Kairos Power has completed the installation of a prefabricated concrete shielding structure at our Oak Ridge campus in Tennessee.
The advanced construction method will be used for portions of the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor facility and scaled up for future plants to help shorten construction timelines and lower costs.
De-risking Precast Construction
Kairos Power worked with several key partners to produce and assemble premade wall panels measuring 8 feet wide by 26 feet tall. The 45-ton elements were installed by general contractor Barnard Construction, with support from Barnhart Crane & Rigging.
Emulative precast concrete construction uses modular elements with detailed joints and connections that behave structurally like conventional cast-in-place concrete structures. Kairos Power plans to integrate this method into the construction process for our reactor buildings to enhance quality control, reduce waste, and speed up assembly timelines.
The precast wall panels were made on-site using a combination of wood, steel, and 3D-printed polymer composite molds produced by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Manufacturing Demonstration Facility and the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composite Center. The 3D-printed forms allowed us to produce complex sinusoidal “wave” joints with extreme precision that can’t be achieved with conventional formwork.
The wave joints enable rapid assembly without the use of grout and are designed to deliver similar shielding performance as conventional wall structures built with cast-in-place methods.
WATCH: Kairos Power Completes Precast Concrete Shielding Demonstration
“The ability to modularize the reactor building and shielding structures will be transformative,” said Principal Engineer Ahmed Elhattab. “Assembly of the sinusoidal walls took one day, as opposed to five days for the walls with grouted connections – a significant time reduction that demonstrated our iterative process in action.”
“Kairos Power aims to leverage both precast and traditional cast-in-place methods to shrink construction timelines and drive toward cost certainty for the fleet,” said Chief Technology Officer Ed Blandford. “This demonstration is a crucial step to expanding the use of precast construction to build our plants with greater efficiency and enhanced performance on significantly faster timelines compared to conventional methods.”
Moving Forward
The demonstration replicated a portion of the Hermes reactor building that will be optimized to protect workers from low-level radiation emitted during operation using the sinusoidal wave joints.
The Kairos Power team will work to test the shielding performance of the walls and investigate other advanced manufacturing technologies, such as 3D laser and Lidar scanners for quality control.
By combining modular construction, advanced manufacturing techniques, and iterative learning, Kairos Power is building a repeatable, scalable, and cost-effective model for future KP-FHR deployments.
Every modular build accelerates the next—driving faster schedules and lower costs.
