We’ve seen this vector before. A defense-grade technology sits in commercial purgatory for decades… Then a forcing function arrives that makes the status quo untenable. For GPS, it was the smartphone. For molten salt reactors, it’s the insatiable energy demand of AI.
This report highlights the top molten salt reactor stocks across two angles to play the market: pure-play MSR developers and picks-and-shovels enablers.
AI Ate the Grid
AI data center power demand is projected to quadruple by 2030. Hyperscalers are signing 20-year power purchase agreements at premium rates because intermittent renewables can’t handle baseload AI inference at scale. Three Mile Island is reopening for Microsoft. Google’s buying nuclear capacity that doesn’t yet exist. Amazon took equity stakes in X-energy and invested $500M in small modular nuclear.
This isn’t venture capital speculation—this is hyperscalers pre-purchasing gigawatts because they’ve done the math. Their conclusion? The future energy mix needs additional nuclear capacity.
What’s Changed
Molten salt reactors aren’t new—Oak Ridge proved the concept in the 1960s. What’s new is that the economic and regulatory conditions finally make it viable to build at scale.
The core design eliminates what makes traditional nuclear dangerous: MSRs dissolve fuel directly into liquid salt coolant that circulates at atmospheric pressure. No high-pressure water systems. No solid fuel that can melt down. When the fuel overheats, physics handles the shutdown passively—the salt expands, the reaction slows.
The fundamental safety advantage, with the backdrop of surging power demand from data centers, is why the regulatory pathway has finally cleared.
The NRC issued the first-ever construction permit for a molten salt research reactor in 2024. China’s TMSR-LF1 experimental reactor has been operational since 2023. The policy bottleneck that kept this technology theoretical for 50 years is breaking—driven by the shift in demand profile and risk calculus.
Modern MSR designs consume existing nuclear waste as fuel, deploy in 3-4 years instead of a decade, and pencil out at $60-80/MWh—competitive with natural gas without carbon pricing. The public still thinks “nuclear = Chernobyl + waste + cost overruns.” That mental model is 40 years old.
Pure-Play MSR Developers
Direct molten salt reactor stocks are nearly impossible to access on public markets—most leading developers remain private. Terrestrial Energy’s SPAC merger creates the first public pure-play, while private leaders offer exposure only through secondary markets for accredited investors. Several are included below to watch as industry bellwethers and potential IPO targets.
Molten salt reactor designs aren’t monolithic. The sector spans different technical architectures, each optimizing for different deployment timelines and market segments.
- Thermal-spectrum designs like Terrestrial’s IMSR prioritize near-term commercialization through conservative fuel choices—standard Low-Enriched Uranium avoids the HALEU supply bottleneck.
- Fast-spectrum designs like TerraPower’s MCFR tackle harder materials science problems but unlock larger addressable markets long-term.
- Kairos sits in a different category entirely—technically a molten salt cooled reactor using solid TRISO fuel rather than liquid fuel dissolved in salt. This sidesteps some chemistry challenges but requires a different fuel supply chain.
This segment features high upside protected by first-mover advantage—if execution succeeds.
Terrestrial Energy (NASDAQ: IMSR post-SPAC)
HQ: Canada/USA; First public MSR pure-play, standard fuel de-risks path.
Terrestrial Energy isn’t trying to reinvent molten salt reactors—they’re commercializing the Oak Ridge designs from the 1960s with one critical modification. Their Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) packages the entire core, moderator, and heat exchangers into a sealed, replaceable module with a seven-year operational life. When the graphite degrades, you swap the whole unit. It’s elegantly pragmatic: you’ve turned a materials science problem into a maintenance schedule.
The real differentiation isn’t the reactor—it’s the fuel. Terrestrial runs on Standard Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (SALEU), the same <5% enriched fuel that powers every commercial light-water reactor on earth. That means access to a mature, geopolitically diversified supply chain that already exists at scale.
Most of their competitors require High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). The problem: global HALEU supply outside Russia is effectively zero. Centrus, the sole licensed U.S. producer, is targeting 900 kilograms annually—demonstration scale, not commercial fleet scale. Terrestrial sidestepped the bottleneck entirely.
