Last Energy announced on October 7 that the U.S. Department of Energy approved the documented safety analysis (DSA) for its pilot reactor. The DSA is the penultimate of five milestones in the DOE authorization process, and only the readiness review remains.
The pilot facility is located at Texas A&M University's RELLIS campus in Texas. It is one of two projects in the DOE Reactor Pilot Program centered there, the other belonging to Terrestrial Energy.
Last Energy ultimately plans a 20-MWe pressurized water reactor fueled with low-enriched uranium. The pilot was previously called PWR-5 and shares the same physical reactor geometry as the PWR-20, with fuel enrichment reduced to yield 5 MW of electrical output. The PWR-5 name does not appear in the newest announcement. The pilot is intended to demonstrate low-power criticality before the company moves toward electricity generation, with the stated aim of validating commercial-ready performance.
With the DSA approved as the fourth of five steps, the readiness review is the one remaining gate in that authorization sequence. The pilot is meant to show the design operating at low power before the company pursues the larger commercial unit, and its placement on a university campus in Texas puts it alongside the second pilot project at the same site.
The Nuclear Newswire item also covered DOE authorization milestones reached by Antares and Radiant, which are outside the Texas project described here.
Source: Nuclear Newswire (American Nuclear Society) -- https://www.ans.org/news/2026-11-02/article-8549/antares-last-energy-and-radiant-hit-doe-authorization-milestones/