By Diana DiGangi of UtilityDive

The planned Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington, which will be built by Energy Northwest with funding from Amazon, will deploy 12 small modular reactors, Amazon said in a Thursday release.

The “modular nature” of the plant means that three 320-MW sections will together comprise a 960-MW plant within the space of a few city blocks, in contrast to “traditional nuclear power facilities whose single GW plant can take up more than a square mile of land,” Amazon said.

The SMRs will be supplied by X-energy, which received $500 million in Series C funding from Amazon last year, using X-energy’s advanced nuclear reactor design. The Cascade facility will be built outside Richland, Washington, near Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.

X-energy’s “advanced reactor design, the Xe-100, will be used in Amazon’s partnership with Energy Northwest to develop four SMRs in the first phase of Cascade, with an initial capacity of 320 MW and the option to expand to 12 units with a capacity of 960 MW,” Amazon said in its release.

Construction is expected to start at the end of the decade, “with operations targeted to start in the 2030s,” Amazon said.

Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 public utility districts and municipalities across Washington, said in 2024 that the deal with Amazon would meet an “urgent need to develop advanced technologies in the Pacific Northwest that provide reliable, carbon-free and sustainable energy generation.”

“The SMRs will be the Xe-100 design, a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor developed by X-energy ... Each Xe-100 module can provide 80 megawatts of full-time electricity,” Energy Northwest said. 

Amazon’s Thursday release said the energy will help power AI and other digital tools.

X-energy and Amazon, along with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and Doosan Enerbility, also signed a strategic collaboration agreement in August to “accelerate the deployment of new Xe-100 advanced nuclear reactors in the United States to meet increasing power demands by data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification,” according to a release from X-energy. 

“KHNP, Doosan, and additional Korean industrial partners have agreed to support Amazon and X-energy’s plans to deploy more than five gigawatts of new nuclear energy across the [U.S.] by 2039, while also exploring global regions,” X-energy said. “The parties aim to mobilize up to $50 billion in public and private investments for Xe-100 projects and the expansion of associated supply chain capacity to support the future of American energy dominance and artificial intelligence growth.”

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