Deep Fission signs Kansas power agreement following market woes

Last week, reactor developer Deep Fission announced that it had entered into a master energy purchase agreement with the Great Plains Development Authority in Kansas.

This new milestone for the Department of Energy-backed start-up comes as it weathers the fallout from a recent report by a short-seller firm that accused the company of exaggerating its commercial viability.

Contract details: Created by the Labette County Commission, the GPDA is a municipal administration that manages the Great Plains Industrial Park in Parsons, Kan. The 30-square-mile park is tailored to attract a wide variety of industries for project deployment, including R&D, manufacturing, data centers, and energy projects. Deep Fission, one of the participants in the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, has sited its pilot project at the park.

The GPDA and Deep Fission signed a letter of intent in December 2025 establishing their plans to collaborate on both a pilot project and a full-scale commercial project at the Parsons site. According to the company, this new agreement converts that early-stage LOI into a definitive contract that commits Deep Fission to pursuing the commercial project and supplying power to GPDA.

After the project reaches an initial 150-MW target in 2028, the partners aim to grow the site "through later phases to a total of 2,000 MW, pending further demand growth."

Company background: Deep Fission has been developing a small pressurized water reactor design over the past three years. The design specifics on that reactor, including its capacity, have changed several times; currently, the company is targeting an output of "up to approximately 8 MWe." The key constant throughout the reactor's design life has been a foundational idea: putting a small PWR in a borehole about a mile underground to theoretically cut costs, speed deployment, and improve safety and security.

In August 2025, the company was one of 10 selected for the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, a race to bring test reactors critical by July 2026 with the help of a new, faster DOE authorization pathway (as opposed to the typical, lengthier Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing options).

As part of that program, Deep Fission broke ground in Parsons in December 2025. That same month, it also signed an LOI with the GPDA and completed the first regulatory milestone of DOE authorization: entering into an other transactional agreement.

In August 2026, as work progressed on the Parsons site, the company cleared the second milestone of the process: earning approval of its nuclear safety design agreement. Three steps in the authorization process now remain: the preliminary design safety agreement, the design safety agreement, and a final readiness review.

Deep Fission's plans for its Reactor Pilot Program reactor are quite different from other program participants. Antares, for example, reached criticality with its Mark-0 reactor through the program and has since begun work on its next reactor, Mark-1. The same seems broadly true of others companies like Aalo Atomics and Oklo, whose reactors were used to gather data, gain experience, and verify designs and were steppingstones to follow-on, separate reactors.

In contrast, Deep Fission intends for its pilot reactor to eventually become an NRC-licensed, commercially operating unit after initial testing through DOE authorization. The NRC is currently engaged in preapplication activities with the company on the licensing of its reactor design.

Money Pit report: Deep Fission's new power purchase deal is momentum set against a recent, significant headwind. In the past month, controversy has arisen around the company since the release of a report titled Deep Fission ($FISN): a Money Pit. That report was published by Iceberg Research, a group that publishes research generally framed as exposés on a variety of tech-related companies. Iceberg Research openly acknowledges that it shorts the companies on which it publishes reports and as such has a vested interest in the stock prices of those companies dropping.

Iceberg's report attacks Deep Fission's viability and credibility on numerous points, including frequently shifting designs, a lack of transparency, dwindling capital, unrealistic timelines and projections, and slow progress through the Reactor Pilot Program.

To demonstrate these claims, the report pulls from Deep Fission's investor presentations, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, NRC documentation, and other publicly available sources, reviewing numerous changes to the company's plans and speculating as to the financial implications of those changes.

In the week after the report's release, Deep Fission's stock price fell by 35 percent, from $8.12 to $5.25 per share. Since then, it has dropped further to $2.59 per share-an almost 84 percent drop from its initial $16 initial public offering.

A tanking stock was not the only worry after the release of the report. As of this writing, four separate law firms are trying to capitalize on the bad press and have launched investigations into Deep Fission because of to the allegations made in and consequences of the Iceberg report.

For its part, Deep Fission formally responded earlier this week, calling the report "highly misleading" and alleging that it contains "numerous distortions, inaccuracies, and mischaracterizations." The company added that its evaluating "potential legal remedies," among other options.