Dive Brief:
- Oklo has non-binding letters of intent for approximately 1,350 MW of microreactor capacity as of this month, a 93% increase from about 700 MW in July 2023, the company said Wednesday in its Q2 2024 earnings update. The company is working to convert these LOIs into power purchase agreements this year and next, it said.
- Notable recent LOIs include one in April to provide 50 MW of power for Diamondback Energy’s Permian Basin oil and gas operations and another in May to provide 100 MW of electricity for Wyoming Hyperscale’s data center operations, both over 20-year terms, the company said Wednesday in a shareholder letter. Oklo also has a “pre-agreement” to provide up to 500 MW of power to Equinix, a data center operator, the company said.
- A “build, own, operate” business model that avoids customer responsibility for power plant operation, a reactor design that can incorporate readily available components and a more efficient licensing approach contribute to Oklo’s appeal, cofounder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said on the company’s Wednesday earnings call.
Dive Insight:
Oklo ended the first half of 2024 with $294.6 million in cash and liquid securities, mostly proceeds from its reverse merger transaction, after spending $17 million in the period, according to the shareholder letter.
Oklo expects to burn through $35 million to $40 million in cash for the full year, the company said.
The July enactment of the ADVANCE Act is a significant tailwind for Oklo moving forward, and Oklo’s May debut on the New York Stock Exchange boosted prospective customers’ confidence in the company, DeWitte and Oklo Chief Financial Officer R. Craig Bealmear said on the call.
“Jacob’s phone was ringing off the hook” after the NYSE listing, Bealmear said.
Some 600 MW of Oklo’s non-binding agreements are with data center operators, which DeWitte described as a good fit for Oklo’s product mix. Its sodium-cooled fast fission reactor — dubbed Aurora — comes in 15-MW and 50-MW configurations, complementing the 10-MW to 20-MW and 35-MW to 50-MW “data halls” that operate as discrete computing units within hyperscale data centers, DeWitte said.
Much of Oklo’s Aurora order book is for the 50-MW configuration, Bealmear said later on the call.
The size match allows data center operators to pair new computing capacity with roughly equivalent electric generation instead of overbuilding the initial power supply with a single 500-MW to 1-GW reactor, DeWitte said. Multiple Aurora powerhouses on a single campus can provide backup power during refueling outages, he added.
Oklo and its customers also stand to benefit from the company’s decision to pursue a faster, more efficient combined licensing process with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, DeWitte said.
Combined licensing rolls review of “the applicant’s qualifications, design safety, environmental impacts, operational programs, site safety, and verification of construction” into a single process, according to the NRC.
Oklo’s approach is expected to reduce its initial licensing timeline by 50% to 85% relative to typical initial nuclear reactor license applications, according to the shareholder presentation. ADVANCE Act reforms may trim subsequent license application timelines to as little as six months, the shareholder letter said.
“The reviews on the subsequent licenses only focus on things that have changed from the initial license,” DeWitte said.
Oklo is in pre-application discussions with the NRC now and expects to file its first combined license application next year, with subsequent license applications to follow later in 2025, he said.
Oklo has engaged with the NRC since 2016, longer than any other non-water-cooled advanced reactor company, according to the shareholder letter. The NRC in 2022 denied Oklo’s COL application for a smaller 1.5-MWe reactor design.
Oklo is aiming to commission a commercial-scale Aurora reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in 2027, which would make it the first advanced nuclear reactor completed in the U.S., it said in the shareholder presentation.
Oklo modeled its Aurora reactor design after the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, which operated at INL from 1964 to 1994, DeWitte said.
Oklo plans to build a demonstration-scale fuel fabrication facility at INL that will use material salvaged from EBR-II, it said in the shareholder letter. Oklo signed an agreement last year with Centrus to purchase U.S.-made high-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, from its Ohio enrichment facility, the only near-term domestic source of the material amid a federal ban on Russian uranium imports.
Oklo expects its plants’ levelized electricity costs to range from $40/MWh to $90/MWh, according to its shareholder presentation. For comparison, the presentation showed the following DOE-estimated per-MWh cost ranges for competing clean, firm generation technologies: $63 to $99 for natural gas with carbon capture, $66 to $109 for non-Oklo advanced nuclear and $69 to $119 for renewables plus storage.
The first 50-MW Aurora powerhouse could cost around $145 million, with lower costs for subsequent plants as economies of scale develop, Bealmear said.
Oklo is evaluating the feasibility of a 100-MW to 200-MW reactor configuration, but the smaller versions are the company’s primary near-term focus, DeWitte said.
