Nuclear power startup Antares announced Tuesday that it has raised $96 million in Series B funding as it advances the design of a small modular nuclear reactor.
The round was led by Shine Capital, with participation from Alt Capital, Caffeinated, FiftyThree Stations, Industrious and others, and consists of $71 million in equity and $25 million in debt.
Antares said it is targeting commercial, defense and space-based applications with its R1 microreactor, which produces 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of power. The design uses TRISO fuel, and in the case of Antares, carbon- and ceramic-coated uranium spheres embedded in graphite.
The startup is one of several companies to have recently benefited from renewed interest in nuclear power over the past six months.
Last week, Amazon-backed X-energy announced it had raised $700 million in a Series D round, following a $700 million Series C that closed in February. The company also designs nuclear reactors based on TRISO fuel. Deep Fission struggled to raise capital until April, but went public in September in a $30 million reverse merger.
Aalo Atomics raised $100 million in August to build a demonstration data center featuring microreactors, and in June, Nvidia invested in a $650 million round in TerraPower, a small modular reactor startup backed by Bill Gates.
Large nuclear power plants are also being given a second chance.
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Earlier this month, Microsoft partner Constellation Energy received a $1 billion loan from the Department of Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor by 2028. The project is expected to cost $1.6 billion to refurbish the reactor, which shut down in 2019. In October, Google announced it was working with NextEra Energy to restart a nuclear power plant in Iowa that was damaged in 2020’s torrential rains.
Earlier this summer, Amazon purchased 1.92 gigawatts of power generation capacity from the Talen Energy nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Meta also announced in June that it would purchase clean energy attributes from the Constellation Energy nuclear power plant in Illinois.
And while large nuclear power has been a major beneficiary, the Trump administration is bullish on the potential for small nuclear power to revive the industry’s fortunes over the next decade.
In August, Antares was selected as one of 11 participants in the Department of Energy’s nuclear reactor testing program. The program aims to have at least three of the reactors in operation by July 4, 2026, which is significantly earlier than the schedule to which the nuclear industry is accustomed.
Antares aims to demonstrate the reactor for the DOE next year and said it plans to have a full-power reactor operating in 2027.
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