Latest news with #TRISO-X
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US government to ship enriched uranium to Oak Ridge nuclear fuel plant planning 400 jobs
The U.S. Department of Energy will ship specialized uranium to a nuclear fuel plant under construction in Oak Ridge, bridging a gap in the domestic uranium supply chain for a company with plans to create hundreds of local jobs. TRISO-X, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon-backed advanced reactor developer X-energy, is building a fuel fabrication plant at the Horizon Center Industrial Park to enter operations by the end of 2027. Its near-term goal is to supply pebble fuel for X-energy's first small modular reactors at a Dow manufacturing facility in Seadrift, Texas. TRISO-X wants to supply fuel to other companies in the future. TRISO-X is one of five companies selected by the U.S. government to receive shipments from the government's store of uranium while it helps a handful of uranium enrichment companies including Centrus Energy and Orano build out a domestic supply chain. "We are clearly in the right position to be able to bring these advanced technologies on board and get them operating," Joel Duling, president of TRISO-X, told Knox News in an interview. TRISO-X will not enrich uranium at its Oak Ridge plant, but will manufacture spherical nuclear fuel using enriched uranium. The process is critical to X-energy's push to build its own fuel supply chain. The first TRISO-X facility in Oak Ridge will employ around 400 people once it is operational, Duling said. The company broke ground for the $300 million plant in 2022 and began site preparations in November. It plans to begin construction on its first plant in July or August, having originally planned to open in 2025. A second plant slated for Oak Ridge will increase the local TRISO-X workforce to around 1,000 people. The lack of a U.S. source of high-assay, low-enriched uranium is a major hurdle for advanced nuclear companies. The fuel, also called HALEU, is more concentrated than the uranium in commercial nuclear power plant reactors, but less powerful than bomb-grade uranium. The Department of Energy could send enriched uranium to advanced nuclear companies as soon as this fall, and plans to select more companies for future shipments. The fuel will come from the government's stores, including from the National Nuclear Security Administration, though the Department of Energy did not share the exact source of the uranium. The National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent agency of the Department of Energy that shepherds the U.S. nuclear arsenal, stores bomb-grade uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. Kairos Power, a company building a series of demonstration reactors in Oak Ridge, also will receive an allocation of uranium. It is developing its own advanced nuclear fuel in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The special uranium fuel is necessary for many advanced nuclear reactor designs to run more efficiently and safely, and at varying sizes, compared to large traditional nuclear power plants. X-energy and Dow submitted a construction permit application for the Xe-100 reactor design to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the companies announced March 31. The approval of the construction permit could take up to two and a half years. Many tech companies are investing in small modular reactors as a potential source of 24/7 clean energy to power data centers that train AI platforms and process online transactions. Most advanced nuclear companies use some form of TRISO fuel, which stands for "tri-structural isotropic." Each particle of TRISO fuel, around the size of a poppy seed, has its own containment through layers of carbon, oxygen and uranium. Companies load the particles into different fabrications, like pebbles, pellets or rods. The fuel "cannot melt" in a reactor and is the "most robust nuclear fuel on earth," according to the Department of Energy. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. government's largest multiprogram science and tech lab, established a dedicated lab space to develop TRISO fuel in 2002. TRISO-X formed a partnership to pilot its own fuel at ORNL in 2016 and continues to operate a lab there. The partnership is set to expire at the end of this year, Duling said, though the company may renew it for further research. Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Email: Signal: @danieldassow.24. Support strong local journalism by subscribing at This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: US to ship enriched uranium to TRISO-X nuclear plant in Oak Ridge
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Data Centers Bet on Next-Gen Nuclear
Soaring demand for electricity to power the AI boom is creating a global rush to develop small modular reactors to meet the growing energy needs of the Big Tech firms with electricity that's both reliable and low-carbon. Many start-ups in the United States and Europe are vying to become the first to not only design but also put into commercial operation the next generation of advanced nuclear reactors. The small modular reactors (SMR) are believed to be simpler and cheaper to build and install. Because of their smaller size, it is possible to install SMRs on sites that are not suitable for bigger reactors. They are also significantly cheaper and faster to build than conventional reactors and can be constructed incrementally to meet the growing energy demand of a promising advances in recent years, no one has actually launched such a micro reactor yet. However, the race has accelerated as technology giants are looking to power and cool their data centers, preferably with low-carbon energy. Renewables plus battery storage cannot meet all the growth in demand, so nuclear power has become the next best thing for Big Tech who are looking to boast AI advancements and climate commitments at the same time. The problem is that conventional nuclear reactors and sites take years, often decades, to fund and build. One mothballed reactor is being restarted in the U.S., thanks to a power purchase agreement that giant Microsoft has signed. Last year, Constellation Energy, the biggest owner of U.S. nuclear power plants, signed its largest-ever power purchase agreement with Microsoft, which paves the way for the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear plant. The tech industry, however, cannot rely on PPAs from operational nuclear reactors to cover the energy needs of their new data centers. That's why Big Tech is investing in the start-ups that are developing smaller-scale modular for example, invested in a financing round of approximately $500 million, which X-Energy Reactor Company raised last year. X-Energy continues to raise financing to complete its reactor design and licensing as well as the first phase of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Amazon funding will support future carbon-free projects that will use X-energy's Xe-100 advanced SMRs.'We need smart solutions that can help us meet growing energy demands while also addressing climate change,' said Kevin Miller, Amazon's Vice President of Global Data Centers. Earlier this month, X-Energy said that the upsized $700 million financing round would help it advance its technology development. Amazon and X-energy are collaborating to bring more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of new power projects online across the U.S. by 2039. Another tech giant, Google, signed in October 2024 the world's first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors to be developed by Kairos Power. 'This agreement is part of our efforts to develop and commercialize a broad portfolio of advanced clean electricity technologies to power our global data centers and offices,' Michael Terrell, Senior Director, Energy and Climate, at Google said. In the race to commercialize the first small modular reactors, developers globally have raised at least $1.5 billion in funding over the past year to advance their technologies and projects, according to estimates by the Financial funding rounds, in many cases backed by the technology giants, add to government support for nuclear technologies in the U.S. and Europe. While the Trump Administration is skeptical about supporting renewables such as solar and wind, and especially offshore wind, the Department of Energy strongly backs nuclear power development. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said earlier this month that DOE would 'work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology.' The funding and the support are lining up for developers of small advanced reactors. However start-ups will need much more financing to commercialize the various advanced nuclear technologies they are currently designing. The hope is that at some point in the 2030s, the world will have its first operational small modular reactor. Developers and backers also hope that SMRs will not suffer the fate of many conventional nuclear projects of recent years, which have seen huge cost overruns and have been years behind schedule.A lot of nuclear energy will be needed in the coming years as data center demand is soaring. Nuclear power will be one of the most important new energy infrastructure that the world will need to meet the electricity demand from AI, Goldman Sachs said in a report last month. 'But nuclear can't meet all of the increased data-center power needs. Natural gas, renewables, and battery technology will also have a role to play,' Goldman Sachs Research said. The Wall Street bank forecasts 85-90 GW of new nuclear capacity would be needed to meet all of the data center power demand growth expected by 2030, relative to 2023. But well less than 10% of this capacity will be available globally by 2030. That's why natural gas will stay in the mix, especially in the U.S., while battery storage capacity is also expected to surge to back up solar and wind power in unfavorable weather conditions, according to Goldman Sachs. By Tsvetana Paraskova for More Top Reads From this article on
