In November 2025, a nuclear startup called Valar Atomics flipped the switch on a moment we weren’t supposed to reach this soon: cold criticality at Los Alamos. That’s engineer-speak for “the reactor went live”, without melting anyone’s face off. No mushroom clouds, no Chernobyl flashbacks. Just quiet validation that a tiny, helium-cooled reactor stuffed with TRISO fuel can achieve a self‑sustaining chain reaction in a lab built for war.
This isn’t just some DOE science fair moment. It marks the dawn of a new age in nuclear, modular, decentralised, faster than regulators can blink. A venture‑backed race to install microreactors across the world, not in megaprojects but at gigasites, AI data centres, hydrogen hubs, industrial foundries. It’s like we took the Fallout universe and said, “Yeah, but let’s keep the tech and lose the post‑apocalyptic vibes.” Spoiler: we might not get to choose.
Valar’s reactor isn’t some souped‑up steam boiler. It’s a 100 kWt High‑Temperature Gas Reactor running on High‑Assay Low‑Enriched Uranium (HALEU) and encased in ceramic TRISO particles so stable they make traditional uranium pellets look like soggy cornflakes. Instead of water, it uses helium, chemically inert, phase-change‑immune, and thoroughly boring in the best way.
That combo means no steam explosions, no meltdown scenarios, and heat levels that rival industrial furnaces. It also means nuclear tech that’s mobile, standardised, and scalable, three words regulators hate and venture capital loves. Valar’s aim is simple: mass-produce these reactors and drop them where energy demand is exploding. Not to light up cities, but to power the data-driven, carbon-choked, always-on future. Think AI clusters, hydrogen synthesis, synthetic fuels, all humming quietly on micro-nuclear heat.
It’s fast. It’s funded. And it’s (mostly) unregulated. But that doesn’t mean it’s risk-free.
The promise of decentralised nuclear power is immense. Stable, zero-carbon baseload energy with no need for sun or wind. Localised resilience that makes power grids more survivable in crises. Water-free cooling. High-temperature heat that unlocks entire sectors, heavy industry, chemical production, hydrogen. And unlike old-school mega-reactors, these things are modular. They’re manufactured in batches, trucked in, and bolted down in a matter of months. This is nuclear as logistics. Plug-and-play power.
But every clean tech revolution comes with a dark passenger.
Let’s start with governance. Valar isn’t just racing to deploy, it’s actively suing the NRC to weaken federal oversight. Their lawyers argue that microreactors don’t meet the criteria for central regulation, aiming to shift authority to the states. Simultaneously, they’re building their first full deployment in the Philippines, where regulatory hurdles are lower. That’s not a one-off, it’s the blueprint. Faster builds, fewer questions.
Then there’s the fuel. HALEU isn’t weapons-grade, but it’s close enough to raise eyebrows. The DOE and NNSA are nervous, and for good reason. The material’s mobility, its movement between facilities, jurisdictions, countries, opens doors to proliferation risk. Especially if reactors start popping up outside tightly governed states.
And then we hit the waste wall. TRISO fuel is durable in operation, but creates a new class of radioactive by-product that doesn’t slot neatly into our current disposal strategies. The U.S. still hasn’t solved the standard waste problem, let alone figured out how to store high-burnup graphite-sheathed fuel pebbles. No one wants them in their backyard. No permanent geological repositories exist. So the waste will stack up, quietly, invisibly, and become a crisis later.
There’s also the uncomfortable truth about who these reactors are really for. Not for off-grid villages. Not for underserved communities. These are machines for tech giants and military clients. Built by capital, for capital. Without public frameworks in place, this new nuclear fleet may widen the gap it claims to solve, powering algorithmic empires while the rest of us ride out brownouts.
So yes, the Fallout comparison is crude, but not wrong. In that universe, nuclear energy became ubiquitous and cheap. But the tech outpaced the stewardship. Corporate ambition overtook public planning. And governance failed to keep the genie in the bottle.
Today, we stand at a crossroads. One path leads to a resilient, post-carbon grid, stabilised by modular reactors integrated into renewables and smart demand. The other runs toward a fragmented regulatory wasteland, where every state and multinational runs its own reactor programme, its own rules, its own risks.
We are building something nuclear. Whether it’s a utopia, a monopoly, or the first ten minutes of Fallout 5, is up to us.