Residents of Parsons, Kansas agree on many things. Whether to put an experimental nuclear reactor a mile deep in the granite beneath their town isn’t one of them.
The hole
Parsons, population 9,600, sits about midway between Kansas City and Tulsa. This spring, a startup called Deep Fission drilled a first test hole on 100 acres at a mostly overgrown industrial park dotted with old munitions bunkers.
The plan: lower a canister of nuclear fuel down a third hole, heat water a mile underground, and generate electricity on the surface in 2027 or 2028. By nuclear industry standards, that timeline is astonishingly short.
The so-called Gravity Reactor is the creation of Liz Muller and her father Richard, an emeritus physics professor at Berkeley. The clever part is not the reactor — it is a common, scaled-down design. The clever part is the burial. A mile of rock provides the pressure, cooling and containment, so no hulking containment building is needed.
One reactor generates just 15 megawatts, enough for about 12,000 homes. But Muller envisions an array of 100 or more — over a gigawatt, enough for a data center. That is the real customer: soaring electricity demand, much of it from AI.
The project is one of 11 in an Energy Department pilot program for small, advanced reactors, using expedited environmental reviews. “It’s allowing us to develop a first reactor within a time frame that had been unthinkable previously,” said Liz Muller, the chief executive.
The argument
The town is split in an unusually honest way. “Any time you’re putting a nuclear reactor in a hole, it’s kind of scary,” said Verlyn Bolinger, an insurance agent on the city commission who is now mostly excited. “It’s great that it’s here. It’s kind of bad that we’re the guinea pigs.” Jerel Johnson, an IT professional who planned to retire in Parsons, was blunter: “I can’t think of a worse idea.”
The professionals are split too. This spring, 12 state attorneys general argued that skipping standard environmental reviews puts communities at risk. Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear called it “simply unacceptable” to consider exempting the project from a peer-reviewed environmental impact statement. A local nonprofit, the Prairie Dog Alliance, asks how anyone performs maintenance a mile down — and why the drillers operate under oil-and-gas rules rather than nuclear ones.
Muller says the spent-fuel plan is safe, the reactor sits far below any aquifer, and the company will follow all nuclear and oil-and-gas regulations. The Energy Department says the administration is focused on safety and security.
Either way, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission still controls the commercial license needed to sell electricity. Dozens of firms are designing small reactors. A handful have started construction. None yet operate commercially in the U.S.
That last sentence is the investment story. The bottleneck in American nuclear power is not physics. It is paperwork, neighbors and courtrooms — and those do not drill on schedule.
The fight is worth watching even if you never set foot in Kansas. The same argument — speed versus review, boosters versus guinea pigs — decides how fast America gets new nuclear power anywhere.