This is an interesting "movement" on civilian nuclear energy.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken a historic step by voting to issue construction permits for Kairos Power’s 70-MWth Hermes 2, a “low power” advanced test facility comprising two 35-MWth molten salt reactors. “Following the Commission’s vote, Hermes 2 is now the first electricity-producing Gen IV plant to be approved for construction in the United States,” said Kairos Power.

Their design is not what I've talked about although you'd be forgiven for thinking it is since its a molten salt reactor.  Rather than use the salt as a fuel carrier (and thus be able to easily use thorium as the ultimate fuel, although started on either uranium or plutonium) it instead relies on Triso fuel, which is a ceramic pellet-style fuel that is entirely-conventional in its make-up.  Triso pellets have a fairly-decent set of operational advantages but are actually more-difficult to reprocess than conventional fuel pins (and not by a little either), and thus today its a one-time through fuel which sucks from a perspective of nuclear waste handling.

However, there is a forward path that I do like, which is inherently part of using molten salt as a coolant and operating fluid (to transfer the heat); it runs at very high temperatures compared with water-moderated units, and thus is directly compatible with using process heat for things like, as an example, Fischer-Tropsch in a combined plant that produces both synfuel and electricity.  In addition the higher primary loop temperature improves thermodynamic efficiency by quite a bit and thus enables operating these at reasonable efficiency levels where huge volumes of water are not available.

They're not intending to use primary heat for synfuel or similar purposes in what has been licensed but there's nothing stopping them from doing so down the road, nor would it in any reasonable world require any sort of "new licensing" since using the process heat for that purpose doesn't change any element of the actual reactor section (it just taps off some of the heat that then goes to make the steam that turns the turbines and thus make power.)

So yes, this is a step forward toward an actual sane energy policy.  A small and very-incomplete step, and one that in terms of fuel cycle is actually backward and thus bad, but nonetheless deploying more energy resource and one that can be exploited to resolve foreign requirements for petroleum-based fuels is good, never mind that unlike wind and solar spinning generators, no matter the input energy -- nuclear, coal or hydro -- add flywheel mass to the grid which is an essential element for grid stability.

We'll see how this all turns out and whether, on a cost basis, it ultimately proves up as worthwhile for wide-scale deployment, but this is the sort of innovation that does indeed move the ball forward -- even if it has downsides (as Triso fuel does in the fuel cycle and thus waste department.)