Tonight on the ZH homepage, Erik Townsend of Macro Voices will host a special livestream with the founders (CEO and CTO) of nuclear energy company Aalo Atomics: Matt Loszak and Yasir Arafat.
This will be part of an ongoing series diving into the emerging nuclear energy technologies, to feature heads of the cutting edge startups and some technical and philisophical debates about where the industry needs to head in order to solve the world's energy needs.
The following is from Erik Townsend's Substack (full post) which gives a look into the significance of the milstone achieved:
Full disclosure: I am an early investor in Aalo Atomics and have a direct financial interest in the company’s success. Nothing here is investment advice. Early-stage private investments are speculative, illiquid, and can go to zero. Do your own diligence.
At the stroke of midnight on July 4th, 2026, the United States of America began its 250th year. Nineteen minutes later, at 12:19 a.m. Mountain Time, a small nuclear reactor sitting on a two-acre plot at the edge of the Idaho National Laboratory reached criticality — the moment a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. Aalo Atomics had just made history.
This post explains why that was historic. But it also makes a bolder claim, so let me put it up front where you can argue with it:
The criticality demonstration that just made headlines is the least important thing Aalo will do. The event that will actually change the course of history is scheduled for the second half of 2027 — and almost nobody is paying attention to it yet.
Bottom line up front:
Four American companies brought first-of-a-kind advanced reactors to criticality in a single month — more genuine reactor firsts than the previous half-century produced. Give them all credit.
Of the four, I contend Aalo’s was the most commercially important, for two reasons almost no one is discussing: it was the only one built at full commercial scale, and it uses the one fuel form that doesn’t depend on a non-existent supply chain.
The 2026 criticality was a physics demonstration. The 2027 demonstration — the first Aalo-X reactor actually making electricity that powers something substantial — is the starting gun for what I call the Nuclear Henry Ford Moment.
Aalo has a SAFE round closing this month and a Series C now being shopped. I expect the Series C valuation — which some will likely complain is too high — is going to look, in hindsight, like the bargain of the century. I’ll show you why using a company you’ve heard of.
Above: “Fission Accomplished”—The crowd in Idaho Falls, ID erupts in cheers and applause as the successful criticality event is announced just after midnight on the morning of July 4th.
Here is a fact that should stop you cold. On June 4th, 2026, when Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 reactor went critical at INL, it became — by the count of INL’s own laboratory director — the first genuinely new reactor design to reach criticality at the lab in more than half a century. It was also, per the DOE, the 53rd reactor ever built at that site since 1951.
Think about what that means. The Idaho desert is where America built the first of a kind (FOAK) reactors that created the first nuclear age — 52 of them in the 22-year period from 1951 to 1973. Then that pace of first-of-a-kind innovation effectively stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. FOAKreactor design introductions at INL went into a 53-year hiatus from 1973 to 2026. Then four new reactor designs went critical in just 31 days, culminating with Aalo’s Critical Test Reactor on the nation’s 250th birthday.
The conclusion is inescapable: The dawn of the second nuclear age is upon us.
What restarted it was a deadline. In May 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” which directed the DOE to stand up a Reactor Pilot Program and get at least three new test reactors to criticality by July 4th, 2026. When that goal was announced, most of the industry called it a fantasy. The conventional wisdom is that a new reactor takes at least a decade. The order gave them roughly just twelve months.
They didn’t just hit the target. They beat it. Four companies reached criticality:
Antares Nuclear — the Mark-0, a 500-kilowatt sodium heat-pipe microreactor, critical at INL on June 4th.
Valar Atomics — the Ward 250, a 100-kilowatt helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactor, critical in Emery County, Utah on June 18th.
Deployable Energy — the Unity Nuclear Battery, a roughly 1-megawatt shipping-container reactor whose founder famously drove the core to Idaho in the bed of a Ford F-150, critical on June 30th.
Aalo Atomics — the Critical Test Reactor went critical at INL in the wee hours of July 4th, the very deadline itself.
The DOE was entitled to its victory lap: for the first time in history, a single country brought four distinct advanced-reactor designs to criticality inside one month’s time. That’s never happened before in world history.
For over fifty years the pace of American reactor innovation was zero. Then, on a presidential dare, four companies did the impossible in four weeks. That is the real headline — and it deserves to be spread far and wide.
So let me be clear before I get selective: every one of these teams did something extraordinary.... but “we made a reactor go critical” and “we’re about to change the economics of civilization” are very different claims, and in my humble opinion, the market is currently failing to distinguish between them.
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Tune in tonight at the ZH homepage, X account, and YouTube page at 7pm ET to watch the Aalo energy deep dive live, and see why Erik is betting big on their prospects to change the entire industry.