Yasir Arafat of INL’s MARVEL to Join Aalo Atomics as CTO

Originally posted on Linkedin and Twitter on October 16th 2023.

We have big news to announce at Aalo today: Yasir Arafat is joining as our CTO. We believe that Yasir will go down in history as one of the most influential people in the resurgence of nuclear.

To start his career, Yasir worked at Westinghouse for close to a decade. He contributed to a variety of projects including the AP1000, then went on to start the eVinci micro-reactor program. There, he honed his skills in reactor design, engineering leadership, and nuclear techno-economic optimization.

Yasir subsequently joined INL and became the project lead behind the MARVEL microreactor. MARVEL is the first new advanced reactor being built in the US in decades. In just 3 years, Yasir was able to lead a team at INL for the ideation, funding, designing, and testing of this novel reactor.

Recently, Yasir and the team at INL made US Nuclear history: They received a “90% design complete” seal of approval from the DOE. This is the first such approval since the DOE was formed in 1977. Construction of MARVEL has now started and is expected to complete next year.

At Aalo, Yasir will be leading the design of the Aalo-1, a 10 MWe reactor inspired by MARVEL. It too will use unpressurized liquid-metal coolant, and fuel that’s commonly used in university campus reactors. This unique combination will result in the same great level of safety as today’s water-based reactors, but will be even more economical. Aalo-1 will be perfect for use in powering data centers, industrial process heat applications, and one day, may compete at utility scale.

We can think of nobody better to lead the technical efforts at Aalo, pushing to make nuclear ubiquitous, and showing the world how amazing this energy source really is.

Follow us on LinkedIn @ Aalo Atomics and on X @ AaloAtomics to stay tuned on our progress!

Lots more to come.