By Anders Lorenzen

The world’s biggest profit-making company, Amazon, last week announced that, in addition to continued investments in renewables, to scale up their net-zero ambitions, they’re eying several nuclear energy projects.

The company has signed new agreements that it says will support the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

SMRs are an advanced type of nuclear reactor that takes up less land, thus allowing them to be built closer to the grid. While traditional large-scale nuclear projects from planning to completion can take ten years, sometimes longer, the advantage of SMRs is that they have a much faster turnaround time.

The project confirmed so far is an agreement with Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities. Energy Northwest will construct, own, and operate SMR reactors, with a generation capacity of 320 megawatts (MW) in the first phase of the project, with the option to increase to 960 MW in total—this is equivalent to powering more than 770,000 U.S. homes—expected to come online in the early 2030s.

Investment in next-generation SMR’s

The US-headquartered company says it’s also investing in X-energy, a leading developer of next-generation SMR reactors and fuel. X-energy’s advanced nuclear reactor design will be used in the Energy Northwest project. Amazon says its investment includes manufacturing capacity to develop the SMR equipment to support more than five gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear energy projects utilizing X-energy’s technology.

Additionally, the company says that in Virginia, they have signed an agreement with utility company Dominion Energy to explore the development of an SMR project near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. This project would bring at least 300 megawatts of power to the Virginia region, where Dominion estimates power demands will increase by 85% over the next 15 years.

Amazon adds that they have already signed an agreement to co-locate a data centre next to Talen Energy’s nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. This will directly power our data centres with carbon-free energy and help preserve this existing reactor.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) said about these investments: “Nuclear is a safe source of carbon-free energy that can help power our operations and meet the growing demands of our customers while helping us progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040.” 

Amazon highlights in addition to creating low-carbon energy sources, these projects will create a series of new jobs. They estimate that the agreement with Energy Northwest will create up to 1,000 temporary construction jobs and 100+ permanent jobs once the SMR project is fully operational. In Pennsylvania, they’re building a data centre campus as part of the investment in Talen Energy, and that project will create construction jobs – though they did not put a number on the amount of jobs, but said it would help preserve the 900 local jobs that are already there to keep the facility up and running.