Hyperion Power Generation has been one of the more interesting and vocal companies in the small modular reactor (SMR) business during the past few years. I have attended a number of conferences and meetings at which John “Grizz” Deal and/or his sister Deborah Blackwell have been featured speakers or the centers of interested crowds in the hallways.

I interviewed Grizz Deal for The Atomic Show in August 2008 and followed up with an update for The Atomic Show in January 2010. I have been keeping up with the company’s progress, but have not seen or heard much in the past six months.

A couple of days ago, however, I received an update via LinkedIn that Grizz had a new job as the CEO of a company called IX Power (pronounced as “nine power”). I got in touch with Grizz yesterday to find out what had happened to his position as CEO of Hyperion.

Not surprisingly, he was not able to tell me much, since he is under both non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. He told me that he was excited about the opportunity to work with technologies that could be made in America and exported without getting permission from multiple export control offices. He agreed that it sometimes seemed that those offices worked under rules specifically designed to discourage US job creation in energy game changing technology. As we agreed during our conversation, that has been the attitude of the US government with regard to nuclear energy related products for quite some time.

During the conversation he mentioned that he and Deborah were still committed to their joint mission of building systems that can deliver both reliable electricity and fresh water to places where those important commodities that we take for granted are virtually unobtainable. He invited me to visit IXPower.com to learn more about their new company, its team and its mission.

One thing that jumped out at me on the “About” page was that virtually every executive that was a part of the founding team at Hyperion seemed to now be a part of IX Power. It will be interesting to see how that migration affects the prospects of both Hyperion and IX Power.

Image by Hyperion Energy.