Oklo's Groves One Achieves Criticality; And the Race for Medical Isotopes Begins

AUSTIN, Texas — Oklo’s Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Lockhart has reached criticality, a key step for the advanced nuclear company as it works toward building future domestic isotope-production facilities.

Criticality means the reactor has achieved a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at low power. Oklo announced the milestone less than a year after breaking ground on the privately funded project. The company says Groves is the first reactor in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to reach criticality on private land.

Oklo CEO and co-founder Jacob DeWitte called the achievement a major moment for the company.

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“By all accounts and measures, this is the fastest-built, privately sited, privately funded, privately built nuclear reactor in world history,” DeWitte said in an interview with “Tech This Out’s” Walt Maciborski.

The Lockhart facility is a low-power test reactor, not a commercial power plant. It is intended to help Oklo validate the reactor technology, equipment, safety programs and operating procedures needed for larger future facilities that could produce medical and industrial isotopes.

Those isotopes can support medical diagnostics and targeted cancer therapies, as well as advanced manufacturing, scientific research, space exploration and national-security applications.

“We have a huge amount of need for isotopes for therapeutics, for diagnostics, for the medical case, but also to power our ambitions in space,” DeWitte said.

Oklo says Groves will serve as a technical and operational foundation for its planned commercial-scale isotope-production campus. The current reactor will continue startup testing and is not designed to produce commercial quantities of isotopes itself.