Solaris Invests in Deployable Energy, Pushing "Unity" Transportable Microreactor Toward Commercial SMR

Houston-based advanced nuclear startup Deployable Energy (CEO Bobby Gallagher, former Australian Army/offshore drilling background) has reached a strategic partnership with NYSE-listed U.S. energy infrastructure company Solaris Energy Infrastructure, Inc. (NYSE: SEI): Solaris will take an equity stake in Deployable and leverage its own experience in grid construction and operations under harsh conditions (defense bases, heavy industry, data centers) to help the latter bring the Unity Nuclear Battery——a roughly 1 MWe-class, container-sized, portable microreactor that fits in a pickup truck bed for highway transport——to commercial deployment.

The Unity reactor achieved zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory on June 30, 2026, under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot/Launch Pad accelerated pathway, bypassing the NRC's traditional long-cycle process—though commercial power generation will still require a formal NRC license. The design is oriented toward factory fabrication, modular replacement, and off-grid critical loads. Solaris founder and Co-CEO Bill Zartler said the company was drawn to Deployable's execution capability of "having reached first criticality, differentiated design, and supply chain bottleneck avoidance," while Gallagher noted that Solaris's grid-connected power foundation plus capital perspective can accelerate next-generation nuclear deployment in "resilience + scalability + long-duration performance" scenarios.

This partnership does not change the national character of the project——both Deployable Energy and Solaris are U.S. companies, with the project rooted in the U.S. DOE/NRC framework. Target scenarios first target North American defense/data center/remote industrial applications, then extend overseas through concepts like Fiji's "Ocean of Peace" ship-based microreactor. It joins Nuclea (Canadian company→Utah), TVA+BWRX-300 (U.S. SMR), and Deep Fission (U.S. underground PWR) in forming the summer 2026 North American landscape of "non-traditional nuclear routes converging on commercialization," but Deployable's differentiator is its criticality achievement + pickup-truck transportability + binding with existing gas/grid infrastructure players rather than new reactor physics.