HWBRIEF
A factory built microreactor is 1,000+ miles into a road trip to a federal test bed, where 150 unattended hours will feed Radiant's first Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license and a 2028 Space Force delivery.
A single, factory-built nuclear reactor left Radiant's El Segundo facility on 12 August on a flatbed trailer, more than 1,000 miles into a road trip to a federal test bed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The microreactor, called Kaleidos, is designed to ship by land, sea, or air and produce about 1 MW of thermal output.
The destination is the DOME (Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments) test bed, built inside the repurposed containment structure of a former experimental breeder reactor. There, Radiant will run Kaleidos through a five-phase campaign from zero-power criticality to full heat and power, capped by 150 continuous hours of unattended operation. That 150-hour run is the commercial-readiness bar; the data feeds the company's first US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) manufacturing license, a Part 70 for a planned Oak Ridge, Tennessee production facility. Radiant has targeted NRC approval by Q4 2026.
The fuel is TRISO, a meltdown-resistant pebble that Standard Nuclear fabricated to Radiant's specifications earlier this year. INL and the Department of Energy will oversee loading, with the test campaign targeted for Q3 2026 completion.
Kaleidos is the same design, at the same scale, with the same commercial fuel load that Radiant plans to roll off the production line. The company is under contract to deliver a unit to Buckley Space Force Base by 2028, a date that turns this road trip into a regulatory dress rehearsal.