Emerald Horizon and ASML Partner VDL Groep Start Building A Small Modular Reactor

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Emerald Horizon AG, the Graz-based company listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange since late June and currently valued at around 1.2 billion euros, has just announced the start of construction on the central component of its SMRX small modular reactor, together with the Dutch VDL Groep. The so-called megawatt power loop will be built in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Founder and CEO Florian Wagner and Markjan Vermeer, Managing Director of VDL ETG Technology & Development, signed a joint memorandum on the operational implementation of their existing contract at the Emerald LaboraTHorium in Graz, in front of assembled media. It was the two companies’ first joint public appearance in Austria.

What Is Actually Being Built

The SMRX, according to the company, is a modular, subcritical energy source based on thorium. The loop now entering construction is the high-temperature circuit in which the liquid carrier salt circulates. It operates at ambient pressure and transfers heat at process temperatures of up to 900 degrees Celsius. Four hardware revisions of the loop have already been tested at the Graz laboratory, Emerald Horizon says, and the measurement data has been handed over to VDL.

What the loop tests is how materials, pumps, seals and instrumentation behave in continuous operation. “The loop runs at the same temperatures that prevail during active reactor operation,” says Mario J. Müller, Vice President R&D at Emerald Horizon. Time under load is the decisive factor: designing for a service life measured in decades requires data from sustained high-temperature operation. Upstream of the loop sit functional models used to validate individual subsystems on their own.

One element is absent from this announcement: the particle accelerator, which in the concept acts as the physical switch of the system and is what keeps the reaction running at all. Emerald Horizon says it will address that at its next press conference.

Division of Labor: Research in Graz, Industrialization in Eindhoven

Graz remains the company’s research and development center and retains system leadership, according to Emerald Horizon. VDL translates the Graz results into an industrially manufacturable design, component by component, acting as a tier-one partner for co-development, co-engineering and series preparation. Wagner stresses that VDL contributes its own resources and shares the entrepreneurial risk: the plan is to use existing high-precision facilities rather than build a factory from the ground up, which the company says saves both time and capital.

Hans Priem, Vice President Business Development at VDL ETG, points to capacity in engineering, manufacturing, assembly and supply chain, along with partnerships with research institutes in fields such as liquid salt, electrochemistry and advanced materials. Vermeer names corrosion control, material selection and high-temperature processes as the central open questions.

Who VDL Is, and Why ASML Matters Here

VDL Groep is a Dutch family business founded in 1953, headquartered in the Brainport region around Eindhoven and run by the third generation of the Van der Leegte family. The group employs more than 14,000 people across 20 countries and is known for buses, vehicle assembly (VDL Nedcar) and high-tech supply work.

The division relevant to the SMRX project is VDL ETG, which grew out of the former Philips Machinefabrieken and was acquired by VDL in 2006. VDL ETG ranks among the established suppliers to the semiconductor industry and has supplied ASML, the world’s only manufacturer of EUV lithography systems, since the 1980s and 1990s. Emerald Horizon is therefore bringing on a partner experienced at turning complex one-off research hardware into reproducible series production. That step is precisely the stated task of the current project phase.

Road Map and Performance Figures

The DUALstorePLUS hybrid storage system can already be ordered, and the battery modules of the E-store are commercially available. The CALstore high-temperature storage unit is scheduled for delivery from 2028. For the SMRX itself, a fully integrated prototype is planned for 2029, with industrial series production starting in 2031. The company explicitly describes these horizons as target values based on current project planning.

A single SMRX module is designed to deliver 25 MW of thermal and roughly 10 MW of electrical output in a standardized container format, rated for 20 years of operation without refueling. The system can be replicated from 10 MW into the gigawatt range, the company says, with energy sold under contracts running up to 20 years.

Austria: Storage Yes, Reactor Abroad

For the Austrian side of the business, the legal boundary is clear. The Atomsperrgesetz of 1978, enacted after the referendum on the Zwentendorf plant and reinforced in 1999 by a constitutional law establishing a nuclear-free Austria, prohibits the construction and operation of facilities generating energy through nuclear fission on Austrian soil.

The company states: “Emerald Horizon fully respects the Austrian Atomsperrgesetz of 1978. In Austria, only the non-nuclear DUALstorePLUS storage system is sold. Construction and operation of the SMRX take place internationally. The work at the LaboraTHorium in Graz stays within the scope of existing regulatory permits; no reactor operation takes place in Graz.”

Wagner places the location in a European context: “System leadership and our advanced research stay firmly anchored in Graz. Three of the four Austrian members of the EU SMR Alliance come from Styria.” Emerald Horizon participates in Technical Working Groups 2 and 6 of the alliance initiated by the European Commission.

About the Company

Emerald Horizon was founded in Graz in 2019 and maintains subsidiaries in Slovakia and the United States. The modular SMRX system combines the DUALstorePLUS hybrid storage unit with ADES, a subcritical thorium-based energy source. The company has been listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange since late June (ISIN AT0000A3UZE1, ticker SMRX), with an opening price of 760 euros per share. Shortly after the listing, its valuation climbed to around one billion euros.

Worth keeping in mind: no commercial thorium-based molten salt reactor is in operation anywhere in the world today. The figures on output, service life and timing come from the company and have not been independently verified.