They’re going public via SPAC in 2025 (ticker: IMSR) with $280 million to accelerate deployment. That capital access is an advantage, but it trades patient private backing for quarterly scrutiny. They’ve cleared Canadian regulatory review and received NRC approval for their core safety criteria. First plants target early 2030s.
Kairos Power (Private)
HQ: USA; Iterative de-risking strategy, first Gen IV construction permit.
Kairos spun out of a DOE university research program in 2016 with a different engineering philosophy: don’t build the commercial plant first—iterate your way there. Their reactor design is a hybrid. It uses solid TRISO fuel pebbles (borrowed from high-temperature gas reactors) cooled by liquid fluoride salt (Flibe), housed in a low-pressure pool vessel. Critically, this is a salt-cooled reactor, not salt-fueled. The fuel stays solid; the salt just moves heat.
That distinction matters. By keeping fission products contained inside multi-layered ceramic fuel particles instead of dissolved in circulating liquid, Kairos sidesteps the hardest material science and chemistry challenges that plague fuel-in-salt designs. They get the thermal efficiency and passive safety of molten salt without the corrosive, radioactive liquid fuel headaches.
The tradeoff is that this pragmatic approach sacrifices the transformative long-term advantages of a true salt-fueled design, namely the potential for online fuel reprocessing which enables vastly superior fuel efficiency and the ability to consume nuclear waste.
Kairos is de-risking through staged, non-nuclear test facilities before committing capital to demonstration plants. ETU 1.0 ran over 2,000 hours of pumped salt operations. The data fed Hermes, their 35 MWth test reactor, which received a construction permit in under two years—the first Gen IV approval in U.S. history. Hermes 2, the first electricity-producing unit, followed in 2024.
They’ve secured Flibe supply through Materion and aligned with a utility consortium. DOE kicked in $629 million through ARDP. The constraint: Kairos runs on HALEU. They’re waiting in a fuel line that doesn’t yet exist at scale in the West.
TerraPower (Private)
HQ: USA; Gates-backed, NVIDIA-endorsed, vertically integrated nuclear conglomerate.
TerraPower is Bill Gates’ nuclear conglomerate. Founded in 2006 with over $1.4 billion raised, they’re executing a barbell strategy: one near-term commercial play, one long-term moonshot.
The near-term anchor is Natrium, a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor with an integrated molten salt thermal battery that can boost output to 500 MWe for over five hours. It’s grid-scale flexible power designed to load-follow intermittent renewables. The first unit is already under construction in Kemmerer, Wyoming, backed by a $2 billion ARDP cost-share. NRC review is on an accelerated track; commercial operation targets 2031.
The long-term play is the Molten Chloride Fast Reactor (MCFR)—a true fuel-in-salt design running at fast spectrum with higher temperatures, simplified fuel cycles, and the ability to consume existing nuclear waste. They’re de-risking it through the MCRE test reactor at Idaho National Lab in partnership with Southern Company.
What changed the trajectory: NVIDIA’s venture arm just invested $650 million. That’s a major strategic signal. NVentures explicitly tied the investment to AI’s energy demands, stating nuclear is “going to become a more vital energy source” for AI workloads. It’s the first direct capital link between hyperscalers and advanced nuclear.
The risk: two complex programs, both HALEU-dependent. But TerraPower has the balance sheet to absorb delays that would kill competitors.
MSR Critical Enablers
These molten salt reactor stocks avoid single-technology risk; rather than betting on a single reactor design, they supply critical components as picks-and-shovels enablers.
MSRs require specialized inputs with stringent nuclear specifications and high barriers to entry. Liquid-fuel MSRs need high-purity fluoride salt coolants and HALEU fuel. Pebble-bed designs using solid fuel cooled by molten salt need TRISO fuel particles.
Materion is the sole domestic supplier of beryllium fluoride for Flibe coolant. Centrus operates the only NRC-licensed HALEU production facility in the Western world. BWXT is building North America’s first commercial-scale TRISO fuel fabrication facility.
These companies capture value from MSR innovation without carrying reactor development risk. They’re established, profitable businesses with diversified revenue streams where advanced nuclear growth is upside optionality, not existential dependency.
Materion (NYSE: MTRN)
HQ: USA; Sole-source beryllium supplier for Flibe coolant production.
