Molten salt reactors · Texas Hill Country

Nuclear,
made liquid.

We dissolve nuclear fuel into molten salt — so it runs blazing hot, at ordinary pressure, and can't melt down. Texas Atomics is built to bring this technology to the world.

See how it works → Why Texas Atomics
The idea

Most reactors fight physics. Ours uses it.

Conventional reactor

Solid fuel. Water under pressure.

Today's reactors pack solid fuel rods and pin water down at roughly 150 times atmospheric pressure to keep it from flashing to steam. Lose cooling, and the heat keeps climbing toward the very thing everyone fears.

Molten salt reactor

Liquid fuel. No pressure to lose.

We dissolve the fuel into a molten salt that flows near room pressure. There's no high-pressure water to burst, no solid core to melt — the fuel is already a stable, self-limiting liquid. Heat it up and the reaction naturally throttles itself back down.

We melted the fuel so it can't melt down.

How it works

A reactor that runs like a living liquid.

01 / FUEL

Dissolve it

Nuclear fuel is dissolved into a fluoride or chloride salt. The fuel and its coolant become one flowing liquid — no rods, no cladding, no pellets to fail.

02 / HEAT

Run it hot

The salt circulates through the core and heats to around 700°C — far hotter than a water reactor. That heat spins turbines for the grid and powers heavy industry directly.

03 / CONTROL

Let physics steer

As the liquid fuel gets hotter it expands and spreads apart, which naturally slows the reaction. The reactor leans toward stability instead of away from it.

The fail-safe

The off switch is gravity.

At the bottom of the reactor sits a plug of frozen salt, held solid by nothing more than a cooling fan. It's the simplest safety device in nuclear power — and the most reassuring.

Cut the power. Cut everything. With no fan, the plug warms, melts, and the liquid fuel drains by gravity into tanks built to let the reaction simply stop and cool on its own. No operators. No pumps. No backup generators.

To make it safe, you don't add anything.
You take the power away.

● Operating · plug frozen
Why it matters

Clean power that's finally practical.

// 24/7

Firm, around the clock

Carbon-free power that doesn't wait for wind or sun — steady baseload to anchor a clean grid.

// FUEL

Less waste, more value

Molten salt designs sip their fuel and leave far less behind. Some can even consume spent fuel that other reactors threw away.

// SITE

Build it where it's needed

No coast or great river required. Low-pressure, air-coolable designs can sit closer to the cities and industry they power.

// HEAT

Hot enough for industry

700°C heat does more than make electricity — it can drive hydrogen, desalination, and the high-heat processes behind steel and chemicals.

Our mission

Proven decades ago.
Built for now.

The molten salt reactor isn't science fiction — it ran successfully at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. The physics worked. The world just wasn't ready. We are.

Texas Atomics is a full-stack molten salt reactor developer, pairing validated computational modeling with hands-on experiment to carry a reactor from design through licensing to operation. Our path runs from medicine to power — beginning with the medical isotopes a small reactor can make soonest, then building toward clean, firm power for the grid.

To reach power scale without re-running a decade of component testing, we're partnering with Copenhagen Atomics to bring their proven Onion Core® reactor to the United States under an exclusive U.S. license, currently in advanced negotiation. Copenhagen Atomics contributes roughly a decade of salt-wetted hardware — test loops with thousands of operating hours, a continuously run molten-salt pump, and demonstrated salt-chemistry control. Because U.S. law requires that a nuclear license be held by an American operator, Texas Atomics is built to be that domestic licensee — bringing a proven design home and deploying molten salt power on American soil.

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About us

From model to metal.

Most advanced-reactor efforts are strong in one leg and weak in the other — a modeling group that has never run an experiment, or a hardware shop whose models a regulator can't trust. Texas Atomics is a full-stack molten salt reactor developer, built to bring both legs together, by the people who have already demonstrated each one.

Dr. John Ross

Dr. John Ross

Founder & CEO · Computational nuclear engineering

Dr. Ross is a computational nuclear engineer who built the modeling foundation Texas Atomics is grounded in. As his doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, he developed a validated digital twin of the university's research reactor — a working demonstration that a molten-salt-relevant multiphysics model can be anchored to a real operating reactor and trusted as a basis for analysis and licensing.

He carries that capability directly into the company through UT Austin's Digital Molten Salt Reactor Initiative (DMSRI) — the MSRI program — where the same digital-twin methods now model Texas Atomics' own reactor. It's the difference between a simulation a regulator has to take on faith and a model proven against the reactor it describes.

A full-stack team

Dr. Ross leads a team assembled to merge validated modeling with hands-on experiment: the UT Austin DMSRI modeling group, the UT/NETL researchers behind the reactor's salt-separations work, and molten-salt specialists with deep familiarity with Copenhagen Atomics' systems. The company's role is the integrator — combining founder-proven modeling with demonstrated experimental expertise, which is precisely what a defensible licensing basis requires.

EST. [founding year] · [city, TX]

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