Two next-generation geothermal companies moved closer to the grid on the same day. Quaise Energy was picked for up to $25 million in Department of Energy support for its superhot plant in Oregon. Sage Geosystems chose Ormat’s Blue Mountain power plant in Nevada as the site for its next commercial-scale enhanced geothermal system (EGS). Different technologies, different business models. Same destination: firm power, around the clock, from rock that conventional geothermal can’t use.

Oklo Inc. has cleared a major regulatory milestone for its Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Lockhart, Texas, after the U.S. Department of Energy granted startup authorization under the agency’s Reactor Pilot Program. The approval lets Oklo begin loading nuclear fuel, run startup testing, and move toward first criticality at the facility. The pace of the buildout stands out. Oklo went from breaking ground to DOE startup authorization in just over ten months, a span that included constructing the reactor facility, standing up the operating organization, training personnel, writing nuclear programs and procedures, and sourcing fuel and major equipment commercially.

President Trump’s Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” attached a hard deadline to America’s nuclear ambitions: at least three participants in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program were meant to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026. That deadline has now passed, and it functions as a real-time stress test of how fast the “nuclear renaissance” rhetoric can translate into operating reactors. The pilot program mechanism.