Amazon.com joins push for nuclear power to meet data centre demand

Nuclear power, which generates electricity virtually free of greenhouse gas emissions and provides high-paying union jobs, gets wide support from both Democrats and Republicans [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Amazon.com said on Wednesday it has signed three agreements on developing the nuclear power technology called small modular reactors, becoming the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet surging electricity demand from data centres.

Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state. The SMR is planned to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed.

Under the agreement, Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, will have the option to add up to eight 80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity up to 960 MWs, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes. The additional power would be available to Amazon and utilities 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.

SMRs will have their components built in a factory to reduce construction costs. Today’s larger reactors are built onsite. 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 high-paying union jobs, gets wide support from both Democrats and Republicans. But no U.S. SMRs exist yet. NuScale, the only U.S. company with an SMR design license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last year had to axe the first SMR project to build its technology at a U.S. lab in Idaho.

In addition, SMRs will produce long-lasting radioactive nuclear waste for which the U.S. does not yet have a final repository.

Scott Burnell, a spokesperson at the U.S. NRC, said “no specifics” about the planned SMRs been presented yet to the regulator.

Data centres

Tech firms have signed a rash of agreements with nuclear companies this year as artificial intelligence boosts U.S. power demand for the first time in decades, though time-lines for nuclear projects tend to lag goals by years.

U.S. data centre power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Goldman assumed natural gas, wind and solar power would fill the gap.

Amazon said it is also leading a funding round for $500 million to support X-Energy’s development of SMRs. Amazon and X-Energy aim to bring more than 5 gigawatts online in the United States by 2039, which the companies call the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs yet.

Amazon also signed an agreement with Dominion Energy to explore the development of an SMR project near the utility’s existing power station in Virginia. The about 300 megawatt project would help meet power needs in a region where demand is expected to jump 85% in 15 years, Dominion said.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner said at an event held at Amazon offices in Virginia that recent announcements could “crack the code” in getting U.S. SMRs built.

Warner said he often talks with parties in other countries who are interested in buying SMRs from U.S. companies but wary that none have been built in the U.S. On Monday Alphabet’s Google signed an agreement with Kairos Power to bring an SMR online by 2030, with more deployments through 2035.

In March, Amazon purchased a nuclear-powered datacenter from Talen Energy. Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed a power deal to help resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the worst U.S. nuclear accident in 1979.