Oklo's fuel strategy is easier to read once you map the megawatts. The HALEU that Centrus will begin delivering in 2029 is allocated across three distinct uses: the first phase of a 1.2 GW power campus in southern Ohio, future Aurora powerhouses not yet sited, and the eventual refuelling of Aurora-INL, the company's first reactor at Idaho National Laboratory.

A reactor with EBR-II DNA

The Aurora powerhouse is a liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fuelled fast reactor that uses heat pipes to move heat from the core to a supercritical carbon dioxide power conversion system. It builds on the operational heritage of Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which ran at Idaho National Laboratory from 1964 to 1994 — the same machine whose recovered fuel supplies Oklo's first unit.

Ohio: five units and a hyperscaler

The southern Ohio campus is planned at 1.2 GW, with contracted fuel sufficient for up to five Aurora powerhouses running for several years. Power will be sold into the PJM grid to support Meta's data centre operations, and Meta's earlier prepayments for future electricity are now helping finance Oklo's HALEU purchase. Oklo intends to sell power through a build-own-operate model anchored by long-term power purchase agreements rather than unit sales.

Idaho: the commercial launchpad

Aurora-INL comes first. It will initially run on HALEU recovered from EBR-II fuel, a supply the U.S. Department of Energy made available through a 2019 competitive process at a time when no U.S. commercial facility could produce HALEU. The Centrus contract then converts that one-off arrangement into a durable commercial refuelling path.

Oklo CEO and co-founder Jacob DeWitte has said securing fuel is essential to scaling the business beyond the first Idaho reactor, supporting initial Ohio deployments and future Aurora units.

The demand signal

Each Aurora unit represents a multi-year HALEU commitment, and a five-unit campus implies reload demand stretching well beyond the initial core loads. That is the demand visibility Centrus cites when it points to substantial upcoming commercial HALEU requirements. For the wider market, Oklo's fleet plan is the clearest test of whether advanced reactor demand can be aggregated into orders large enough to justify enrichment capacity built at U.S. scale — and whether fuel, rather than reactor design, becomes the pacing item for deployment.

This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.