By Andy May
I first read about Deployable Energy on Joanne Nova’s website and was very interested in their innovative small modular nuclear reactor and how it worked. The reactor was produced under President Trump’s 2025 nuclear reactor plan. It was designed by Australian Bobby Gallagher and his team in Houston. It can produce one megawatt of power, at a cost of 15 cents per kilowatt hour, for five years before refueling is required. The entire reactor can fit on the bed of a Ford F150 pickup, as shown in the photo. More importantly, it can be manufactured in a factory, fits into one 20-foot shipping container, uses the existing conventional supply chain, and requires no exotic custom-made components.
The advantages are obvious, the reactor has less than a six-month lead time, it is transportable by rail, ship, conventional trucks, and normal logistics. It fits on an ordinary slab or other small structure and can be easily installed with off-the-shelf plumbing and wiring. It is cooled with either helium or water, or the excess heat can be used for additional power generation. It has inherent safety and security and does not require full-time monitoring; it is walk-away safe. The fuel is standard 4.95% enriched uranium oxide; that must be replaced every five years at a current cost of $1.3 million. The fuel is well below weapons grade and is readily available.
In the photo you can see Deployable Energy’s first reactor being trucked to Idaho National Laboratory to be tested. Their reactor first went critical on June 30, 2026. They recently signed a 145-billion-dollar contract for three GW of cumulative clean nuclear power deployments with Gridmarket.
What is truly amazing is the company built its first reactor and brought it online in 150 days and did it all with less than $10 million in private funding. They did this by utilizing low enriched uranium-235 (<5%), standard manufactured components, and mass manufacturing processes. Their original design was elegant and beautiful, but required a lot of exotic components and materials so it was abandoned. They quickly realized that the design was not scalable or economic. They redesigned it to use off-the-shelf readily available components wherever possible. Their goal was to make nuclear a commodity product; they needed a mass-producible reactor.
Gallagher admits that without the considerable help he received from Chris Wright and the Department of Energy he and his team could never have accomplished what they did. I was surprised to see the government and government employees helping him, as opposed to fighting against him.
Their next steps are to complete the full suite of required tests of their reactor and staff up for manufacturing. They also need a factory, and they are looking at several possible building locations in Texas. They also plan to build similar special reactors for ships and hope to become the first manufacturer of commercial maritime nuclear power plants. Their plants are ideal for critical infrastructure, like data centers, military installations, or hospitals.
Gallagher mentions in his interview on the Oilfield 360 interview that both China and Russia are building small reactors and have contracts to provide them around the world, in the USA we have none. China and Russia are leading today, and the USA has done nothing so far in the commercial nuclear space.
