Rendering of Oklo’s Aurora Powerhouse reactor
Ohio locked in two pieces of America’s nuclear future last week.
The headline grabber was Oklo’s announcement of an agreement with Meta to develop a a 1.2 gigawatt nuclear campus in Southern Ohio.
It will power Meta’s data centers in the region, including the company’s “AI supercluster” outside Columbus. It’s one of the largest advanced nuclear deals in the country.
In addition to the Oklo campus, Meta signed 20-year agreements to extend and expand Vistra’s Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear plants in Ohio – part of a 6.6 GW nuclear portfolio that makes Meta one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history.
Two days earlier, 2,000 miles west of Columbus, Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte was at CES in Las Vegas laying out a broader vision for Ohio as the center of the nation’s nuclear buildout.
“Ohio is primed to be a significant nuclear ecosystem hub – not just reactors running power, but fuel production, fuel manufacturing, fabrication – all these things around the system.”
The logic: “You build the power and it enables you to attract all of that,” DeWitte said.
Meta is securing the demand for that power, we now know.
But at CES, DeWitte revealed plans to ready Ohio’s nuclear workforce: he and Oklo will support The Ohio State University in building a new nuclear engineering program.
“We need a lot more nuclear engineers,” DeWitte told a standing room-only CES event on the Future of Manufacturing convened by JobsOhio.
DeWitte said he’s committed “a multimillion dollar contribution, both personally and from the company” to help stand up the program – an effort to “prime the pump for more nuclear engineers.”
He praised “Ohio-produced, born and bred engineers,” noting Oklo’s very first hire was an Ohio State alumnus.
By partnering with Ohio State to build a nuclear workforce, Oklo is turning to someone who has done it before: Ohio State’s President, Admiral Ted Carter.
Admiral Carter is a nuclear engineer who was trained to construct and deconstruct a reactor. He has commanded a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and while serving as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, accredited its nuclear engineering major.
“The fact that we can partner with Oklo and think about developing a new nuclear engineering degree in less than a year and a half — I can speak to this because I actually did this at the Naval Academy,” Carter said, sitting alongside DeWitte on JobsOhio’s panel.
He knows it sounds ambitious.
“Let’s face it, higher ed is not being known for pivoting to the dynamic needs of the workforce,” he said.
But Carter says Ohio State is ready for this pivot.
“Sometimes I use the analogy of how hard it is to turn a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier around,” he said. “People think it takes about five miles.”
“Actually, if you know what you’re doing, you can reverse the propellers and put the rudder full over, and you can turn an aircraft carrier around in less than a minute and a half.”
“That’s how I’m viewing what higher education needs to be doing today.”
What this adds up to: Ohio establishing itself as America’s nuclear hub:
"There's just nothing like Ohio in the entire country," DeWitte said. "I don't think many people fully appreciate the inevitability that those factors make Ohio a really productive crucible for economic development and wealth creation for the whole country."
