Accelerating the commercialization of advanced nuclear energy: X-energy, Google, and Amazon announced three new deals of “world’s first” to purchase electricity from advanced nuclear reactor

Google needs a lot more clean energy to meet its climate goals while pursuing its AI ambitions. The hope is that new nuclear technologies can provide carbon-free electricity, but also do some things that traditional nuclear power plants can’t.

By 2020 the company set a goal of running on carbon-free energy around the clock. It also committed to slashing its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. Its greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 48 percent since the beginning of 2019.

In an interview with the Japanese journal, the chief executive officer said that the scale of the task needed has been added to by the trajectory of AI investments. We are looking at additional investments, be it solar or small modular nuclear reactor.

Each deal supports the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), which can be one-tenth to one-quarter the size of a traditional nuclear power plant. If these projects make it to the finish line, SMRs would be a source of carbon pollution-free energy for big tech companies trying to salvage their climate goals by turning to nuclear energy.

“Having an agreement for multiple deployments is important to accelerate the commercialization of advanced nuclear energy by demonstrating the technical and market viability,” Jeff Olson, Kairos Power vice president of business development and finance, said in a press release.

Two days after a “world’s first” deal to purchase electricity from advanced nuclear reactor, Amazon announced three new agreements of its own.

X-energy announced a $500 million Series C-1 financing round today “anchored by” Amazon. Beyond the project in Washington, the money is supposed to support the “completion of X-energy’s reactor design and licensing” and the development of a fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. X-energy says it is collaborating with Amazon to bring more than 5,000MW of S MR projects to the US by 2039, which it says would be the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs yet. To make it all happen, the two companies “plan to establish and standardize a deployment and financing model to develop projects in partnership with infrastructure and utility partners.”

Nuclear reactor are also an attractive option for data centers that run around the clock because they can generate electricity even in the worst of weather. SMRs are also supposed to be faster to build and easier to site than larger traditional nuclear power plants.

Nuclear energy is still facing opposition from advocates concerned about the environmental and health risks that come with mining, enriching and storing radioactive waste.

Johanna Neumann, a senior director at the Environment America Research & Policy said, “It is time for Big Tech to recommit to solutions that work and pose less risk to our environment and health, such as making data centers as energy efficient as possible and committing them to be powered by new renewable