Radiant Nuclear’s application for its R-50 production facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. has been accepted for review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the company said Tuesday.
El Segundo, Calif.-based Radiant’s Title 10 Code of Federal Regulations Part 70 – 10 CFR Part 70 – license application review will be on an accelerated timeline of eight months, according to the company’s press release. This review time would be 55% faster than the standard schedule, Radiant said.
Part 70 covers NRC’s criteria for licensing the ownership, use and transfer of special nuclear material, such as enriched uranium. The R-50 production facility is designed to deliver a scalable production of its portable high-temperature gas-cooled microreactor called Kaleidos.
The one-megawatt microreactor is designed to use tri-structural isotropic – or TRISO – fuel for its operation. TRISO fuel uses high-assay low-enriched uranium – or HALEU – which is uranium enriched between 5% and 20%.
Radiant said Part 70 is one of the biggest regulatory hurdles for a company to establish a production facility. Receiving this license would allow for the factory to use fuel in the microreactor manufacturing process, which would be a key step in launching the R-50 production facility.
When operational, the R-50 factory is expected to produce up to 50 microreactors per year, the company said.
“We have been working every day to validate our design, process, and product,” Radiant Chief Nuclear Officer Rita Baranwal said. “Five years of development, thousands of man hours, and hundreds of pages of technical information, testing, repeated results, and documentation have led to this moment.”
Radiant elected to set up shop near the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge site in October 2025 after discontinuing plans to site its microreactor production factory in Natrona County, Wyo.
The decision to go to Tennessee was due to Wyoming’s laws that only allowed for temporary storage of waste from operating nuclear power plants. This would have prohibited Radiant’s plans to refuel its microreactors at the factory and temporarily store the waste at the manufacturing site.