Exactly one year ago, Amazon made a bet on the small modular reactor developer X-energy, investing in the startup and pledging to build its first 320-megawatt plant in the retail giant’s home state of Washington.
Today, Amazon is unveiling its updated plans for what it’s dubbed the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. The planned-for plant is now triple the original proposed size, and will be constructed in three phases — each with four of X-energy’s 80-MW, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors — totaling 12 reactors pumping out a maximum of 960 MW of electricity. The facility, built as part of a partnership between Amazon and Energy Northwest, will supply the utility with power and augment the Columbia Generating Station, the Pacific Northwest’s only existing nuclear plant.
Located along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, the X-energy facility will transform an urbanizing corner in the southwestern part of the state into an energy hub for the entire region. As part of the deal, Amazon will finance the construction of the project and the power will flow to Energy Northwest — which in turn supplies power for Amazon’s nearby data centers.
Amazon said it expects construction to start “by the end of this decade,” with hopes of generating electricity sometime “in the 2030s.”
By structuring the deal as a direct investment from Amazon rather than as a power purchase agreement, the tech giant improves the odds that the first-of-a-kind reactors are actually completed, Amazon’s Climate Fund director Daniel Gross, who initially helped identify X-energy as a potential investment for the company, previously told Latitude Media.
“A PPA for a solar project or a wind project has, for the last decade, been sufficient to get that project built and financed,” he said earlier this year. “If an independent power producer or renewable energy developer is able to sign a power purchase agreement with a hyperscaler, the credit quality is so good, the certainty around the revenue is so good that they’re able to borrow money, raise tax equity, and raise infrastructure money in order to build.”
The GenIV SMR race
Financing and logistics support from one of the world’s most valuable companies give the Maryland-based X-energy a significant boost in its race to build the first next-generation commercial nuclear plant in the West.
When China started up the world’s first fourth-generation commercial reactor at its Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant in December 2023, the country vaulted past the United States and gained a lead of up to 15 years, according to an analysis by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
At a symposium in the southern city of Fuzhou in July, Zhang Donghui, the chief scientist at the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation, said fourth-generation reactors promised to be even safer than light-water reactors and burned up more of the radioactive material that makes traditional spent fuel dangerous for such long periods of time. “There are no credible scenarios leading to core meltdown, and even in hypothetical severe accidents, radioactive materials would be contained within the plant,” Zhang said, according to the state-controlled nationalist tabloid Global Times.
X-energy’s rivals in the U.S. include the Bill Gates-led TerraPower and Oklo, the microreactor startup backed by OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In August, Google-backed Kairos Power inked the first power purchase agreement between a fourth-generation reactor company and a utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority.
But X-energy’s strategy of pursuing corporate deals has made the company stand out for years. The company signed its first deal to deploy its reactors at a Dow Chemical plant on the Gulf of Mexico back in 2022, highlighting a key advantage of fourth-generation technology over traditional third-generation reactors, since the non-water coolant could allow the machines to generate high enough temperatures to decarbonize industrial heat. In August, the company announced an agreement to deploy reactors in South Korea to work with the state-owned giant Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power.
“Over the past year, the support of Amazon has enabled us to accelerate progress on our technology, grow our team with world-class talent and expertise, and position the Cascade Advanced Energy Center at the forefront of energy innovation,” J. Clay Sell, X-energy CEO, said in a press release. “The scale of this work is historic.”
In a statement, Energy Northwest praised Amazon for establishing a training center at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Washington, where the Department of Energy is helping to fund a simulator that replicates the control room of one of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors.
That program promised to “demystify nuclear energy” and show “students that a viable, meaningful career in clean energy is within reach — and that they can be part of something transformative,” said Energy Northwest CEO Bob Schuetz. “Investing in advanced training simulators prepares future operators and builds the foundation for a clean energy workforce that will power our region for decades to come.”
