# Kairos Power An Alameda, CA-based advanced nuclear startup developing the KP-FHR (Kairos Power Fluoride Salt-Cooled High-Temperature Reactor). Founded in 2016 by Mike Laufer and Ed Blandford, the company's key differentiator is its use of molten fluoride salt as a coolant rather than pressurized water. Because the salt operates at atmospheric pressure and has a very high boiling point, the reactor cannot experience the kind of steam explosions or loss-of-coolant accidents that plague traditional light-water designs — a fundamental safety advantage. ## Hermes Demonstration Reactor Kairos is building the Hermes demonstration reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee — the first privately funded nuclear test reactor approved in the United States since the 1960s. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a construction permit in November 2024, and nuclear construction began in May 2025. Hermes is a low-power (35 MW thermal) test unit designed to validate the KP-FHR technology before commercial scale-up. ## Google Partnership In August 2025, [[Google]], Kairos Power, and the Tennessee Valley Authority announced a collaboration to deploy the Hermes 2 plant — a 50 MW unit that will deliver power to the TVA grid serving Google data centers in Tennessee and Alabama, with operations expected by 2030. Hermes 2 is the first deployment under Kairos's landmark orderbook agreement with [[Google]] to bring 500 MW of advanced nuclear capacity online by 2035. Google and Kairos bear the financial risk of the first-of-a-kind build, while TVA provides the revenue stream through a power purchase agreement. ## KB Relevance Kairos sits at the center of [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]] — the hyperscaler race to secure massive amounts of carbon-free baseload power for AI data centers. Its partnership with [[Google]] is one of the clearest examples of Big Tech directly funding next-generation nuclear to meet [[Artificial Intelligence]] infrastructure demand. The molten-salt approach, if it scales, could reshape the [[Nuclear Energy Debate]] by removing the safety objections that have stalled nuclear expansion for decades. ## See Also - [[Google]] - [[The Quest for 90 Gigawatts]] - [[Nuclear Energy Debate]] - [[Artificial Intelligence]] - [[Energy Sector]]