“Geothermal developer Mazama Energy announced it has created the world’s hottest enhanced geothermal system (EGS) at its pilot site in Oregon’s Newberry Volcano, reaching a bottomhole temperature of 629°F (331°C). The Frisco, Texas-based company said its latest milestone, achieved in late October, sets a new benchmark for geothermal development and advances its goal of generating electricity for less than $0.05/kWh.

Located in the Cascade Range, Newberry is one of the largest geothermal reservoirs in the US. Mazama mobilized a rig to the site in October 2024, converting a legacy well into a water injector and drilling a new deviated producer well to a total measured depth of 10,200 ft. The producer was placed within 6 ft of its planned trajectory, and circulation tests confirmed hydraulic connectivity between the wells. The project was funded in part by a $20-million grant awarded to Mazama last year by the US Department of Energy…

Mazama’s next step is to scale the technology to a 15-MW pilot project using horizontal wells, followed by a 200-MW commercial development at Newberry. Future wells are expected to target temperatures exceeding 750°F (400°C), which the company said could yield up to 10 times the power density while using 75% less water than current EGS methods.”

From Society of Petroleum Engineers.

“Fervo is a buzzy geothermal-techno­logy startup backed by Google and other high-powered tech investors that wants to turn a once-neglected source of energy into a powerhouse. The privately held firm, valued at some $1.4bn, will start producing electricity next year in the first phase of a 500-megawatt deal with the power division of Shell, an oil company, and with a Californian utility. That is the largest commercial contract agreed for geothermal electricity in the industry’s history.

It is the first shot in an incipient geothermal revolution. Today, less than 1% of global (and American) energy comes from geothermal. But researchers at Princeton University predict that technical innovations mean widely available geothermal power could, by 2050, produce nearly triple the current output of the country’s nuclear power plants (which supply roughly 20% of America’s electricity at present). By 2035, the International Energy Agency reckons cumulative investment in geothermal globally could reach $1trn, a big jump from the $1bn to $2bn invested in 2024.”

From The Economist.

“Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality—an essential nuclear milestone—with the help of one of the country’s top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction.

It’s also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order president Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace…

Criticality is the term used for when a nuclear reactor is sustaining a chain reaction—the first step in providing power…

There’s a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week—what’s known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality—and what’s needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test a reactor’s design and physics, the reaction isn’t strong enough to create enough heat to make power.

Before this year, startups like Valar would have to go through the country’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), before trying any criticality tests. The NRC, which has a lengthy licensing process, traditionally maintains authority over all nuclear reactors. This includes small modular reactors, which, as their name suggests, are much smaller than traditional nuclear reactors; these advanced technologies, like the ones Valar is trying to bring to market, have never been commercially deployed in the US. However, both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have some legal ability to develop their own reactors without going through the NRC, including some solely used for research purposes.”

From Wired.

“Oklo Inc, an advanced nuclear technology company, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho Operations Office has approved the Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (NSDA) for the Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility (A3F) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), selected to participate in the DOE’s Advanced Nuclear Fuel Line Pilot Projects.

The NSDA, the first under the DOE’s Fuel Line Pilot Projects, was approved in just under two weeks and helps demonstrate a new authorization pathway that has the potential to unlock U.S. industrial capacity, advance national energy security and create an accelerated and reproducible framework for scaling production capacity under the executive order ‘Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security’…

Located at INL, the A3F will fabricate fuel for Oklo’s first commercial-scale powerhouse, the Aurora-INL, which was selected for the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program. Together, these facilities couple fuel production to power delivery for near-term commercial deployment of advanced nuclear energy.”

From Oklo.