First Position in Oklo (OKLO)
A next-gen nuclear utility with 14 GW of demand, a DoD contract in hand — and the runway to prove it.
The bull case here isn’t complicated.
14 gigawatts of interest.
A reactor that doesn’t need refueling for a decade.
A $3 billion market cap.
That’s the setup. It’s not a moonshot. It’s a bet on electricity demand, execution, and the fact that the U.S. military just picked this company to power a strategic Arctic base.
We’re not betting the farm.
But we are building a position.
This is our first entry into Oklo — a small nuclear company with a big plan: reinvent fission for the 21st century. If they pull it off, they’ll have a head start on one of the most durable problems in modern infrastructure: how to deliver clean, reliable, 24/7 power anywhere it’s needed.
What follows is a breakdown of the tech, the thesis, the risks, and how we’re trading it. Because whether you believe in nuclear or not, power demand is rising — and someone has to supply it.
What Oklo Actually Does
Oklo isn’t trying to rebuild the past. It’s trying to rethink how nuclear works from the ground up — with a compact, self-regulating fission reactor that doesn’t need water, pumps, or even daily supervision.
The company’s flagship design, the Aurora, is a fast-neutron fission reactor. It uses HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium) fuel and circulates heat through liquid metal (sodium), not pressurized water. That choice matters. Unlike the large, complex light-water reactors that make up most of the world’s nuclear fleet, Oklo’s design doesn’t require massive steam turbines, external cooling towers, or human operators on constant watch. It’s small enough to fit on a few acres — and stable enough to run for a decade without refueling public_substack_style.
Each Aurora unit is designed to generate up to 75 megawatts of electricity — or 125 megawatts of thermal energy — with over 90% uptime. And it’s not just the fuel cycle that’s long-lived. The Aurora’s core is built to be sealed and buried, with natural convection and heat pipe-based cooling systems that require no external power to function. It can sit quietly in a remote location, deliver 24/7 baseload power, and shut itself down if something goes wrong — all without operator intervention.
Instead of selling reactors, Oklo plans to build, own, and operate its fleet — selling electricity to customers under long-term contracts. This matters for investors. It turns the company into a future nuclear utility, with recurring revenue tied to 20–30 year power purchase agreements. Not a one-time vendor.
In other words, Oklo isn’t a reactor company. It’s a power company — built on nuclear fission that looks nothing like what came before.
Why It’s Different from the Reactors You’ve Heard Of
When most people hear “nuclear,” they think of disasters. Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. Fukushima. Giant containment domes, spinning turbines, emergency core cooling systems — and human error waiting to happen.
Oklo’s Aurora reactor isn’t just a different model. It’s a fundamentally different design — with physics, fuel, and control systems that make those old risks structurally impossible.
Start with the core. Traditional reactors use water to both cool the fuel and slow down neutrons — which means they run at high pressure, with complex systems of valves and pumps. When one of those fails, or when operators make the wrong call (as they did at Three Mile Island), the system can spiral out of control in minutes.
Aurora doesn’t use water. Its fuel is cooled by liquid metal, and the reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, not hundreds of pounds per square inch. There are no high-pressure steam loops, no massive turbine buildings, and no cooling towers. Just a sealed, passively cooled unit — buried underground — with inherent negative reactivity feedback. If temperatures rise, the reaction slows. If they fall, it picks back up. No operator needs to touch a thing.
Chernobyl failed in part because of a positive void coefficient — a fancy way of saying the reactor got more reactive when things got hot. Aurora is the opposite. Its feedback loops are self-correcting — more like a thermostat than a chain reaction gone rogue.
It’s also small by design. Traditional reactors produce 1,000+ megawatts and require vast infrastructure. Aurora’s 75 MWe footprint is modular and distributed. That’s not just safer — it’s more flexible. Power can be placed closer to where it’s used: data centers, industrial sites, military bases. And each reactor can run for 10 years or more without refueling, which means no complex logistics, no routine shut-downs, and fewer opportunities for anything to go wrong.
There are no analogues in the traditional fleet. This isn’t a scaled-down Three Mile Island. It’s a fundamentally new system — one that removes the most dangerous parts of nuclear before they ever appear.
The Bull Case for OKLO
The bull case isn’t built on vibes. It’s built on numbers — and the numbers are impressive.
