Apollo Atomics founders, Aseel Halimi and Drew Walker, believe that the problem is that companies are operating on the wrong side of the equation. Instead of designing a new nuclear reactor, the company is focusing on rethinking the way thermal energy is converted into electricity.
Halimi, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch: “We are focusing on the largest component, which is the steam generator. “We were able to reduce its size, making the entire system much more compact than any other reactor on the market.”
The steam generator is an essential, if unremarkable, component of power plants, as it produces steam from the reactor’s cooling circuit to operate turbines. While most steam generators are currently hand-built and stand several stories tall, Apollo says their design can be mass-produced and is roughly the size of a human.
This innovation allowed the company to develop a reactor that is approximately 40 times smaller than reactors using traditional steam generators.
Financing worth $26 million
Apollo Atomics announced that it recently closed a $26 million seed funding round, including $5 million in debt, with the aim of building an experimental reactor for a planned commercial launch in 2028. The company’s design is based on research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Halimi expects that the Apollo station will be able to produce electricity at a cost of up to 3 US cents per kilowatt-hour, stressing that the company’s goal is not limited to making gradual improvements in the nuclear energy sector, but rather “outperforming natural gas.”
Halimi believes that current steam generators do not adequately benefit from the enormous potential of nuclear fuel. Older designs are largely based on technologies used in coal and natural gas plants, although the energy density of nuclear fuels, such as uranium, is much higher than that of fossil fuels.
Microchannels instead of bulky tubes
Most current steam generators rely on passing reactor coolant through a set of large tubes, surrounded by water that turns into steam.
As for the Apollo design, it relies on passing the two fluid circuits inside a compact metal block that contains very precise channels whose thickness is approximately no more than the thickness of a needle. This technology allows heat to be transferred more efficiently, allowing the size of the steam generator to be significantly reduced.
With the new component’s small size, Apollo plans to assemble the reactor and steam generator inside a factory, rather than building them at the power plant site as is typically done in current nuclear projects.
The company is betting that this, combined with reduced labor costs and smaller equipment size, will enable it to build a 300-megawatt plant in less than 24 months.
It also expects that the cost of producing the reactor itself will be four to five times lower than the cost of current nuclear designs.
Three reactor sizes
Apollo had already built a small 40-kilowatt reactor at MIT to prove the technology’s feasibility.
The company plans to offer three sizes of reactors, starting from 10 megawatts and up to 300 megawatts.
