LANL Nuclear Fuel Company Set to Expand New Mexico Operations

Sept. 19 — As part of its expansion into New Mexico, a California energy company is building space at 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 headquarters, which would create 100 jobs and generate an estimated $4.2 billion in economic development for the state over the next 10 years.

In 2019, the company announced it would be creating a new engineering center in the Mesa del Sol community in Albuquerque. At the time, the company anticipated creating more than 65 jobs; it has now invested more than $125 million in the campus and employs more than 130 people. It is currently hiring for several positions, including engineers, structural engineers and welders.

What does this have to do with its neighbor to the north, Los Alamos National Laboratory?

Kairos Power is the launch customer for LANL’s low-enriched fuel facility, which processes enriched uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors. The company is making “significant investments” in the sector, spokesman Christopher Ortiz said in an email.

Kairos is working on commercializing a high-temperature reactor cooled by fluoride salt.

In 2022, the national laboratory and the energy company signed an agreement to supply the planned demonstration reactor with tristructural isotropic nuclear fuel particles — 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 pellets will be manufactured at LANL using processes developed in Albuquerque. Special nuclear material, including plutonium, uranium-233 or enriched uranium, will not be stored in Albuquerque, according to a company news release.

As for how the fuel will be transported across the country, Ortiz said “those details are still in development.”

Both Alameda County, Calif., and Oak Ridge, where Kairos Power has another headquarters, are home to national laboratories. The company’s fourth headquarters is in Charlotte, N.C., home to a renewable energy lab at the William States Lee College of Engineering.

Ortiz said Albuquerque was chosen because of its proximity to LANL and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as its headquarters in California; “the existing clean energy innovation ecosystem”; and access to talent from the University of New Mexico’s nuclear engineering program and other educational institutions.