NANO announces MMR rebrand on completion of USNC technology acquisition

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

The acquisition also includes the Pylon Transportable Reactor Platform, as well as contracts and collaborations associated with Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) projects.

USNC initiated the process to sell its assets through a public auction under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in November. NANO executed a definitive agreement to acquire the nuclear energy technology assets from USNC and some of its subsidiaries on 24 December.

The assets acquired by NANO include 38 issued and pending or published patents, including six issued and four pending or published US utility patents and three issued and four pending Canadian utility patents, as well as associated trademarks.

The Micro Modular Reactor is a 45 MW thermal, 15 MW electrical high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, using TRISO fuel in prismatic graphite blocks. USNC had been working on deployment projects at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories' Chalk River site in Ontario, Canada, and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the USA. NANO said it plans to extend the existing collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while continuing the licensing process for the reactor with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It also expects "further demonstrations" of the technology to take place at Chalk River, pending Canadian governmental approvals of the acquisition.

The Pylon microreactor is a containerised system capable of producing 1.5-5 MWe with a lower mass than the MMR high-temperature gas-cooled reactor system, designed to be easily transportable to off-grid locations both on Earth and in space. Pylon was one of three microreactors selected in 2023 to receive a share of USD3.9 million of federal funding for front-end engineering and experiment design in the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) test bed facility at Idaho National Laboratory, and NANO said it will continue efforts to demonstrate the reactor at DOME by 2027.

NANO said the acquisition "immediately adds one of the highest technology readiness level advanced nuclear reactors in development and significantly expands NANO Nuclear's patent portfolio", with the MMR Energy System and Pylon reactor augmenting NANO's existing portfolio of nuclear power systems designed for remote, industrial, infrastructural, maritime, and extra-terrestrial applications. The integration of the MMR Energy System specifically "will enable NANO Nuclear to better serve growing markets that have high energy demands, including large-scale data and artificial intelligence centres and other energy-intensive operations in manufacturing and infrastructure", the company said.

NANO founder and Chairman Jay Yu said the addition of the MMR and Pylon "enable us to expand our business strategy and further positions NANO Nuclear as an emerging leader in the advanced nuclear reactor technology market. These technologies significantly strengthen our intellectual property foundation and create additional commercial shots on goal for us as we continue to mature our reactor technologies through design, testing and demonstration towards regulatory licensing and eventual commercial deployment".

The MMR and Pylon join NANO's reactor products in development: ZEUS, a solid core battery reactor, and ODIN, a low-pressure coolant reactor. The company also has subsidiaries focused on the fabrication and transportation of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel and on potential commercial deployment of microreactors in space.