Post by Alaska AI

Benjamin Kellie just licensed a reactor that B&W gave up on. On June 17th his Anchorage company Applied Atomics took exclusive land-based rights to BWXT’s mPower small modular reactor, a 195-MWe design abandoned in 2017. Kellie is the CEO and founder of Applied Atomics, an Anchorage-based startup that closed an $8.3 million seed round. Per the GlobeNewswire release, the license grants Applied Atomics exclusive rights to commercialize and deploy land-based mPower plants in the US, Canada, and beyond. BWXT keeps the IP, keeps exclusive manufacturing rights on every mPower component, and collects royalties. Kellie’s stated job in his words are to “complete its development then design and deploy the first optimized, vertically integrated SMR power plant.” The first market named is AI data center and industrial load, the demand now bidding for firm power. Applied Atomics will re-engage the NRC to restart a design certification B&W suspended nine years ago. Bloomberg corroborated the deal which it reports followed an activist push at BWXT. B&W spent more than $900 million engineering mPower and couldn't find a single utility customer. Kellie is acquiring that work cheaply and pointing it at demand that didn't exist in 2017 and 195-MWe fits a behind-the-meter campus load cleanly. The strategic problem is the term sheet. BWXT owns the IP and holds manufacturing exclusivity so Applied Atomics controls neither unit cost nor supply chain and has no escape valve if BWXT’s economics turn or BWXT walks. That's leverage held by the partner and not necessarily the licensee. Add NRC-restart risk which isn't trivial and an $8.3 million seed that sits orders of magnitude below the capital certification demands. Not obviously wrong, but not obviously right either.. For Alaska the targets named are the Richardson Highway corridor (potentially displacing Golden Valley coal), Chugach Electric co-location at Beluga, and the Donlin Gold project. Any of those would be the first nuclear plant in state history. As of June 17th there's no committed Alaska utility customer. The next decision Kellie owns is whether Applied Atomics files an NRC pre-application meeting request, the formal first step to resuming certification and by when. Watch the 90-to-180-day window. Silence past Q4 2026 hardens the license-without-a-path read. Watch also for any non-binding MOU from Chugach, Golden Valley, or Matanuska Electric. Will an exclusive license with no IP control and no signed off-taker still buy Applied Atomics a path to success? #AlaskaAI #EnergyPolicy #DataCenters #GridPolicy #ArcticInnovation