The last time Deployable Energy sent a reactor to Idaho, it rode in the bed of a Ford F-150. The core had no fuel in it, which is why a pickup out of Houston was a perfectly legal way to move a nuclear reactor across half the country, and the whole trip was a bit of a stunt to show how small the thing is.<\/p>\n
The next trip won’t be a stunt. The company says the Unity reactor it’s sending back to Idaho National Laboratory will have uranium in it before it leaves the factory, and that changes pretty much everything about the drive.<\/p>\n
We covered the selection for the DOME test bed<\/a> when it was announced. Since then a few details have come out that I think matter more than the press release did.<\/p>\n Bobby Gallagher, Deployable’s co-founder and CEO, told EastIdahoNews.com<\/a> that the test window inside the dome opens in May 2027 and runs up to six months. He also put a date on the fueled-transport claim, calling it “the first factory fueled and transported reactor since the 1960s.” And on October 14 the company hired an outside nuclear engineering firm, Sargent & Lundy, to work on the commercial version of the reactor, which has nothing to do with Idaho at all.<\/p>\n Every commercial reactor in this country gets built first and fueled second. The plant goes up, the fuel assemblies arrive later in shipping casks, and a licensed crew loads them on site.<\/p>\n Deployable wants to flip that order. Load the uranium at the factory, seal the box, and ship a finished reactor to wherever you need the power.<\/p>\n Fresh fuel on its own isn’t the hard part. Unity runs on uranium dioxide enriched to 4.95 percent, the same stuff every US power plant burns, and that material moves by truck all the time because it’s barely radioactive until it’s been used. The hard part is that a box with fuel inside it is a reactor, not a shipment of parts, so the safety paperwork, the security plan and the transport approvals all have to cover a reactor sitting on an interstate.<\/p>\n Gallagher’s “since the 1960s” line points at the Army’s portable reactor program from that era, as far as I can tell. He hasn’t said which machine he’s measuring against, and I’d read the claim as his, not the Department of Energy’s. Still, no US startup has pulled that step off yet, and the whole business model depends on it.<\/p>\n DOME stands for Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments, and it’s a real dome: 100 feet tall and 80 feet across, the old containment building of Experimental Breeder Reactor-II. That was a sodium-cooled breeder that ran for 30 years out in the Idaho desert before it was shut down 32 years ago.<\/p>\n The reactor and most of the equipment got torn out years ago. The dome didn’t, and the DOE spent the last few years turning it into a shared test bed where a company can run a fueled reactor at up to 20 megawatts of heat without pouring a one-off plant around it.<\/p>\n If you’re wondering why a 1-megawatt reactor needs a 20-megawatt building, that 20 is thermal and Unity’s 1 is electric. A reactor throws off a lot more heat than it turns into electricity, so a 1-megawatt-electric unit fits inside that ceiling with room to spare.<\/p>\n Here’s where it gets interesting. Deployable isn’t first in line. Radiant’s Kaleidos got the inaugural slot and, according to Radiant, exclusive use of the dome for a full year.<\/p>\n That reactor rolled into Idaho on a trailer in August with a plan to be through its whole five-phase campaign by the end of September. As far as I can tell Radiant still hasn’t announced criticality, and its most recent statement describes Kaleidos as in testing without saying which phase it’s in.<\/p>\n We looked at that schedule in more detail when the Navy picked the same reactor for an Indiana weapons base<\/a>. Westinghouse’s eVinci, a 5-megawatt design, was selected alongside Radiant back in 2025 and I can’t find a public date for it.<\/p>\n Deployable came in through the next application round, the one that closed in July 2026, and the DOE announced the pick on September 30. The lab’s own release<\/a> calls it the second-ever company to test in DOME.<\/p>\n You need to know the rules of the slot, because they explain the schedule. Every DOME campaign is paid for by the company running it, the DOE estimates each one at up to six months, and a developer that misses its milestones loses its place in the building.<\/p>\n The DOE laid that out<\/a> when it picked the first two companies. So “May 2027” is really “May 2027 if Deployable keeps hitting dates and the dome is free,” and the second half of that sentence depends on a reactor that doesn’t belong to Deployable.<\/p>\n A national lab running a reactor test bed like a shared garage bay is, frankly, one of the more sensible nuclear policy ideas I’ve seen in a while. It just means everybody’s calendar is tied to everybody else’s.<\/p>\n Unity already passed its first exam. On June 30 the demonstration core sustained a chain reaction at Idaho, roughly 150 days after the project kicked off by the company’s count, 155 by Gallagher’s. That was a zero-power test, which means the physics held but the reactor made no meaningful heat and didn’t generate a watt of electricity. Pretty much every startup chasing the July 4 goal did the same thing.<\/p>\nSo what does “factory fueled” actually mean?<\/h2>\n
The dome has a waiting list<\/h2>\n
What Unity has to do in those six months<\/h2>\n