Bloomberg reports that Kairos Power has lined up $643 million in private and federal financing to build Hermes 2, an electricity-producing demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The package combines $368 million from private backers with $275 million from the Energy Department, funding a plant meant to feed the TVA grid serving Google data centers in Tennessee and Alabama.
Kairos plans to develop, construct and operate its reactors. TVA will buy up to 50 megawatts of Hermes 2 electricity under a binding power-purchase agreement. The plant is scheduled for 2030 as the first delivery in a Google agreement covering as much as 500 megawatts by 2035.
The company’s system uses TRISO fuel formed into pebbles and molten fluoride salt as coolant. Its commercial reactor design runs near atmospheric pressure and supports online refueling, while modular configurations share power-conversion equipment. For utility customers, the deliverable is electricity under a power-purchase agreement, while Kairos carries the work of building and running the reactor.
Hermes 2 is still a demonstration. Kairos broke ground in April after securing an NRC construction permit, and says the project will build on non-nuclear hardware tests and its Hermes 1 reactor. It is also testing precast construction and factory production methods intended to improve cost and schedule certainty before fleet deployment.
The headline amount isn’t a conventional $643 million equity round. Bloomberg says the $368 million private slice includes a $70 million Samsung C&T investment announced in September; the $275 million federal portion is about 43% of the package. The mix puts venture, industrial and government capital behind a project that isn’t scheduled to produce power until 2030.