The sci-fi-worthy machine soaring 120 feet tall in the hills outside Lynchburg had been all but left for dead — a $400 million experiment that collapsed as the energy economy shifted and the financial prospects for next-generation nuclear technology soured.

The faux eight-story reactor in Lynchburg, built to mimic a nuclear plant but run on electricity so engineers can safely monitor and tinker with it, languished a decade unused on a Liberty University engineering campus.

Now, with the AI build out exploding across the country, a pair of engineering wizards with a nuclear start-up and SpaceX pedigree see in it a lucrative solution to one of the country’s most vexing challenges: powering the proliferation of data centers.

Read more in the Washington Post here.

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