Delhi Delhi. Amazon.com said Wednesday it has signed three agreements to develop nuclear power technology called small modular reactors, the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet growing power demand from data centers. It has become. Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near the 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 power from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, will have the option to add eight 80-megawatt modules, resulting in total capacity of up to 960 megawatts, or the equivalent of power for more than 770,000 U.S. homes. The extra electricity will be available to Amazon and utilities to power homes and businesses.
“Our agreements will encourage the creation of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. SMR components will be manufactured in the factory to reduce manufacturing costs. Today's large 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 nearly free of greenhouse gas emissions and provides high-paying union jobs, enjoys broad support from both Democrats and Republicans. But no US SMR exists yet. NewScale, the only US company with an SMR design license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had to scrap the first SMR project last year to build its technology at a US lab in Idaho. In addition, SMRs will produce long-lived radioactive nuclear waste, for which the US does not yet have an ultimate repository. US NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said that “no specific information” about the planned SMRs has yet been submitted to the regulator.
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