Presented by
It's Tuesday. A microreactor the size of a shipping container quietly sustained a nuclear chain reaction in the Idaho desert last week, the first new reactor design to do so at the lab in half a century. The race the government set for July 4 now has a frontrunner.
In today's edition:
⚛️ Antares becomes the first advanced reactor critical under DOE's pilot program
🔌 Quick Hits: an SMR speeds up, Meta beams solar from space, a battery on a dead reactor
💰 Capital: a $78M raise and a 1.2-GW AI campus in the Permian
📋 Policy Watch: Congress speeds geothermal, New York shops for reactors
📊 Chart: the world's grid-battery boom in one line
The Electrification of Heavy Machinery Has a Ground Floor
Tesla did it to cars. Now the same shift is coming for excavators, forklifts, cranes, and military equipment. The difference is that nobody has owned this moment yet — until RISE Robotics.
Their technology strips hydraulics out of heavy machinery entirely and replaces it with a patented electric actuator. No fluid. Full digital control. Built for the autonomous machines that are coming whether the industry is ready or not. The Pentagon is already a customer.
Last Round Oversubscribed. $9.7M in revenue already on the board. Dylan Jovine of ‘Behind the Markets’ spotted it early. The Wefunder community round lets anyone invest alongside institutional backers.
The Big Story
Antares Mark-0 becomes the first advanced reactor critical under DOE's pilot program.
Antares Nuclear's Mark-0, a sodium heat-pipe-cooled microreactor running on HALEU TRISO fuel, achieved zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory on June 4, the first reactor to reach that milestone under the Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. The Torrance, California company was founded in 2023 and has raised more than $140 million, including a $96 million Series B that closed in December.
"We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028. Today is the first of those commitments delivered on the schedule we set." POWER, June 5, 2026
The Mark-0 reached criticality at INL's RACE facility, the first novel reactor design to go critical at the lab in more than 50 years and the 53rd reactor built there since 1951.
DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, created by a May 2025 executive order, targets at least three advanced-reactor criticalities by July 4; Antares is the first to deliver.
Zero-power criticality proves the reactor physics and controls work, not electricity generation; Antares plans full-power electricity production in 2027.
The commercial R1 microreactor is rated 100 kWe to 1 MWe, ships in a transport cradle, and is aimed at defense and space deployments by 2028.
Source: POWER · World Nuclear News
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
A mix of nuclear, storage, and a literal moonshot moving from blueprint to build.
OPG is building its BWRX-300 at Darlington faster and cheaper than the last one, a sign North American SMR construction is finding a repeatable rhythm. ANS
DOE picked two companies to demo automated monitoring of spent-fuel canisters, chipping at one of the cost and labor bottlenecks in nuclear waste handling. ANS
Google and Intersect broke ground on a 1-GW-plus co-located generation complex in the Texas Panhandle, wind, solar, storage, and some gas wired to a single data center. POWER
Meta signed a capacity reservation deal with startup Overview Energy for up to 1 GW of solar power beamed from space, near-infrared light fired at terrestrial solar farms so they keep generating after dark, with the first satellites targeted for 2030. TechCrunch
Planted is pitching a leaner, faster solar model built specifically for data-center speed-to-power, betting solar can compete on schedule, not just price. Latitude Media
SMUD is breaking ground this month on a 160-MW, 640-MWh battery inside the fence of the decommissioned Rancho Seco nuclear site, reusing existing interconnection to skip costly upgrades. Energy-Storage.news
The Capital Stack
On the latest Catalyst, the analyst case for where energy money is heading.
Energy Impact Partners' Shayle Kann and Ember's Nic Fulghum unpack the Global Electricity Review and the data points behind capital's rotation into grid, storage, and firm generation: demand growth is real, and the technologies that site and build fastest are winning the dollars. Worth a listen before the next raise hits.
Source: Latitude Media — Catalyst
Also in the capital stack:
Companion Energy raised $78M to take on the energy market. Companion’s software autonomously cuts costs by forecasting demand, reading the market, and acting on it, from procurement to assets to flexibility, in real time.
The round is led by Realyze Ventures and Pi Labs, with Asterion Ventures and existing investors Übermorgen Ventures, NAP, Entourage Ventures, imec.istart future fund.
Poolside Infrastructure's Project Horizon, a 1.2-GW AI campus rising in the Permian Basin near Fort Stockton, Texas, is the kind of vertically integrated, power-first buildout now steering where compute capital flows, per energy writer David Blackmon.
Loving Today’s Brief?
Forward it to your team!
And reply back with some news and stories we should include tomorrow!
Policy Watch
The House passed a bipartisan geothermal permitting package (H.R. 5631), the most significant geothermal reform since 1970, easing the federal leasing and review steps that slow next-gen geothermal builds; it now heads to the Senate. E&E News
New York issued solicitations to develop at least 1 GW of advanced nuclear upstate, an RFQ for nuclear developers plus $40M in workforce funding, moving Gov. Hochul's nuclear plan from blueprint to procurement. Public Power
Chart of the Day
The world is installing grid batteries at a blistering pace.
The world deployed 112 GW of grid batteries in 2025, roughly 10 times the amount added just four years earlier. Data via Canary Media's Chart of the Week.
Source: Canary Media · June 2026
