Oklo said Thursday that it had reached a milestone agreement with a federally-backed research laboratory as it prepares to lay the foundations of its first commercial nuclear power plant.

Oklo climbed 4.9% to $29.43 on Thursday.

The nuclear start-up announced that it had signed an agreement with Idaho National Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s largest multi-program science and technology research lab, in anticipation of site work such as drilling and collecting soil samples.

The agreement, reached in collaboration with the DOE and local Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, is meant to ensure that Oklo follows environmental regulations as the company examines the geotechnical aspects of the future location of its Aurora nuclear powerhouse.

A memorandum of agreement with the DOE, finalized in September 2024, granted Oklo permission to conduct investigations at its preferred site in Idaho. In an interview with Barron’s, Oklo stressed that the latest development was both a sign of how far the company had come and of how far it still has to go.

The company’s focus has been on its timeline to get nuclear reactors on the ground. Oklo is targeting first deployment by late 2027, and has already signed a string of deals with partners including data-center operator Switch and fuel developer Lightbridge.

The start-up was founded in 2013 by Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates. It went public in May 2024 after merging with a special-purpose acquisition corporation headed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

CEO DeWitte told Barron’s that Oklo wasn’t born out of a desire to solve a novel problem, but to seize the “huge amount of potential” that was being underutilized by existing players in the sector.

DeWitte’s educational background is in nuclear engineering, including a master’s degree and Ph.D. from MIT, though he says his interest in the sector began even earlier.

“It felt like science fiction,” DeWitte said. “But it was an industry that had stagnated. Looking at traditional players, they just weren’t being innovative.”

The Oklo team focused on technology with “a deep basis in research, so weren’t having to do a bunch of R&D or a bunch of capital expenditures,” DeWitte said. In other words, the company aims to build and iterate at a smaller scale.

Oklo specializes in compact fast reactors, which have a lower power output than traditional large reactors but are faster to construct and are usually deployed incrementally in response to increasing energy demand.

“Getting plants built and producing commercial power is what really matters,” DeWitte said. “Everything up until then is performative.”

The latest agreement “is the byproduct of our broader partnerships that have been progressing with the Department of Energy and Idaho National Laboratory to actually get this thing up and running,” he added. “So it’s a significant milestone, but there’s more to come.”