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

Amazon.com said it signed agreements on developing the nuclear power technology called small modular reactors.

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.