, 2026. As of late last Friday night, that goal has been surpassed! When the EO was announced, we immediately sat down to figure out what the most ambitious scope would be, while still being potentially achievable by July 4th. Some of the team proposed doing simplified designs with smaller fuel loads, or building in existing facilities. One thing was clear: We wouldn't have time to integrate a full-scale sodium heat-removal loop to bring the reactor to its full 30 MWt. So here’s where we landed: ➡️ We purchased the entire commercial-scale fuel load. This is enough fuel to operate at 30 MWt / 10 MWe for 3 years before refueling. To my knowledge, it’s the largest fuel load that’s been taken critical in the DOE pilot program, by far. ➡️ We built a full-scale reactor vessel in our factory, and loaded in our commercial graphite layout. All the dimensions, vessel thickness, and manufacturing techniques are essentially the same as we will use for the imminent commercial version. There will be a few minor tweaks for sodium flow and full-power, but nothing major. ➡️ We built an entirely new reactor facility at the Idaho National Lab. Building a building is easy. Building a new reactor facility comes with a mountain of paperwork, policies, operation and training procedures, security, instrumentation and control, and more. Zero-power criticality might seem like a small step, but I can tell you, going through the exercise of building a reactor and taking it to criticality has been extremely valuable. The learnings on regulatory, ops, manufacturing, supply chain, QA, economics, engineering, and design will accelerate our path through to the final iteration at full-power. America is blessed to have a recent Cambrian explosion of startups in nuclear, all going after different markets, technologies, and strategies. I’m excited that sodium, gas, salt, and new PWRs are all getting pushed forward once again. The best outcome for humanity is to have all these advance in parallel, as quickly as possible, while maintaining safety. Thanks again to our amazing team, DOE, INL, BEA, and everyone else who helped us get to where we are today. This could not have happened anywhere else. Happy birthday, America!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 There has never been a better time for nuclear energy. The Second Atomic Age has begun, and this one will be here to stay.
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics477,800 views • 2 months ago
Tomorrow is a big day for Aalo, and the future of clean energy on Earth.
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics78,060 views • 2 months ago
Here's my full testimony and transcript from the House Science Committee hearing today. Grateful for the opportunity to share our story. -- Chairman Weber, Ranking Member Ross, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. Less than three years ago, Aalo Atomics was two people. Today, we are 200, and we are about to expand into a MILLION square foot manufacturing facility. On the 4th of July, at 12:20 a.m. near Idaho National Lab, we brought our first reactor to initial criticality. We moved from groundbreaking to a sustained nuclear chain reaction in less than eight months. The reactor used a full-scale core, representative of our 10-megawatt-electric commercial design. One year ago, the Department of Energy established a clear authorization pathway, and set deadlines. Aalo brought the design, the team, the capital, and the execution. Together, we demonstrated that America can build and test new reactors quickly. This work matters. Aalo is developing a critically important technology for the US people: sodium reactors, starting in the thermal spectrum, and eventually expanding to the fast spectrum. With this latter technology, we will be able to use nuclear waste as fuel. Few people realize that there is as much energy contained in US nuclear waste as there is in Global known Oil and Gas reserves. Additionally, the volume of nuclear waste would be reduced significantly by using it as fuel. Lastly, by unlocking Thorium and U-238, we can extend the usable lifespan of nuclear fuel on earth from 100 years, to millions of years. Sodium fast breeder technology unlocks all these things, and Aalo will push hard to make this a reality. To do this, we need HALEU, 20% enriched fuel. Fortunately, that supply chain is getting spun up as we speak by several great American companies. In the meantime, we are using off-the-shelf UO2, LEU. Why? Because the nation has a far more pressing challenge than dealing with nuclear waste, or the limitations of oil and gas in the long term. Artificial Intelligence has arisen in the past 3 years, and is now accelerating faster than ever. AI is an incredibly important national security issue. It is imperative that we not lose to China on this massively impactful technology. The best way to power the development of more AI is with nuclear. Advanced nuclear needs no water, uses a small amount of land, is clean, baseload, and we are proving that it can be affordable and fast to deploy. By using off-the-shelf UO2 fuel, Aalo’s reactors will be able to scale rapidly to meet the growing demand of AI. And thanks to the choice of sodium as our coolant, we will have a very compact, mass-manufacturable design. We are excited to continue working hard to bring these incredible technologies to bear for the American people. Based on our experience, I would offer Congress three priorities to help us continue this momentum. First, ensure that the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program remains a durable pathway, connecting the dots from initial criticality through to sustained full-power operations. Second, ensure that the demonstration data generated under DOE oversight can be credited or adopted in subsequent NRC licensing. Third, continue supporting the full-stack domestic nuclear fuel cycle, including advanced fuels such as HALEU, and ultimately recycling and waste burning. America pioneered much of the world’s nuclear technology. We now have an opportunity to lead again. We are grateful to Congress, the Administration, Secretary Wright, Bob Boston, the Department of Energy, Idaho National Lab, and the career public servants who helped make our demonstration possible. Aalo intends to repay that trust by building reactors, factories, creating American jobs, and by helping restore U.S. leadership in nuclear energy. Thank you.
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics19,875 views • 20 days ago
When EBR-II scientists reflected on shutting it down, they cried. They had demonstrated a reactor with "walk away" safety, the ability to use nuclear waste as fuel, and just how economical sodium cooled reactors could be. But they had to shut it down. The story in videos: 🧵
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics30,947 views • 2 months ago
NEW VIDEO At Aalo, we're using AI to build nuclear faster. And the more nuclear we deploy to power data centers, the better AI will get. A positive reinforcement loop is incoming. A few ways we're using AI: ➡️ Aalo Bot attends every meeting, listens, and soon will be able to talk. We'll ask it questions like "would this design change work given all the constraints you've heard from other teams?" or "what are the most pressing blockers for the company right now, stack ranked?", and more. ➡️ We're using AI to write software across the entire company. Not just replacing SaaS, but AI is also currently writing the code to automate physical robotic work done in our factory, including welding. This will unlock a scale of production and consistency of quality beyond what’s been possible in nuclear in the past. The video below features Gregory Wildes and Russell Rowland, along with some of the work Rob Kessler has been doing behind the scenes. Enjoy!
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics16,551 views • 3 months ago
Most sodium reactors are "fast spectrum", meaning they have no moderator. Aalo reactors are "thermal spectrum", and we use graphite as the moderator. Why? Because using a moderator allows us to leverage the existing fuel supply chain, of low enrichment (5-10%) UO2. Our target market is data centers, so the only fuel choice that could scale fast enough to meet that level of demand was the off-the-shelf fuel used by all the water based reactors around the world today. Here's a quick video showing the graphite being loaded into our nuclear reactor, on pace for criticality by July 4th as per the executive orders!
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics10,646 views • 4 months ago
This nuclear fuel (UZrH) has an incredible property: It can't melt itself down. But why isn't it used in reactors everywhere? In this video, we visit UT Austin's UZrH nuclear reactor and put it to the test: we actually TRY to make it melt down. Then we explore the history of UZrH, the challenges of using it in a power-generating reactor, and the upside if these challenges are overcome. cc Aalo Atomics Yasir Arafat Christian Keil
Matt Loszak | Aalo Atomics24,943 views • 1 year ago
Here's a small sample of our Monday unveiling. Full video will be posted to YouTube soon! Obviously we're just getting started and have a lot of work to do, but this was a super fun event for the whole team to showcase the hard work thus far. Can't wait for what's coming!
Matt Loszak10,668 views • 1 year ago
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