Did Anyone Ask Lockhart?
A nuclear reactor is coming to Caldwell County. Nobody told the neighbors.
Unfortunately, by the time most people in central Texas hear about this, it’ll already be done.
A new Watchdog Group has sprung up (with its own Facebook group), and it requires your immediate attention. Lockhart Nuke Watch.
A company called Oklo is building a nuclear reactor outside Lockhart, Texas. It’ll be a factory that uses nuclear reactions to manufacture radioactive materials. Some of those materials are used in cancer treatment. Some of them are for things Oklo describes only as “critical national capabilities…” whatever that means.
They want the reactor running by July 4. That’s eight weeks from now.
And almost nobody in Caldwell County knew it was happening.
How did we get here?
A couple of former Duke students, Merle Nye and Joshua Farahzad, had a vision to build a 538-acre innovation campus south of Lockhart where hardware startups could prototype and test physical technology. They called it Proto-Town. Think of it as a company town for tech bros who want to build things without San Francisco rent prices.
To make it happen, they needed land, connections, and political cover. Enter John Cyrier.
Cyrier is a former Texas state representative who served HD17 from 2015 to 2023.
He helped facilitate the land purchase for Proto-Town. He has an ownership stake in an entity tied to the property. He left the legislature in January 2023. Proto-Town started taking shape shortly after.
That’s the classic Texas revolving door. A former lawmaker leverages relationships and local knowledge to profit from development in his home county, the moment he’s out of office. It’s practically a tradition.
The nuclear piece came in through a man named Thomas Eiden, founder of Atomic Alchemy, which produces radioactive isotopes for medical and research use. Eiden got recruited to work on Proto-Town’s nuclear ambitions. His company was acquired by Oklo in 2025. And suddenly, a Silicon Valley-backed nuclear startup owned the reactor plans, the scientist, and a spot on a fast-tracked federal program designed to get exactly this kind of project built as quickly as possible.
Here’s where the Trump administration comes in.
In 2025, the federal government rewrote its nuclear safety directives. A new program called the Reactor Pilot Program was created under the Department of Energy, specifically designed to move advanced nuclear projects through approval quickly, with less public documentation and regulatory review than is normally required for building a nuclear facility.
Oklo ran the Lockhart project through that program.
So, less safe, quicker, and one of the first ones.
In March 2026, DOE approved its Nuclear Safety Design Agreement. They announced it in a press release that almost nobody in Caldwell County saw.
The target date for the reactor going operational is July 4, 2026. Independence Day. They picked that date on purpose. Of course they did.
What’s being built?
The reactor is called the VIPR, Versatile Isotope Production Reactor. It sits on roughly 7,600 square feet on Mineral Springs Road, with an estimated construction cost of $23 million.
Based on publicly available documents for a similar canceled project, the reactor likely produces up to 16.8 megawatts of thermal power, i.e., the energy from the nuclear reaction. That heat bombards materials with neutrons, creating radioactive isotopes. The isotopes are produced, sold, and the reactor runs again. It’s essentially a manufacturing operation.
We don’t know the exact specifications for the Lockhart reactor specifically, because Oklo successfully petitioned the federal government to seal that information as proprietary business secrets. A search of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s public document database for “Groves,” “Lockhart,” or “Texas” returns almost nothing. For a nuclear facility going operational in two months, that is, according to people who track these things, unprecedented and highly irregular.
Someone in the Lockhart area noticed this. They built a website, lockhartnuke.watch, and filed public records requests with both the NRC and DOE asking for basic safety information. Those requests were acknowledged on May 8, 2026. They don’t have answers yet.
The real story
Here’s the thing. The Groves reactor could be perfectly safe. Small isotope production reactors exist and operate without incident. The medical isotope supply chain in the United States faces real problems that need to be solved. None of that is made up.
But that’s not actually what this story is about.
This story is about who gets to decide what goes in your backyard, and who doesn’t. We’re hearing the same stories in almost every corner of Texas. Giant data centers in Abilene. Desalination plants in Brownsville. Water supplies run dry in Corpus Christi. This isn’t what anyone voted for.
A small, working-class Texas county got a nuclear facility placed in it through a fast-tracked federal deregulation program, backed by a well-connected former local politician with a financial stake in the project, with technical details sealed behind proprietary exemptions, announced in corporate press releases nobody locally read, with a community notification process that apparently consisted of nothing.
Lockhart didn’t get a town hall. Lockhart didn’t get a vote. Lockhart didn’t get a public comment period. Lockhart got a July 4 deadline and a website that talks about cancer treatment and Texas pride.
This is what it looks like when power operates without accountability. Not with a villain twirling a mustache. With press releases and fast-track approvals and proprietary exemptions and a former state rep who just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right connections.
The people of Caldwell County deserve better than that. They deserve answers. And they deserve to have been asked in the first place.
May 15, 2026: Last day to apply to vote by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 18, 2026: First day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 22, 2026: Last day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)
Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.
LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Holy 💩! I wonder if I still family that lives there.
I know I do in Luling.
I’m glad my Mom is no longer is alive. She would know who lives there and then worry about them. Ignorance is bliss.
Would they be so secretive if this was going to be good for that county? 🤬
This is why GOP wants to RULE and not Govern. 😢
This is the beginning of the story. The story ends with a site contaminated with radioactive isotopes that neither the EPA nor the TXEQC will help the county clean up. How do I know? There's a former industrial site in Denton contaminated with radioactive isotopes that is not public knowledge, and noone is doing anything about. I know this from a former City of Denton employee who consulted the TXEQC, the EPA and Dept. of Energy about what the City could do, with no results. The former owner just declared bankruptcy and escaped responsibility.
Similarly, there's a former battery plant in Frisco (Exide) that the city has been trying to remediate for 20 years, and has engaged in a string of lawsuits to that end. The former owner declared bankruptcy and escaped responsibility. The battery plant was on Stewart Creek, into which the plant tossed the crushed remnants of battery casings, which have washed all the way down to Lake Lewisville, the water supply for City of Dallas.
At one point the EPA had committed funds for remediation, but that assistance has evaporated, surprising no one. The creek flows through a site that Frisco wanted to turn into the crown jewel of the City park system, with water from the creek flowing through the park. Needless to say, the park has never been built, while Frisco taxpayers have paid millions to remove soil from the plant site. Nothing can be done about the contaminated creek, however. It's miles from the site to the Lake, and it winds through multiple Frisco subdivisions and parks. None of them could have been built if the extent of the contamination had been known at the time.
Every county in Texas is a quiet environemental disaster as a result of a state government owned by the people extracting wealth from the state and leaving a disaster behind for the people who live here.