A nuclear reactor design that burned through roughly $400 million in investment before being quietly shelved in 2017 is getting a second life, courtesy of two engineers who used to build rockets for Elon Musk.
Ben Kellie and Paul Keutelian, both former SpaceX engineers, founded Applied Atomics in 2025 with a specific goal: take a proven but abandoned reactor concept and route its output directly to the data centers that AI companies are desperately trying to keep powered. On June 17, 2026, the company signed a licensing agreement with BWXT, giving Applied Atomics exclusive commercial rights to the mPower small modular reactor design across the US and Canada.
What exactly they’re reviving
The mPower reactor is a Generation III+ light-water small modular reactor rated at 195 megawatts electric, or 575 megawatts thermal. For context, a single large conventional nuclear plant typically generates around 1,000 MW electric, so mPower sits in a middle tier: smaller and faster to build than traditional nuclear, but meaningfully more powerful than the micro-reactors that often dominate SMR headlines.
BWXT originally developed mPower with partner Babcock and Wilcox, drawing significant federal and private support before the project stalled under the weight of cost overruns and a difficult regulatory environment. The design did not disappear entirely. Test facilities in Lynchburg, Virginia were preserved, which means Applied Atomics is not starting from a blank page. The prior $400 million in development work is effectively a head start baked into the licensing deal.
