All 200 employees from nuclear startup Aalo Atomics’s Austin, Texas headquarters have been flying into Idaho Falls this week to gather at the two-acre construction site, just outside of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where their new Aalo-X reactor is now being put to the test. Aalo brought in Airstream trailers for the event, which CEO Matt Loszak describes as “a nuclear Burning Man,” after the counter culture festival in the Nevada desert.

“We’ll give some emotional speeches,” says Loszak of himself and his co-founder Yasir Arafat, and share a live video feed of the team loading uranium fuel bundles into the reactor core, then removing control rods to allow fission chain reactions to speed up.

Aalo broke ground on the DOE site in August 2025 with the ambitious plan to achieve “criticality” -- the state in which a nuclear reactor sustains a stable chain reaction -- by July 4, 2026. Early on July 2, Aalo’s Arafat, the chief technology officer, conceded in a post on X that they weren't quite to critical yet. “Atoms are splitting, and the core is multiplying neutrons, but we're not critical yet….criticality is a slow and deliberate process. And we are super close to the July 4th deadline.”

America’s 250th birthday is the deadline President Donald Trump set in a May 2025 executive order directing the DOE to launch the Reactor Pilot Program, with the goal of jumpstarting at least three reactor startups to achieve criticality. Aalo is just the latest small-sized reactor startup to close in on “criticality,” thanks to help from the DOE. Incredibly, three others recently achieved the milestone, satisfying Trump’s deadline -- Valar Atomics, Antares Energy and Deployable Energy.

Bob Boston, head of the agency’s Idaho........

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