TEXAS ATOMICS
TEXAS ATOMICS
Texas Atomics will bring Copenhagen Atomics’ molten salt reactor technology to the United States, starting with a Texas fuel line that will produce the liquid salt fuel these reactors run on. The reactor will follow: one that runs hotter, holds itself stable, and can produce the isotopes used to treat cancer alongside firm, carbon-free power.
U.S. reactors run at roughly a 93% capacity factor, the highest of any energy source. It is the steady baseload a reliable grid is built on.
A fingertip-sized uranium pellet releases about the energy of a ton of coal. That is enormous output from a land and fuel footprint a fraction of any alternative.
Fission releases no carbon dioxide in operation, and nuclear sits among the lowest lifecycle-emission sources ever measured.
U.S. electricity demand is climbing for the first time in two decades, driven by data centers and electrification. Nuclear is the only carbon-free source that adds round-the-clock power at gigawatt scale.
Run the fuel as a liquid and a reactor can do far more than make electricity.
Nuclear fuel is dissolved into a fluoride salt, so fuel and coolant become a single circulating liquid. There are no rods, cladding, or pellets that can crack, swell, or fail.
The salt circulates through the core at roughly 700°C, far hotter than a water reactor. That temperature drives turbines efficiently and can supply process heat to heavy industry directly.
As the fuel salt warms it expands and thins, which slows the reaction. This negative temperature feedback makes the reactor self-regulating rather than something that must be actively held in check.
A molten salt reactor doesn’t burn solid pellets. It runs on a liquid: uranium dissolved in a carefully purified fluoride salt. That fuel isn’t made at commercial scale in the United States today, so our first facility won’t be a reactor. It will be a molten salt fuel line in Texas, producing the salts Copenhagen Atomics’ reactor is designed to run on.
The fuel line will start from low-enriched uranium under 5%, the same commercially available material today’s power plants use, rather than scarce high-assay fuel.
It will convert that uranium into fluoride fuel salt and purify it to the standard the reactor needs, driving out the moisture and oxygen that would corrode it.
The same line will prepare the thorium salt for the reactor’s outer blanket, the layer designed to breed new fuel.
When the reactor arrives, U.S.-made fuel will already be waiting for it, instead of a supply chain that has to be built after the fact.
Every molten salt reactor will need fuel. We plan to make it first.
At the base of the core sits a plug of frozen salt, kept solid by nothing more than a small cooling fan, a mechanism first demonstrated at Oak Ridge in the 1960s.
If power is ever interrupted, the plug melts and the fuel settles by gravity into tanks shaped to hold it at rest. No operator action, no pumps, no backup generators. Because the safety comes from the design itself, these reactors can be built smaller and sited closer to where the power is needed.
To make it safe, you don't add anything.
You take the power away.
Our plan
Rather than design a reactor from scratch, Texas Atomics will bring Copenhagen Atomics' Onion Core®, a containerized molten salt reactor with roughly a decade of hardware testing behind it, to the United States under a U.S. license. The first step will be its fuel: a Texas fuel line producing the salt the reactor runs on.
Copenhagen Atomics has spent roughly a decade proving the Onion Core®, with thousands of hours of salt-wetted hardware testing behind it. Texas Atomics’ role will be to deploy that technology domestically: first producing its fuel salt in Texas, then securing the U.S. license, building and operating the reactor here, and serving as the domestic owner-operator that U.S. nuclear law requires.
The design is proven in hardware. We’ll make its fuel here first.
The fuel line will be a Texas facility built to produce the fuel and blanket salts for Copenhagen Atomics’ reactor. It will give the reactor a domestic fuel supply from the start, and let Texas Atomics build its licensing and operating record with nuclear materials before the reactor arrives.
The line will start from low-enriched uranium under 5%, the same category of fuel today’s power plants already buy.
Uranium will be converted into LiF–UF₄ fuel salt made with lithium-7, then purified and tested before it leaves the plant.
The line will also prepare the ThF₄ salt for the reactor’s outer breeding blanket.
Running the fuel line will build the team, procedures, and regulatory track record the reactor will need.
Instead of the bundles of solid fuel rods in a conventional reactor, the Onion Core® is built from nested layers wrapped around a center. Two liquids do two jobs: one salt makes the power, the other breeds new fuel. From the inside out:
An inner core of heavy water (D₂O) moderates neutrons, sitting near ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure.
LiF–UF₄ fuel salt, beryllium-free with enriched lithium-7, circulates here at roughly 600–700°C. This is where fission happens.
A second D₂O layer wraps the fuel salt, shaping the neutron spectrum and carrying heat away from the core.
An outer ThF₄ salt captures escaping neutrons and breeds new fuel.
Our first reactor will be a molten salt demonstration unit in Texas, with no electrical output, running on salt from our fuel line. Its purpose will be to prove that Texas Atomics can license and operate this technology in the United States, and to exercise the company’s full-stack capability end to end.
The reactor’s own fission will keep the salt molten: no external heaters, no power-conversion system, no pressurization.
It will run on fuel salt made at our Texas fuel line from commercially available low-enriched uranium, with none of the fuel-rod fabrication a conventional reactor requires.
The heavy-water layers will sit near ambient temperature. Stop fission and the salt simply freezes in place, the benign end state.
It will take the design from paper to a running, licensed reactor, validating the modeling, the fuel, and the operations the larger power reactors will be built on.
That first reactor will prove the licensing and operating path. The same platform is designed to scale: Copenhagen Atomics' commercial Onion Core® is a 100 MWth reactor designed to deliver firm, carbon-free power for the grid and for behind-the-meter industrial sites. Texas Atomics plans to be the U.S. owner-operator that deploys it here, and the fuel line will grow with the fleet.
Because the fuel is a liquid, the same reactor can also produce medical isotopes.
Texas Atomics will pair two capabilities that rarely sit in one company: reactor modeling validated against a real operating reactor, and a hardware platform with a decade of test data behind it. We’ll start with the molten salt fuel that platform runs on.
Dr. Ross is a computational nuclear engineer and the technical foundation of Texas Atomics. Through the University of Texas at Austin's Digital Molten Salt Reactor Initiative, his doctoral work produced a validated digital twin of UT Austin's research reactor: a working demonstration that a molten-salt-relevant multiphysics model can be anchored to real reactor data and trusted as a basis for analysis and licensing.
He will carry that capability directly into the company, where the same methods will model Texas Atomics’ fuel line and reactor. It is the difference between a simulation a regulator must take on faith and a model proven against the reactor it describes. Dr. Ross will lead research partnerships and capital formation.
Texas Atomics will run lean and integrate two external groups, holding single-point accountability to its regulators across both.
University of Texas at Austin will provide the validated digital twin, independent physics verification, and experimental separations research, via sponsored research.
Copenhagen Atomics will supply the Onion Core® technology, from the salts it runs on to the reactor itself.
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