The SMR still under construction

On 23 December 2025, engineers at Changjiang on Hainan Island spun Linglong One's turbine up to speed on conventional steam — a full dress rehearsal of the power side of the plant, run with no nuclear fuel inside the reactor at all. It was the latest in a parade of CNNC milestones (dome installed, control room finished, cold test passed) that have been narrated as the approach to a historic first: the world's first land-based, commercial small modular reactor to make grid power.

An integral design tucks the steam generators inside the pressure vessel, engineering out the worst class of meltdown accident.

The catch is the order of operations. As of the IAEA's 21 May 2026 update, the reactor's official status was still 'Under Construction,' with no first-grid-connection or commercial-operation date on record. The remaining gates — loading fuel, achieving first criticality, running the turbine on nuclear heat, connecting to the grid — are the ones that actually make it a reactor rather than a 1.5-billion-dollar steam plant. 'First half of 2026' is the operator's target, repeated until it reads like an accomplished fact.

The design itself is real and genuinely distinctive: a 125-megawatt integral pressurized-water reactor with its steam generators tucked inside the pressure vessel, which engineers out the worst class of meltdown accident, and the first SMR design ever to clear an IAEA generic safety review, back in 2016. A single unit would power roughly half a million households. That decade-old review is the tell — the 'first commercial SMR' title is the payoff of a ten-year head start, not a sudden breakthrough.

Why it carries weight beyond Hainan: the West's SMR programs — NuScale, Rolls-Royce, X-energy, GE-Hitachi's BWRX-300 in Ontario — are all selling the same factory-built, deployable-anywhere pitch, and none has an operating commercial unit either. Whoever connects first proves the modular-nuclear model can deliver real power, just as data centers start shopping for it. The race is on; the finish line has not yet been crossed.