Now one year later, Amazon has released an update on that project, which it has dubbed the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility.
The details: Last year, X-energy highlighted that the deal included an option to increase the Washington project to a 12-unit, 960-MWe deployment. In this newest communication, Amazon has reiterated that this option is being considered., but that the first phase of development at Cascade will focus on the deployment of an initial four units, after which two more may be built.
The site of this new plant will be outside of Richland, Wash., near Columbia nuclear power plant. Columbia, which is situated alongside the Columbia River, is a 1,207-Mwe, single-unit boiling water reactor owned by Energy Northwest and the only currently operational nuclear plant in the state.
The reactor at the core of X-energy’s plans is its Xe-100 SMR, an 80-MWe high-temperature, gas-cooled design. It uses a pebble-bed system (uranium particles encased in graphite) and relies on helium as a coolant.
What’s next: Other than giving this project its official name and reiterating tentative plans to pursue a 12-unit plant, this new update from Amazon provides a few more insights into the project’s progress. According to the company, construction is expected to start by the end of the decade, with commercial operation expected sometime in the 2030s.
Amazon also detailed that the project is expected to create “1,000 jobs during construction and more than 100 permanent jobs in nuclear operations, engineering, and other specialized fields.”
The project represents a first step in Amazon and X-energy’s plans to jointly deploy 5 GW of new nuclear energy to the U.S. grid by 2039. It also represents one of three major reactor deployment projects X-energy is currently working toward. In the U.K., the company aims to deploy a 6-GW fleet of Xe-100s in partnership with energy company Centrica. Together, they are aiming to first deploy a 12-unit plant at the soon-to-close Hartlepool nuclear power plant.
While X-energy’s plans with Centrica and Amazon share significant overlap in their scopes and first steps, its third project is on a smaller scale: The company has partnered with chemical company Dow to bring a four-unit plant on line in Seadrift, Texas. This deployment is the furthest along in its approval process; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission docketed the project’s construction permit in May.
As for the approval progress for Cascade, according to Axios, Greg Cullen, Energy Northwest's vice president for energy services and development, said that officials are “making progress” in discussions with both state regulators and the NRC.
