Nuclear startup Terrestrial Energy goes public via SPAC, netting $280M in merger

Terrestrial Energy, a small nuclear startup, merged with an acquisition company on Wednesday. The North Carolina-based company is developing small modular reactors and expects to net $280 million from the deal. Before the SPAC merger, Terrestrial Energy had raised $94 million, according to PitchBook. The combined entity expects to list on Nasdaq under the symbol IMSR. The ticker is a reference to Terrestrial Energy’s flavor of small modular reactor (SMR), which it calls an integral molten salt reactor. In such a device, uranium fuel is mixed with various salts, such as lithium fluoride or sodium fluoride, that serve to suspend the nuclear fuel and act as the reactor’s main coolant. Terrestrial Energy’s reactor core is designed to be entirely replaced every seven years, in part to head off some of the problems earlier molten salt reactors experienced like corrosion. The reactor core includes not only the fuel and graphite modulators that regulate the speed of the fission reactions, b ... Read full article.