Fall Arrives in Georgetown: Pumpkins, a Skate Park, Food Trucks | GTown Buzz

Morning, Georgetown TX. 👋

Ten issues. Thank you for being here for all of them, or for one of them, or for forwarding this to the person reading it now.

This week: the pumpkin patch opens Saturday, Garey Park has a skate park now, there is free live music with your lunch every Friday, and, somewhere in the middle of all that, a company that builds nuclear reactors is moving to town (not what you are picturing, I promise). Fall is officially allowed to start. Let's go.

On Friday morning, the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, the Georgetown fire and police departments climbed the bleachers at Birkelbach Field at Georgetown High School, as they do every year, to honor the first responders who climbed the towers. Flying over them was an American flag that flew on Georgetown Fire Department's Engine 2 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

The same flag. Twenty five years later. Still going up the stairs with them. That is the kind of detail you cannot make up, and the kind of town that keeps it.

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The city's Trucks & Tunes series runs every Friday in September, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Light & Waterworks District on MLK Street. Each week is a different food truck and a different local musician, and you can enter a free raffle for a $50 gift card to a local business while you eat.

It is a smart little event: a reason to leave your desk, an excuse to try a truck you have not tried, and a way to see the Light & Waterworks District, which a lot of people still have not visited. Two Fridays left this month.

Let's clear up the scary part first. Nobody is building a nuclear power plant in Georgetown. What is coming is a factory that builds small reactors, which then get shipped somewhere else.

The company. Aalo Atomics is an Austin-based startup, founded in 2023, that designs small modular nuclear reactors. On Aug. 31 it filed a permit with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a $25 million production facility in Georgetown, renovating an existing 204,350 square foot warehouse into a lab, machine shop, and production floor. Construction is expected to start Nov. 15 and finish by January 2028. The company just closed a $100 million funding round, and it is reportedly also in talks to lease a 606,000 square foot building under construction in the CrossPoint Business District.

What they actually make. Aalo's reactor is a sodium-cooled design built for factory mass production rather than one-off construction. Each unit produces about 10 megawatts, enough to power roughly 6,000 to 7,000 Texas homes, and is sized to fit on a standard truck. The commercial product is five of those units together for 50 megawatts, aimed at powering data centers. The company's test reactor achieved criticality in July at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, which is where the actual nuclear testing happens. Georgetown gets the assembly line, not the reactor.

Why here, why now. Texas is pushing hard to become the country's testing ground for small reactors, and the state estimates it needs to fill 10,000 nuclear energy jobs over the next three to five years as data centers spread. A manufacturing plant 40 miles from the company's Austin headquarters, on I-35, near a fast growing labor pool, is the obvious move.

What it means for us. High skill manufacturing and engineering jobs, a marquee employer for the industrial side of town, and Georgetown's name attached to one of the more talked about energy technologies in the country. Also, fair to say, some neighbors who will want to understand exactly what happens inside that warehouse. We will keep asking that question as the project moves through permitting.

If you have noticed that trading cards are suddenly a very big deal again, Georgetown now has a home for it. Brodie Sachs, who has been into trading cards since childhood, opened Bad Habits Card Co., bringing the card craze to town.

The trading card world has quietly become one of the more interesting small business stories in the country, with sports and Pokémon cards drawing serious collectors, kids, and everyone in between. It is also exactly the kind of shop that turns into a hangout, where people trade, talk, and show up on release days. Georgetown had nowhere like that. Now it does.

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Last week I asked which Georgetown organizations you would tell a newcomer to get involved with, and the list is getting long. That is going to become a page on the website. Thank you.

This week: a company that builds nuclear reactors is moving into a warehouse in Georgetown. Excited, nervous, or somewhere in between? I am genuinely curious how this town reads that news. Hit reply, and if you have questions you want answered about the facility, send those too. I will take them to the company and the city.

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See you on the Square, Armand

GTown Buzz, your weekly buzz on Georgetown, TX Got a tip? Just hit reply.