reen energy needs to be everyone's priority, especially big companies that need this many resources. Amazon declared yesterday that it become one of the
news companies from the world of tech, to add their weight to the nuclear power energy industry.
Amazon has joined other tech industry leaders such as Google and Microsoft which both invested in nuclear power startups and use their energy in order to power up their data centres. Amazon made public three deals including an investment in X-Energy and two other development agreements that have the purpose of bringing around 300 megawatts in two of their data center spots – Virginia and the Pacific Northwest.
The development deals highlight the process of building small modular reactors (SMR), which can generate only a fraction of the energy produced by typical nuclear power plants. Yet, SMRs, are easier, cheaper, and faster to build, compared to contemporary power plants that take over a decade to build and millions of dollars. Amazon the power plants to start generating energy by 2030s.
In the Pacific Northwest, the agreement with the Energy Northwest consortium of state public utilities will generate the construction of four SMRs that will have the capacity to generate 320 megawatts. Yet, they are expecting an expansive growth that has the ability to generate 960 megawatts which – translates into enough electric energy for a million homes.
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Those ambitious projects are very much likely to be built using the technology available from X-energy, an SMR startup based in, Maryland, Rockville. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund attracted a new $500 million investment in a Series C-1 round into the company. At the investment participated Citadel founder Ken Griffin, the University of Michigan, and NPG.
X-Energy specializes in gas-cooled reactors from high temperatures, being a new approach that was not for long mainstream in the US and Europe. Yet, more recently, it was brought back in Japan and China.
The potential of an X-Energy’s Xe-100 reactor will be to generate 80 megawatts of electricity when it will be built. It has a uranium fuel that is coated with three layers of carbon and 18,000 of those particles are then loaded into a “pebble” the size of a billiard ball in order for the reactor to work it uses 200,000 of those pebbles. After that, the reactor is heated up to 750 degrees C, and the heat is transferred to water leading to the production of steam that rotates a turbine.
This fuel system is known under the name of TRISO and is considered to be a safer alternative than already existing nuclear power fuel designs.
The deals that Amazon made came shortly after Google announced this Monday its collaboration with Kairos. Those deals give nuclear power a boost and create a better environment from renewable energy and a carbon-free future.
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