Amazon.com said Wednesday it signed three deals to develop small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power technology, becoming the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet growing data center electricity demand.
Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state. X-Energy is planned to develop the SMR. Financial details were not disclosed.
Under the agreement, Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a state utility consortium, will have the option to add up to eight 80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity of up to 960 MW, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes. The additional power would be available to Amazon and utility companies to power homes and businesses.
“Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
The SMR components will be built in a factory to reduce construction costs. Today’s largest reactors are built on site. Critics of SMRs say they will be too expensive to achieve the desired economies of scale.
Nuclear power, which generates electricity virtually free of greenhouse gas emissions and provides well-paying union jobs, receives broad support from both Democrats and Republicans.
But there are no American SMRs yet. NuScale, the only US company with an SMR design license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last year had to ax the first SMR project to build its technology in a US laboratory in Idaho.
Additionally, SMRs will produce long-lived radioactive nuclear waste for which the United States does not yet have a final repository.
Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said “no details” about the planned SMRs have yet been presented to the regulator.