Land Energy, a small nuclear startup, merged with the acquisition company on Wednesday.
The North Carolina-based company is developing a small modular reactor and is hoping to win $280 million from the deal. Prior to the SPAC merger, land energy raised $94 million, according to Pitchbook. The combined entities are expected to be listed in Nasdaq under the symbol IMSR.
The ticker refers to the flavor of a small modular reactor (SMR) of terrestrial energy called an integral molten salt reactor. In such devices, uranium fuel is mixed with various salts such as lithium fluoride and sodium fluoride, suspending the nuclear fuel and acting as the main coolant in the reactor.
Terrestrial Energy’s reactor core is designed to be completely replaced every seven years, partly to eliminate some of the previous molten salt reactors experienced like corrosion. The reactor core includes not only fuel and graphite modulators that regulate the rate of fission reactions, but also heat exchangers and pumps that keep salt flowing coldly.
Startups target a variety of markets, including electricity, data centers, and industrial applications that require heat.
There are many existing proposals for building commercial scale molten salt reactors, but to date they have not been built. The basic technology was invented in the 1950s, but two experiments of that era were troubled by problems.
Nuclear is attracting new attention as building electrification and transportation combined with the rapid growth of data centers has led to high electricity demand.
High-tech companies are increasingly interested in this technology as a possible solution to the power requirements of AI training and inference. Sam Altman from Google, Meta, Amazon and Openai all chose horses in the race to develop advanced nuclear reactors.
Terrestrial Energy is not SPAC’s first SMR startup. In 2024, Altman-backed Oklo completed the transaction.