Oklo’s disclosed pipeline has grown from under 1 GW in mid-2023 to over 14.1 gigawatts today. That’s a 2,000% increase in just one year . For context, the entire nuclear generating capacity of the United States is about 95 GW. Oklo’s pipeline — if fully realized — would be the equivalent of adding 15% more nuclear capacity to the U.S. grid, using reactors that fit in a parking lot.
Much of this interest is already taking shape as commercial intent. In 2024, Oklo signed a 20-year master agreement with Switch, a data center operator with some of the most demanding uptime and power quality requirements in the industry. That deal alone accounts for 12 GW — nearly 85% of the pipeline. While it's non-binding at this stage, it's a clear signal: customers want Aurora deployed at scale .
And it’s not just Switch. Oklo has also signed:
A 50 MW deal with Diamondback Energy to power oilfield operations,
A 100 MW agreement with Wyoming Hyperscale, and
Letters of intent with Equinix, another major data center provider.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense awarded Oklo a 30-year contract to deploy a microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The project is expected to be operational by the early 2030s — and if successful, it opens the door to additional government sites, especially in remote or vulnerable areas .
That’s demand. Now here’s the capacity plan.
Oklo’s first commercial deployment is scheduled for 2027–2028, with plans to scale rapidly thereafter. Their internal projections (from investor materials and public filings) suggest a ramp to several gigawatts in the first five years. If they manage even 25% of the 14.1 GW pipeline by 2032, that implies:
~3.5 GW deployed,
At 90% capacity factor, that’s ~27.5 million megawatt-hours per year,
At $90/MWh (a conservative PPA price for clean, reliable baseload), that’s $2.5 billion in annual revenue.
And that’s just the base energy sales.
Oklo is also developing fuel recycling capabilities, targeting a long-term reduction in fuel cost by as much as 80%. They recently acquired Atomic Alchemy, a radioisotope producer, for $25 million — giving them potential entry into the $55 billion global isotopes market .
All of this is happening with a market cap around $3–4 billion.
So the math looks something like this:
~$3B market cap today
$2B+ in potential annual revenue within 5–7 years
14 GW pipeline
Government and enterprise customers willing to sign 20–30 year deals
This isn’t a hype stock. It’s a pre-revenue utility with institutional backing and a regulatory tailwind at its back. And the upside, if execution lands, is many multiples from here.
Section 4: The Risks We're Not Ignoring
The upside here is real. But so are the risks. This isn’t a core position. Not yet. And if we’re being honest, there are a few ways this could go sideways.
The biggest one is regulatory. Oklo hasn’t submitted its final license application yet. Their first attempt, back in 2022, got rejected — not because the tech failed, but because the documentation was incomplete. That’s been addressed. But until the NRC signs off, none of this ships. The company says they’ll file by the end of 2025. That’s a hard milestone. If it slips, the entire deployment timeline could move with it.
Then there’s the fuel. Aurora runs on HALEU — a next-generation uranium fuel that’s in short supply. The U.S. is building domestic capacity, and Oklo is well-positioned to be early in line. But if HALEU isn’t available at scale by 2027, no one is flipping the switch.
Execution risk matters too. Oklo’s not just trying to build reactors. It’s trying to stand up an entire vertically integrated power business. That means manufacturing. Siting. Licensing. Financing. Operating. Doing that once is hard. Doing it fifty times in five years is even harder.
The good news? They have the cash to try. After their latest raise, Oklo is sitting on roughly $660 million in liquidity — enough to fund operations through at least 2028, even if revenue takes longer than expected. That’s a bigger cushion than most pre-revenue power startups ever see.
Still, it won’t be enough forever. If the company hits delays — or scales more slowly than planned — it will need to raise again. That’s not a knock, just reality. And in a market that punishes early-stage names on any slip, even a strong long-term story can see its stock cut in half on weak execution.
That’s why we’re treating this like what it is: a venture-stage power company, not a cash-flowing utility. We’re not swinging big out of the gate. We’re sizing for uncertainty — and scaling with proof and milestones.
How We’re Trading It
We’re not just researching Oklo. We’ve started building the position.
We’re tying our entry to something concrete: the company’s first military reactor contract. The Air Force intends to award Oklo a 30-year agreement to build and operate its Aurora reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska — a landmark deal that validates both the technology and the business model.
This is exactly the kind of milestone we wait for: institutional commitment, long-term cash flow visibility, and a federal partner that doesn’t move casually. It’s not revenue yet. But it’s real.
We’ll continue to build our exposure conservatively — using put premium to fund future entries, scaling as execution plays out. There’s no rush.
You can read the full trade breakdown here:
