Kairos Power is Accelerating Innovation with Rapid Learning Cycles

For the team at Kairos Power, Rapid Learning Cycles is accelerating the iterative development of advanced nuclear technology.

The more that I’ve researched renewable energy, the more convinced I am that nuclear power will be needed to accelerate our path towards Net Zero, no matter how efficient wind turbines and solar panels become.

The Kairos Power FHR (KP-FHR) uses advanced reactor technology that leverages TRISO fuel in pebble form, combined with a low-pressure fluoride salt coolant, to deliver clean, safe, and affordable power.

Last summer, I collaborated with Rapid Learning Cycles Certified® Program Manager Nicolas Zweibaum and the team at Kairos Power as they prepared the Design Approach and Project Management Plan sections of an application to the U.S. Department of Energy to get funding for their first demonstration reactor.

These sections have diagrams that would look familiar to anyone who’s heard me talk about how Rapid Learning Cycles work to eliminate the long, slow learning cycles that slow down technology development.

This marks the first time Rapid Learning Cycles has been incorporated directly into the application for a U.S. Department of Energy demonstration program, as the methodology the team has chosen to accelerate innovation by reducing development risk.

In December, the DOE announced that they granted Kairos Power an Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program award with DOE share of $303 million over the next seven years.

We at the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute offer our congratulations to Nicolas and the entire team for this award.

Nicolas explains the significance of the award and how it will support their goal of accelerating the development of the nuclear technology we need to achieve Net Zero by 2050:

Kairos Power is a recipient of an Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) award for Risk Reduction funding to support development of the Hermes low power demonstration reactor. This is a cost-shared partnership between the U.S. DOE and industry to demonstrate advanced nuclear technology in the United States. The total award value over the next seven years is $629 million (DOE share is $303 million).

We have observed that the conventional nuclear development cycle is long, slow, and capital-intensive. At Kairos Power, we are disrupting this cycle by adopting a rapid iterative approach to accelerate design, test, and building. Our approach leverages multiple design-build-test cycles with non-nuclear and nuclear systems prior to the first commercial reactor. Since 2019, Kairos has been working with Rapid Learning Cycles to reduce development risk associated with some of its most complex systems.

Nuclear technology is a perfect example of a field where initial development involves high unknowns and high cost of change. With Rapid Learning Cycles, Kairos teams are able to achieve the fastest path to deployment, providing cost certainty through the combination of increasing certainty in the company’s technology, capability to build, and supply chain.

                       Nicolas Zweibaum – Senior Manager, Engineering Testing

Rapid Learning Cycles helps innovators change the world — faster.

For the team at Kairos Power, Rapid Learning Cycles is accelerating the iterative development of advanced nuclear technology.