A project to build one of the nation’s first next-generation nuclear facilities has just announced its name — the Cascade Advanced Energy Center — and shared renderings of the plant. The effort includes a coalition of partners coming together to deploy the reactors engineered by X-energy and Amazon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get the effort off the ground.
The question now is will it be enough to kick off a new wave of U.S. nuclear energy innovation — a field that America largely soured on by the 1980s?
“This is not for the faint of heart,” said Ben Reinke, senior vice president for global business development and deputy commercial officer for X-energy. “This is a difficult thing — to take on new technology like this and bring it to market.”
Since 2020, X-energy has been in talks with Energy Northwest, a consortium of Washington public utilities and the operator of the Pacific Northwest’s only operating nuclear plant, trying to get the initiative to coalesce.
Then a year ago, Amazon publicly entered the picture, leading a $700 million investment round in X-energy and committing to spend $334 million to fund essential, early stages of deployment, including development, licensing and construction.
“We said, ‘We want that power enough, and we wish to be an enabler of this technology, so we’ll fund it,’” said Daniel Gross, director of Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.
Amazon — like other tech giants — is hungry for big volumes of energy to fuel its data centers, which are growing rapidly as artificial intelligence increases computational demands. Nuclear is attractive because it doesn’t produce carbon emissions and can operate 24/7, unlike wind and solar power that is available intermittently.
The facility will be located near Richland, Wash., near Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. The initial goal is to install a cluster of four small modular reactors (SMRs) that can produce up to 320 megawatts of power, but the overall vision is to construct 12 reactors total, with a capacity of nearly one gigawatt.
If all the funding, permitting and public support come together, construction should start within the next five years, with the plant coming online in the 2030s.
The path to power
The U.S. doesn’t have any operating SMRs — China and Russia do — but the expectation is they’ll be quicker and cheaper to build than previous reactor designs. That said, the facilities will cost billions of dollars and take years to complete.
X-energy’s first nuclear facility is planned for Seadrift, Texas, and is being built in partnership with Dow to power its chemical manufacturing site. The project has submitted engineering and preliminary designs for the project and a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval.
The hope is the Washington project will come together a little more easily than the first-of-a-kind project in Texas.
“You don’t want to start construction or start moving dirt until your design is fully ready to go. As soon as you start putting a lot of people and a lot of work on the site, that’s when the costs start accruing,” said Greg Cullen, vice president of energy services and development at Energy Northwest. “So you want to make sure you’re ready.”
Cullen didn’t put a price on the initial phase of the project but indicated it would be more than $2 billion. He said the effort is seeking additional funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loans Program Office.
While X-energy is providing the technology for its Xe-100 reactors, Energy Northwest will lead the construction. Cullen said the organization will soon announce the coalition of companies that will perform the work.
And in August, X-energy and Amazon signed a “strategic collaboration agreement” with South Korea’s Doosan Enerbility and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power to accelerate SMR construction by supporting supply chain and manufacturing processes.
Aiming for scale
For Amazon, its support of the Cascade Advanced Energy Center is part of a much bigger initiative. The company has set a goal of deploying 5 gigawatts of nuclear power in the U.S. by 2039.
“One thing that Amazon does well is scale technology,” said Brandon Oyer, Amazon Web Services’ head of power and water for North and South America. “We’ve done this over and over again … We’ll go and make an investment and then learn how to scale that up, drive out cost, make it more readily available.”
Targeting SMRs for amplification was a “natural fit,” Oyer added.
The company believes nuclear aligns with its climate ambitions. Amazon matches all of its electricity use with clean power and is the largest corporate purchaser of wind, solar and other renewable sources. That said, it is struggling to cut its carbon footprint to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2040 as the AI-boom stokes energy use. Amazon reported that its carbon footprint grew by 6% last year.
Amazon has dibs on half of the 320 megawatts of electricity that will be generated by the first four reactors at the Washington site, but will take all of it if the power prices are too high for local utilities to afford.
Cullen said that if everything goes well with the initial phase, it would be straightforward to build the other eight reactors as the permits will encompass the complete build out. The added reactors would produce enough electricity for about one million homes and should come at a lower cost.
“Amazon recognizes the role they can — and are willing — to play,” Cullen said. The company can take some of the early risk and bring that catalytic capital, he said, which is “very, very difficult for utilities to do.”
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