September 19 – As part of an expansion in New Mexico, a California energy company is building space at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Kairos Power LLC, a renewable energy and manufacturing company based in Alameda, California, announced this week that it plans to build new manufacturing and development facilities at its Albuquerque site, creating 100 jobs and generating an estimated $4.2 billion in economic development for the state over the next 10 years.
In 2019, the company announced it would establish a new engineering center in the Mesa del Sol community in Albuquerque. At the time, the company expected to create more than 65 jobs; now, it has invested more than $125 million in the campus and employs more than 130 people. The company is currently hiring for a variety of positions, including engineers, fabricators and welders.
What does this have to do with its northern neighbor, Los Alamos National Laboratory?
Kairos Power is the first customer for LANL’s low-enriched fuel plant, which converts enriched uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors. The company is making “significant investments” in this sector, spokesman Christopher Ortiz wrote in an email.
Kairos is working on commercializing a reactor that can handle high temperatures and cool fluoride salt.
In 2022, the national laboratory and the energy company entered into an agreement to supply a planned demonstration reactor with tri-structural isotropic particle fuel pellets – nuclear fuel composed of uranium, carbon and oxygen – produced by Kairos at LANL’s production facility.
The company began construction of the Hermes demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, earlier this year.
The ring-shaped fuel pebbles will be produced at LANL using processes developed at the Albuquerque site. Special nuclear materials, including plutonium, uranium-233 or enriched uranium, will not be stored at Albuquerque, according to a company news release.
As for how the fuel will be transported across the country, Ortiz said, “Those details are still under development.”
Both Alameda County, California, and Oak Ridge, where Kairos Power has another location, are home to national labs. The company’s fourth location is in Charlotte, NC, where a renewable energy lab is located at the William States Lee College of Engineering.
According to Ortiz, Albuquerque was chosen because of its proximity to LANL and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as its headquarters in California; an “existing ecosystem of clean energy innovation”; and a pipeline of talent from the University of New Mexico’s nuclear engineering program and other educational institutions.
