Racing with Google, Amazon pushes ambitious nuclear energy project

3 contracts under SMR technology

Under the agreement, Amazon will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near an Energy Northwest site in Washington. The reactor is being developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed by the parties.

The deal allows Amazon to buy power from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, has the option to add up to eight additional 80 MW modules, for a total capacity of 960 MW, enough to power more than 770,000 American homes. That power will be supplied to both Amazon and the utilities to serve residents and businesses.

“Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman.

SMRs are manufactured in a factory-assembled model to reduce construction costs, unlike today's larger reactors, which are built off-site. However, opponents of SMRs argue that they will be too expensive to achieve the desired economic efficiency.

Nuclear energy is a clean energy source, does not emit greenhouse gases and provides high-paying jobs, thus receiving support from both Democrats and Republicans.

However, the US currently has no operational SMR reactors. NuScale, the only US company licensed to design SMRs, had to cancel its first SMR project to build the technology at a laboratory in Idaho last year.

In addition, SMRs also create long-lived radioactive nuclear waste, for which the United States has no final repository. Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said there was “no specific information” about the planned SMR reactors submitted to the agency.

Powering data centers

Tech companies have signed deals with nuclear companies this year as demand for electricity surges for the first time in decades to fuel artificial intelligence (AI). But progress on nuclear projects has often lagged behind targets.

According to Goldman Sachs, electricity demand from US data centers is expected to triple between 2023 and 2030, requiring about 47 gigawatts of new power. Goldman Sachs predicts that natural gas, wind and solar will fill the gap.

Amazon said it is also leading a $500 million funding round to support X-Energy's development of SMRs. Amazon and X-Energy aim to bring more than 5 gigawatts of power to the U.S. grid by 2039, which would be the largest commercial deployment of SMRs to date.

In addition, Amazon also signed an agreement with Dominion Energy to jointly research and develop an SMR project near Dominion's existing power plant in Virginia. This project has a capacity of about 300 megawatts, to meet the area's 85% increase in electricity demand over the next 15 years.

US Senator Mark Warner, speaking at an event at Amazon's Virginia office, said the recent announcements could "open the door" to building SMR reactors in the US. Warner said he regularly talks to parties in other countries interested in buying SMRs from US companies but concerned that no SMR reactors have been built in the US.

On Monday, Alphabet's Google signed a deal with Kairos Power to put SMRs into operation from 2030, with more deployments through 2035.

In March, Amazon bought a nuclear-powered data center from Talen Energy. Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed a power agreement to help restore a unit of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant, the site of the United States' worst nuclear accident in 1979.

(According to Reuters)

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