Blykalla
Blykalla is a Swedish developer of advanced nuclear technology, grounded in more than 25 years of research at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. By using small, modular reactors Blykalla aims to deliver the next generation of clean energy. Blykalla’s reactor, the Swedish Advanced Lead Reactor (SEALER), is a 55 MW unit cooled by liquid lead. Historically, lead-cooled reactors were limited to military use because corrosion made them economically inefficient. This is the problem Blykalla’s founders solved.
The breakthrough intellectual property behind Blykalla is based on three corrosion-tolerant steels, now being industrialised through partnerships with leading global companies. This materials platform enables a reactor concept with decades of military experience to be developed for commercial deployment.
Since beginning its commercialisation journey in 2024, Blykalla has grown to a team of around ninety people. The company is headquartered in Stockholm and operates testing facilities in Oskarshamn, where it runs corrosion rigs, thermal-hydraulic rigs and control-room development to qualify components and verify system performance. Now, more than twenty industrial partnerships support Blykalla's work, including collaborations with ABB, KSB, Uniper, Kanthal and Oklo.
Blykalla develops this technology to deliver clean and reliable energy that can abate emissions and decarbonise various industrial processes in power energy-intensive sectors such as AI infrastructure and electrified industry. Lead-cooled reactors provide high-temperature capability, inherent safety characteristics and compact deployment footprints, making them well-suited for these applications.
The next phase focuses on licensing and deploying Blykalla’s first nuclear reactor, in line with Sweden’s new state financing framework and increasing global demand for dependable clean energy. After that the goal is to construct and deploy a thousand SMRs, which would produce close to 500 TWh of clean electricity annually, thereby avoiding 0.5 gigatons of C02 from carbon-based energy production. That would save 1% of global carbon emissions every year.
Blykalla leverages the Dardel system at PDC for computationally demanding simulations to support efficient and robust evaluation and optimisation of reactor designs, benefitting from the advanced computational capacity that outpaces other approaches like simplified modelling, sequential processing, or working with smaller servers, thereby allowing for faster and more complex simulations.
For questions about this or other PDC business partnerships, please contact business-unit@pdc.kth.se .