Materion isn’t chasing the reactor play—it owns a key supply chain chokepoint. The company supplied Flibe coolant to Oak Ridge’s original MSR experiments in the 1960s, and today they’re the sole global producer of high-purity beryllium fluoride (BeF₂), the critical component in Flibe coolant.
Beryllium is toxic, difficult to handle, and has extraordinarily high barriers to entry. No one else is positioned to compete at scale.
The strategic dependency is explicit. Kairos Power’s entire reactor design runs on Flibe, and Materion is the only supplier. This is more than vendor relationship, though; it’s a complete joint venture. Kairos designed the Molten Salt Purification Plant; Materion operates it on their Elmore, Ohio campus. It’s the largest Flibe production facility ever built, scaled for commercial deployment.
The thesis is textbook picks-and-shovels: Materion captures revenue regardless of which specific MSR design wins, as long as it uses Flibe coolant. Kairos can’t build without them. As Kairos moves from Hermes test reactors to commercial-scale deployment in the 2030s, Flibe demand scales linearly. Materion’s molten salt materials division becomes a direct, growing revenue stream tied to Kairos’s success.
This is the lower-risk proxy play. You’re not betting on reactor execution risk—you’re betting on a sole-source supplier with a validated customer and no competition.
Centrus Energy (NYSE American: LEU)
HQ: USA; Only licensed domestic HALEU producer, government-backed monopoly.
Centrus is a legacy fuel supplier that pivoted to solve the single largest infrastructure constraint facing advanced nuclear: domestic HALEU production. High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (5-20% U-235 enrichment) enables smaller, more efficient reactor cores with longer fuel cycles. Nine out of ten DOE Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program designs require it—including TerraPower’s Natrium and the fuel for Kairos’s TRISO pebbles. The problem: until recently, the only commercial-scale HALEU supply was Russian.
Centrus deployed AC100M centrifuge cascades at Piketon, Ohio, and became the first NRC-licensed domestic HALEU producer. They delivered 20 kilograms in late 2023—the nation’s first—and hit 900 kilograms by mid-2025, ahead of schedule. DOE immediately extended the contract for another 900 kg.
The scale is still tiny. 900 kilograms per year is demonstration-level production, nowhere near what a commercial reactor fleet requires. For context, TerraPower’s Natrium reactor is estimated to require 15,000-20,000 kilograms of HALEU for initial setup.
Still, no one else has a licensed facility or production history. Centrus is the designated solution to a problem the government has explicitly identified as a national security and decarbonization priority.
In essence, this is a government-sponsored monopoly on critical infrastructure. Revenue is underwritten by DOE contracts, not market dynamics. The facility is designed to scale with additional cascades as demand materializes. If HALEU-dependent designs move forward, Centrus captures the margin on every kilogram. It’s the lowest-risk way to play the entire HALEU cohort.
BWX Technologies (NYSE: BWXT)
HQ: USA; Naval nuclear pedigree, defense-grade manufacturing for advanced reactors.
BWXT designed components for the USS Nautilus in the 1950s—the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine—and has manufactured naval reactors for the U.S. Navy’s entire fleet for over 70 years. That pedigree matters. Naval nuclear operates in a zero-failure-tolerance environment. A pressure vessel defect on a carrier isn’t a warranty claim; it’s a national security incident. That culture is now institutional.
The company owns North America’s only large-scale commercial nuclear equipment manufacturing facility and is one of the few domestic producers capable of fabricating the heavy pressure vessels, steam generators, and heat exchangers required for any nuclear plant, MSR or otherwise. They’ve partnered with Kairos to optimize TRISO fuel production and have decades of experience downblending highly enriched uranium.
As advanced reactors move from licensing to construction, manufacturing quality becomes the critical path. Regulators and investors will demand supply chain credibility. BWXT is the flight-to-quality supplier. Developers will pay a premium for components stamped with a 70-year naval nuclear track record because it de-risks their entire project timeline. One failed pressure vessel test can blow a construction permit schedule by 18 months. BWXT’s reputation becomes insurance.
The thesis: BWXT captures high-margin contracts across the entire sector regardless of which reactor design wins. They’re exposed to deployment volume, not technology risk. If advanced nuclear scales, BWXT manufactures the components. It’s the safest way to play the build-out phase.