I think this piece of news here is less than meets the eye. The contract between USAF and Oklo is probably heavily contingent on various things. One of which,

I think this piece of news here is less than meets the eye. The contract between USAF and Oklo is probably heavily contingent on various things. One of which, undoubtedly, being that Oklo gets an approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). NRC rejected Oklo's application in January 2022 [1]. We are now 1 year and 8 months later, and where's Oklo with regard to their resubmission? Here's where it is [2] > In 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requested additional information to resume the application. Oklo has since added additional staff with decades of NRC experience. Oklo has been able to reach resolution of the items identified in the denial and is now preparing for an application readiness review. So, they are still preparing. I wish them good luck (no sarcasm). But, for a sense of the timelines one can reasonably expect: NuScale got the approval of their SMR in 6 years. It was a pressurized water reactor, just like about 100 such reactors that are in commercial operation in the US, and which the NRC is currently overseeing. Of course, it is much smaller, so there are probably some specific challenges related to the different size of the reactor, but otherwise the technology is the same, and the NRC has literally thousands, or tens of thousands of man-year experience with these reactors. Oklo's proposed reactor is a sodium-cooled fast reactor. One such reactor was in operation in the US about half a century ago. Most likely noone on the current NRC staff has any personal experience with such a reactor. How long will it take the NRC to approve a new reactor type with which their staff has zero experience? I'm keeping my fingers crossed, this reactor technology is quite cool in principle. But I'm not holding my breath that I'll see this technology in actual production this decade. Maybe in the 2030's, if we are lucky. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/aurora-oklo.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/auro... [2] https://oklo.com/regulatory-maturity/default.aspx https://oklo.com/regulatory-maturity/default.aspx