Builds nuclear reactors that recycle their own spent fuel on-site, producing clean power with no long-term nuclear waste.
What stands out
- Most companies in its industry are rule-setting businesses; this one is a production business
At a glance
Builds nuclear reactors that recycle their own spent fuel on-site, producing clean power with no long-term nuclear waste.
Oklo builds small nuclear reactors that run on liquid sodium coolant instead of water, and on-site electrorefining cells that melt down spent fuel assemblies and reconstitute the recovered fissile material into fresh fuel rods, so each reactor site continuously consumes its own waste rather than shipping spent assemblies elsewhere. The sodium cooling system requires metallic uranium fuel rather than the ceramic pellets used in conventional reactors, and metallic fuel in turn requires that electrorefining process rather than standard aqueous reprocessing — meaning the three elements of the design, sodium cooling, metallic fuel, and on-site recycling, were locked together the moment Oklo submitted the Aurora reference design to the NRC for approval under 10 CFR Part 53. Because no U.S. regulator has ever licensed either liquid sodium cooling or pyrometallurgical recycling at commercial scale, that NRC approval is the single bottleneck through which every new reactor site must pass before construction can begin. If the NRC declines to authorize the recycling process specifically — whether over proliferation concerns or molten-salt handling safety — spent fuel becomes regulated waste, fresh enriched uranium must be sourced externally under DOE supply constraints, and the fixed-price economics written into decade-long power purchase agreements no longer hold.
How does this company make money?
The primary income comes from fixed-price power purchase agreements with industrial customers — contracts that run 10 to 20 years and guarantee a set price for electricity. On top of that, the company charges waste processing fees to outside parties who want their spent nuclear fuel converted into usable Aurora reactor fuel through the on-site pyrometallurgical recycling service.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Getting an Aurora reactor licensed at a specific site takes 3-5 years of NRC review, and that licence cannot be handed to a different reactor vendor if a customer changes its mind. The liquid sodium cooling infrastructure and fuel handling systems built for Aurora are physically incompatible with conventional light-water reactors, so switching would mean tearing out and rebuilding the core infrastructure. On top of that, power purchase agreements lock customers into decade-long fuel cycles that cannot simply be cancelled — stopping early requires regulatory approval.
What limits this company?
Before a single commercial Aurora reactor can operate, the NRC must approve both the liquid sodium cooling system and the on-site pyrometallurgical recycling process under 10 CFR Part 53. Neither technology has ever been licensed commercially in the United States. Until that approval comes through, no new site can be built, no matter how much money is available.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot run without highly enriched uranium fuel supplied by DOE or licensed enrichment facilities. It needs liquid sodium coolant kept in inert atmosphere at every site. It requires NRC construction and operating licences for each individual reactor location. It depends on specialized metallic fuel fabrication capability and on the pyrometallurgical fuel recycling equipment installed on-site to close the waste loop.
Who depends on this company?
Data centers running 24/7 would have to fall back on backup diesel generators and accept greater grid reliability risk. Remote mining operations would return to trucking diesel fuel in to run their power generation. Defense installations would lose the ability to operate independently of the grid and would need to reestablish fossil fuel supply lines.
How does this company scale?
Once the NRC approves the Aurora reference design, the reactor blueprints and safety analysis can be copied to new sites without being reinvented each time. What does not replicate cheaply is the people: liquid sodium handling and pyrometallurgical recycling require specialized nuclear engineers who cannot be hired quickly from conventional power plant workforces or trained on a short timeline.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
DOE controls how much HALEU — uranium enriched to between 5% and 20% — is available, and supply constraints there would limit how much fresh feedstock the company could procure if the recycling loop ever needed supplementing. IAEA safeguards on nuclear fuel cycle activities could restrict how recycling operations are conducted across international sites. Federal tax credits for nuclear power production affect whether the economics of long-term deals with industrial customers stay attractive, and any policy change there would ripple through project financing.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If the NRC refuses to authorize pyrometallurgical electrorefining as part of each site's operating licence — because of proliferation concerns raised under IAEA safeguards, a rule change in 10 CFR Part 53, or a safety finding about molten-salt electrolyte handling — the fuel cycle breaks. Spent fuel would pile up as regulated waste needing off-site storage, the company would have to buy fresh HALEU from outside suppliers under tight DOE supply constraints, and the fixed-price economics behind every 10-20 year power purchase agreement would no longer hold.
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Sign inStructural observations derived from financial data, industry benchmarks, and supply chain position.
Companies that share the same coordination system — how they create, deliver, or capture value.
Companies that share active interpretations — structural patterns currently present in both stocks.
The electricity grid is shaped by three structural constraints that no other supply chain faces simultaneously: electricity cannot be stored at scale and must be consumed the instant it is generated, power degrades over distance with capacity set by the weakest link in the transmission path, and grid topology was built over a century and cannot be quickly reconfigured.
The nuclear energy supply chain is shaped by three structural constraints that most industries never encounter: regulatory and licensing timelines that stretch beyond a decade before a reactor generates a single watt, a fuel cycle where each step — mining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication — is restricted by both physics and international treaty, and a decommissioning obligation embedded from the moment a plant is approved, binding operators to costs that extend decades beyond the last kilowatt-hour sold.
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