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Rendering of a proposed Oklo commercial advanced fission power plant in the U.S. Courtesy: Oklo Inc.

Nuclear startup Oklo is moving closer to initial construction of its first commercial microreactor, CEO Jacob DeWitte told CNBC in an interview. Oklo has received the greenlight from the Department of Energy to conduct site investigations for the planned reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, the company announced Wednesday. The site investigations will focus on infrastructure planning, environmental surveys and geotechnical assessments. "This sets the stage for doing all the initial site ... prep work, and what I would call initial construction activities," DeWitte said. He expects Oklo to break ground at the Idaho site in 2026, with plans to have the reactor up and running by the following year. Oklo, however, still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the plant after its first application was rejected in 2022. The CEO acknowledged there's a risk the 2027 start date gets pushed out depending on how long the NRC review takes. Oklo, which aims to build, operate and directly sell power to customers under long-term contracts, went public in May through a merger with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's SPAC, AltC Acquisition Corp. Altman serves as Oklo's chairman. Electric demand is projected to surge. The tech sector has been feverishly building data centers to handle the power-intensive computations needed for artificial intelligence, while domestic manufacturing is expanding and the economy becomes increasingly electrified. The company said its microreactors, called Aurora, will have smaller and simpler designs that will range from 15 megawatts to as much as 100 megawatts or more. The average nuclear reactor in the U.S. currently is around 1,000 megawatts, according to the Department of Energy.

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