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Amazon today became the tardy Big Tech company to throw its weight behind nuclear power , joiningMicrosoftandGoogle , which both previously declare long - term promises to buy nuclear power from startup to power their data centers .
The companyrevealedthree spate , include an investiture in startup X - Energy and two development accord that aim to add around 300 megawatt ’ worth of capacity in both the Pacific Northwest and Virginia , two data center hot spots .
The two development peck adumbrate the structure of humble modular reactors ( SMR ) , which generate a fraction of the power produce by modern-day nuclear major power plants but which proponents say will be faster and cheap to build . Amazon expects the reactor will start generating electrical energy in the early 2030s .
In the Pacific Northwest , the accord with the Energy Northwest consortium of country public public utility will support the construction of four SMRs that will produce around 320 megawatts combined . succeeding enlargement could bump the entire generating capacity to 960 megawatts , enough to power about 1 million dwelling . In Virginia , Amazon and Dominion have harmonize to “ search the growth ” of 300 megawatts ’ Charles Frederick Worth of SMRs near the North Anna Nuclear Generating Station located between Washington , D.C. , and Richmond , Virginia .
Those projects are likely to be built using engineering from X - Energy , an SMR startup ground in Rockville , Maryland . Amazon ’s Climate Pledge Fund led a young $ 500 millionSeries C-1 roundinto the company , with participation from other investors , including Citadel founder Ken Griffin , NGP , and the University of Michigan . The new round adds to the $ 385 million the company has raised to date , accord to PitchBook .
X - Energy specializes in high - temperature , gas - chill reactors , an approach that fell out of favour in the U.S. and Europe but as young design emerge was more recently revived in Japan and China .
When build , X - Energy ’s Xe-100 reactor will yield 80 megawatt of electricity . Its atomic number 92 fuel is coated with three layers of carbon , and 18,000 of these poppy seed - sized particles are then charge into a billiard - chunk - sized “ pebble , ” and 200,000 of those pebbles are used per reactor . Helium course between the pebble , where it ’s heat to 750 ° C . That heat is then transferred to water , which generates steam to spin a turbine .
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The fuel system , known as TRISO , istoutedas being safer than existing nuclear fuel plan , with the particles contain the uranium under high temperatures .
X - Energy ’s first reactor will be built at a Dow chemical substance flora outside Corpus Christi , Texas . The company has not announced when the projection will be completed and said that it intend to explicate up to 5,000 megawatts of new atomic power throughout the U.S. by 2039 .
The fresh deals with Amazon , like the dealGoogle denote on Mondaywith Kairos , give atomic fission a hike in the face of get progress on atomic unification and the unfaltering march of power from renewable sources like solar and hint , which have become well cheaper over the last X . Although nuclear big businessman is far-flung , fresh nuclear reactor designs have yet to be commercially proven , and their timeline puts them in verbatim competition with other sources of atomic number 6 - free power that foretell to decarbonize the electrical control grid in the coming decade .
