Radiant

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Radiant is building Kaleidos, a roughly one-megawatt portable nuclear microreactor designed to be shipped by land, air, or sea to sites that need reliable off-grid power, such as military bases, remote industrial operations, and data centers. Radiant's microreactors replace diesel generators at roughly the same footprint, except a single unit delivers about five years of power before being trucked back to Radiant's factory for refueling, which keeps customer sites free of long-term nuclear waste handling. The company plans to manufacture reactors like a product line rather than build them in place, an approach aimed at collapsing the cost and schedule risk that has historically made new nuclear projects hard to finance. The launch matters because Radiant is next in line to prove the model works in hardware. Radiant was founded in 2020 by Doug Bernauer (CEO) and Bob Urberger (CTO) , with Tori Shivanandan serving as President and Chief Operating Officer, leading the team building the world's first commercial nuclear microreactor . Bernauer came to the problem from an unusual angle, having studied Electrical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University and later joined SpaceX as an R&D engineer in 2007 , where work on powering a future Mars base convinced him that portable fission was the only workable answer. The near-term milestone is a full-power demonstration at Idaho National Laboratory's DOME facility, where Radiant will be the first new design of a U.S. reactor to be tested at DOME in almost 50 years . The company has also signed an agreement to deliver a microreactor to a U.S. military base, and it recently added Lockheed Martin as a strategic investor alongside its existing backers, including a16z and Founders Fund. For founders and operators watching the nuclear buildout, Radiant is one of the clearest tests of whether factory-built fission can actually reach customers this decade.

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