Blykalla's EIC Accelerator Cools Its Small Reactor With Lead

Small modular reactors are an industry of announcements, and Blykalla is further than most because it picked an old coolant. The Swedish Advanced Lead Reactor, SEALER, is cooled by liquid lead rather than water or sodium, a technique used in submarine reactors for decades, and the company, based in Oskarshamn, says its contribution is the materials and engineering that make it commercially buildable. The hard part of lead cooling is corrosion, which is why much of its work is on materials.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SEALER, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from July 2025 to June 2027 toward industrialisation. The project's ambition is stated without hedging: build and sell 1,000 reactors, in a new nuclear plant market it expects to grow from €30 billion today to €80 billion over twenty years.

The application that nobody in Sweden had filed before

On 18 May 2026 Blykalla filed what it describes as the first ever application to the Swedish government to build a commercial advanced reactor park: six lead-cooled reactors totalling 330MW at Norrsundet in Gävle municipality, chosen for sitting between the SE2 and SE3 power zones and for its existing port and industrial history. The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority and the Land and Environmental Court are among the bodies reviewing it, and the municipality has to agree. CEO Jacob Stedman called it "a historic first for Sweden". In August it filed a second application, for a park of up to 440MW, and applied for government financing for reactor parks at Tierp and elsewhere.

Filing is not permission. No licence has been granted, no construction date is public, and Swedish nuclear licensing has no modern precedent for a non-water-cooled reactor. But submitting a complete application is a different order of progress from a design study, and it is what the EIC grant's industrialisation work is meant to support.

Who has signed up

The partner list is the second substantive thing here. Joint development agreements with ABB and with the welding supplier ESAB on proprietary materials, strategic collaborations with Hitachi Energy and Bodycote, research partnerships with RISE and the Norwegian institute IFE, and research cooperation with newcleo, another lead-cooled developer. In September 2026 it announced work with Microsoft on AI-assisted nuclear licensing. In October 2025 it joined evroc and Studsvik to explore Sweden's first nuclear-powered data centres. CoreWeave's co-founders and the Japanese telecoms group KDDI are among its investors.

The company also reports that the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency assessed its concept as the most mature advanced SMR in Europe, and it has started pre-application engagement with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission while opening offices in New York and Austin.

1. Test and validation facilitiesUnder constructionGround broken at Oskarshamn in early 2025.
2. Industrial supply chainAgreements signedABB, ESAB, Hitachi Energy, Bodycote.
3. Regulatory applicationsFiledTwo Swedish reactor parks; US pre-application engagement.
4. Licence and constructionNot grantedReviews ongoing; no construction date public.

$50 million, and where it came from

In December 2025 Blykalla raised about $50 million, co-led by the American SMR developer Oklo, Sweden's Norrsken Launcher and Armada Investment, with KDDI and CoreWeave's co-founders among the investors. The money is for three things: testing and validation at Oskarshamn, design and engineering of the first nuclear units, and the commercial and regulatory work to secure a site and licence the first SEALER project. An earlier round of SEK 80 million was led by Norrsken Launcher with Nucleation Capital, and in July 2025 the company and partners were awarded SEK 37 million for materials and fuel development.

Against that, the €2.5 million EIC grant is small. Its role is the one the project states: EU support for the industrialisation step, in a technology where European and American developers are now explicitly cooperating and competing at once.

Nuclear is back on the European agenda, and the buyers are data centres

Two things changed the market Blykalla is building for: European energy security after 2022, and the electricity demand of AI data centres. The company has positioned for both, with a Swedish reactor park application framed around grid zones and a data centre partnership framed around co-location. It has also been unusually political, publishing an open letter calling for Europe to become an "Electro Union" and hosting visiting delegations from Vietnam, Singapore and Sweden's own government. For the EIC, funding a lead-cooled design that the company says is the most mature advanced SMR in Europe is a bet on sovereignty as much as on carbon.