Oklo Brand Guidelines: A Gabon-Named Fission Start-Up, an NRC Denial & a Texas Reactor

Two co-founders and a natural reactor.

Oklo is an American nuclear company based in Santa Clara, California. Its leadership page says Jacob DeWitte, its chief executive, and Caroline DeWitte (also given there as Caroline Cochran), its chief operating officer, co-founded it and have sat on its board “since its inception in July 2013.” The company says Jacob DeWitte studied nuclear engineering at the University of Florida and took his master’s degree and doctorate in the subject at MIT.

The name comes from geology rather than from a founder or a product. English Wikipedia says it is taken from Oklo, a region of Gabon in central Africa where self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions occurred naturally about 1.7 billion years ago.

Oklo describes a build-own-operate model. Rather than selling reactors to utilities, it says it plans to design, build, own and operate its plants and sell electricity and heat directly to customers under long-term agreements. Its website now groups the business into three lines — power, fuel and isotopes — and says it has nine active projects across Idaho, Alaska, Texas, Ohio and Tennessee; those are the company’s own descriptions.

Its flagship design is the Aurora powerhouse. English Wikipedia describes the current version as a 75-megawatt-electric, sodium-cooled fast reactor modelled on Experimental Breeder Reactor II, an Idaho research reactor that operated from 1964 to 1994, and fuelled with metallic fuel made from high-assay low-enriched uranium, usually shortened to HALEU. The first Aurora was a very different machine: a 1.5-megawatt microreactor that used heat pipes to carry heat from its core to a power conversion system, as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission described it in 2022.

A denied application, then a listing.

That first design produced the company’s most public setback. Oklo Power submitted a combined licence application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on 11 March 2020, seeking to build and operate the Aurora at the Idaho National Laboratory site, and NRC staff accepted it for review on 5 June 2020. On 6 January 2022 the NRC announced that it had denied the application without prejudice. Its press release said the application lacked information on key topics, quoting the director of its Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation on “significant information gaps” in the description of potential accidents and in the classification of safety systems and components. The NRC said its decision made no safety findings on the design and that the company was free to submit a complete application in the future.

English Wikipedia says Oklo has stayed engaged with the regulator through pre-application work since then, and that in 2025 it reported completing the NRC’s pre-application readiness assessment for the first phase of a new Aurora combined licence process. The larger sodium-cooled Aurora has replaced the heat-pipe microreactor as the company’s main design.

Oklo became a public company through a merger rather than a conventional flotation. In July 2023 it announced plans to combine with AltC Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, English Wikipedia records. After the deal closed, Oklo began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OKLO on 10 May 2024, Nuclear News, the American Nuclear Society’s publication, reported that week; it said Altman had been Oklo’s chairman since 2015. English Wikipedia says he stepped down as chairman in April 2025.

Since the listing the company has widened its scope. English Wikipedia says it completed its purchase of Atomic Alchemy, an Idaho radioisotope company, in March 2025, and announced plans that year for a fuel recycling facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. On 9 January 2026 Meta announced agreements with Oklo, TerraPower and Vistra, Nuclear News reported, arising from a request for proposals the technology company had issued in December 2024. In June 2026 Oklo and the enrichment company Centrus Energy announced a letter of intent for Centrus to supply HALEU from its plant at Piketon, Ohio, for up to five Aurora powerhouses at a planned campus in southern Ohio, with deliveries scheduled to begin in 2029; the two companies said a definitive contract was still to be negotiated.

Design and documentation.

Nuclear companies sell to a small number of buyers — utilities, governments and regulators — over very long timescales, and their imagery tends to reflect that. Corporate pages and reports often return to the same few scenes: cooling towers and reactor domes photographed under clear skies, turbine halls in clean, even light, and wide views of plants set against water or open country.

Newer reactor designers, many of which have not yet built a commercial plant, lean on renders instead. Small modular plants appear as low, compact buildings in green landscapes, sometimes beside a town or a data centre, with no smoke and few people. Large-reactor vendors show construction sites, cranes and heavy components such as reactor vessels and steam generators on the move, a way of picturing scale and progress at once.

People appear mostly as engineers in hard hats and overalls, inspecting a weld, reading a control-room screen or handling fuel. Two images recur across the trade: the blue Cherenkov glow of a spent-fuel or research-reactor pool, caused by charged particles travelling through water faster than light does in it, and ceramic fuel pellets held in a gloved hand. Both are used to make an invisible process visible.

The industry also presents itself in person, at trade gatherings such as the World Nuclear Exhibition and the meetings of the American Nuclear Society, where stands, renders and scale models carry much of the message. The companies in this guide range from Framatome, founded in 1958, and Urenco, set up by treaty in the early 1970s, to much younger reactor designers, and their visual languages vary just as widely.

First criticality in Texas.

Oklo’s first reactor to operate is not an Aurora. Under the US Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, it built the Groves Isotope Test Reactor, a low-power test reactor near Lockhart, Texas. It reached first criticality — a controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction — on the evening of 5 August 2026, the Department of Energy said, and Nuclear News reported on 6 August that it was the fifth reactor to reach that stage under the department’s authorisation process. Oklo says Groves was built on a greenfield site on private land, that criticality came less than a year after groundbreaking, and that the facility is the foundation for future commercial isotope production; those are the company’s statements.

The Aurora itself is still a plan. English Wikipedia says Oklo began pre-construction work on its first Aurora powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory in 2025 and that the company has said it expects that plant to begin operating in 2028. The southern Ohio campus linked to the Meta agreement and the Centrus letter of intent is likewise described by Oklo as planned.

Its website presents Oklo under the line “advanced fission power, fuel recycling and isotopes,” and its newsroom lists regulatory steps, fuel agreements and quarterly updates in date order.

For a design guide, Oklo shows a young company telling its story through a geological name and a run of dated regulatory milestones. Compare TerraPower, which also designs a sodium-cooled fast reactor and was named in the same Meta announcement, and NuScale, another American small-reactor developer. For this guide we use a basalt grey, a sandstone and an ochre gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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