Oklo got dropped from PJM’s interconnection queue this week, and the reason is almost funny once you sit with it. Not zoning, not radiation panic, not a town hall full of NIMBYs. PJM says the 750-MW project never demonstrated it could ride through a sudden drop in grid voltage. Oklo is appealing to FERC. Somewhere there’s a slide deck about the nuclear renaissance that didn’t have a line item for “show your work on voltage sag.”

The timing is what got me. Same day, MISO filed its own proposal requiring large loads to prove ramping and ride-through behavior before they connect, following FERC’s June order telling every major grid operator to write these rules. And four industry executives, including Nvidia’s AI infrastructure VP, published a piece on the three principles for data centers to be “good grid citizens.” All three threads trace back to the same event: the July 22 fault in Northern Virginia, when 3,100 MW of data center load vanished in seconds because backup power kicked in at the first flicker, and the disturbance was felt from DC to Chicago even though the grid itself never actually broke.

So ride-through has quietly become the password. Not “can you make power” or “can you use it,” but “can you hold steady when something upstream hiccups.” Data centers are getting graded on it now. Turns out so is a reactor company that spent years being the industry’s favorite comeback story. I like that the standard doesn’t care what you are, only whether you flinch. Though I imagine that’s cold comfort if you’re Oklo, watching a queue slot close over a test nobody warned you existed.

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