Nuclear microreactors can be factory-built, transportable by land/air/sea, operated for 5 years without refueling, taken back by the manufacturer, and daisy-chained — solving the cost and waste problems that made traditional nuclear uneconomical.
Radiant's Kidos reactor is designed as a 1 MW transportable microreactor — roughly the size of a diesel generator but delivering 5 years of power without refueling, and removable with no waste left on site — which unlocks use cases that large-scale nuclear cannot serve. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-05 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 4:52
When Doug was designing the product, he said, 'Well, all of these things must be true, and therefore I have to make a product that is above ground, that is movable to where customers need it, and then also that they don't have to deal with waste on site.' And so, you got Kidos. It's a transportable by land, air, and sea micro reactor. After a customer has used it, we take it back to our factory site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and refuel it. We handle all of the parts of the nuclear industry that customers didn't want. I always tell people when I talk about the Kidos reactor to think of a diesel generator. Anywhere you'd see a diesel generator, you could bring in a Kidos reactor. They're roughly the same size except you don't have to refill it every 8 hours. It gives you power for 5 years and it provides much more power, many, many times more power than a diesel generator. And you can daisy chain them together. So you can bring in four Kidos reactors and power a small city. You could power a very large data center. You have all kinds of capabilities that come around from something that really can be put on the back of an 18-wheeler. That kind of power generation and making it transportable has never existed before.
verbatim transcript · starts at 4:52
5:02hard to control. Once you make a nuclear reactor and a ground at a site, [music] that site is a radiological site for forever. Puspers are not super excited about that. [music] When Doug was designing the product, he said, "Well, all of these things must be [music] true, and therefore I have to make a product that is above ground, that is movable to where customers need it, and then also that they don't have
5:32to deal with waste on site." And so, you got Kidos. It's a transportable by land, air, and sea micro reactor. After a customer has used it, we take it back to our factory site in Oakidge, Tennessee, and refuel it. We handle all of the parts of the nuclear industry that customers didn't want. >> I always tell people when I talk about the kidos reactor to think of a diesel
5:52generator. Anywhere you'd see a diesel generator, you could bring in a kidos reactor. They're roughly the same size except you don't have to refill it every 8 hours. [music] It gives you power for 5 years and it provides much more power, many, many times more power than a diesel generator. And you can daisy chain them together. So you can bring in four kitus reactors and power a small
6:12city. [music] You could power a very large data center. You have all kinds of capabilities that come around [music] from something that really can be put on the back of an 18-wheeler. That kind of power generation and making it transportable [music] has never existed before. That's why I say there's actually use cases that we haven't really even imagined yet. One [music] of our units is 5 years of power in a box
6:31that just gets delivered, fits in a few parking spaces, and then whenever you want us to take it away, [music] we take it away, which hasn't really done before. It's only possible if you make a size about 1 megawatt, right? make a small [music] enough reactor, you can do this, transport it there and back again sort of trick and take the fuel back and so you have like no nuclear strings
6:50attached, you can [music] just have clean power. So for national security, we also don't know where we might need power sources to be set up. So if you need to rapidly deploy AI, you need to rapidly deploy drones, you need to rapidly put something somewhere, it needs to come with power. And if you're not on a grid, you need to bring the grid with you in a box. [music]
7:08When you're building a commercial product, you have to have the same desire [music] to lower customer friction as Apple did with the iPhone. With nuclear reactors, that might sound wild, but it's an absolute necessity. We have to control all of our costs [music] inside our factory, and we can't put any of that burden onto our customer. We can't put any of the burden of the construction on site, [music] the
- ·Microreactor is transportable by land, air, and sea
- ·Manufacturer takes it back and refuels on site
- ·Customers skip all unwanted nuclear parts on site
- ·No waste left behind for the customer
- ·Roughly the size of a diesel generator
- ·Delivers 5 years of power without refueling
- ·Provides many times more power than a diesel reactor
- ·Four units can power a small city or large data center