Amazon wants nuclear reactors to power its Eastern Oregon data centers. Here’s why

By ANTONIA SIERRA/Oregon Public Broadcasting

Amazon is betting heavily on nuclear energy.

In October, the e-commerce and tech giant announced it was investing in nuclear technology to sustain its growing data business, Amazon Web Services. The corporation’s effort includes a project in the Tri-Cities region of southeast Washington, but its intended target is its extensive operations in Eastern Oregon.

Amazon has spent more than a decade dotting Morrow and Umatilla counties’ landscape with data centers, large warehouses filled with servers that power the modern internet.

But data centers require an immense amount of energy to operate, a need that’s only expected to grow as Amazon and other tech companies invest in data-hungry artificial intelligence. And Amazon is trying to grow this business as it continues to pursue its stated goal of generating net zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Amazon thinks it can meet both of those mandates by sourcing energy from small modular reactors, or SMRs. Advocates and energy experts say these small-scale nuclear reactors can reliably deliver carbon-free power with a fraction of the pollution and meltdown risk of the large reactors most people associate with nuclear.

But the role over nuclear energy in Oregon and the Northwest is a decades-long debate. Here’s an overview of what SMRs are and how they may fit into the region’s energy future.

What is an SMR?

The energy industry has spent years trying to find a way to make nuclear reactors smaller.

Greg Cullen is the vice president of energy services and development at Energy Northwest, a Richland, Washington, company that agreed to partner with Amazon to develop SMRs for Eastern Oregon data centers. Cullen said Energy Northwest, a joint operating agency composed of dozens of publicly owned utilities, was already interested in expanding its nuclear energy output on top of the nuclear power plant it already operates in Richland, Washington, when Amazon reached out.

The appeal of SMRs is that they could provide a great amount of energy capacity without the climate warming effects of fossil fuels.

While a traditional nuclear reactor has 1,000 megawatts of power capacity, Cullen said SMRs produce about 50 to 300 megawatts. That still represents a massive increase in capacity compared to other popular forms of green energy. The average wind turbine produces less than 3 megawatts of power and it takes about 10 acres worth of solar panels to produce 1 megawatt.

While there are many different types of SMRs, Amazon is specifically interested in the model being developed by X-energy. Cullen said the Maryland company’s reactor is fueled by uranium encased in layers of carbon graphite material. The resulting cue ball-sized shield protects the uranium from becoming overheated in a facility about one-tenth the size of a standard nuclear reactor.

“All those layers cannot melt at any temperatures these reactors can achieve,” he said. “What that means is you’ve eliminated the fuel melt concern with nuclear power. You’ve eliminated the ability for the fuel to melt and to release radio nuclei out into the environment.”

SMR safety tests are still ongoing, but a Korean study states that the increased safety SMRs offer is a matter of physics: the smaller the size, the less likely it is to overheat. Some of the world’s most prominent nuclear disasters – Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 – happened because a reactor’s cooling system stopped working or was overwhelmed.

Trevor Kent Howard, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at Oregon State University, said SMRs also have economic advantages compared to traditional nuclear reactors.

“They’re large, they’re big, they’re expensive,” he said. “Those who can invest in a large reactor tend to have a lot of capital. You have to be a much larger, better established energy company in order to build a nuclear reactor of that size.”

Building a standard nuclear power plant can cost billions of dollars. SMRs are supposed to cut down on development and construction costs by using smaller, modular parts that can be manufactured offsite.

But this idea hasn’t been borne out yet. There are two active SMR models in Russia and China, but a German review of the reactors concluded that the projects were weighed down by cost overruns and “mediocre power-generation performance.”

Why is Amazon interested?

In short, Amazon and other tech companies will need a lot of energy to keep their data businesses going.

Kevin Miller, the vice president of global data centers for Amazon Web Services, said the company has already invested heavily in Eastern Oregon and intends to expand further.

The International Energy Agency anticipates that global data center energy consumption will double from 2022 to 2026, driven in part by AI. While Eastern Oregon’s data center boom is driven in part by access to the hydroelectric power supplied by the Columbia River, Cullen said the supply is starting to tap out.

Howard, the OSU professor, said Amazon could invest in a natural gas plant if it wants access to cheap energy. But if it wants to maintain its carbon emission goals, nuclear energy would be the best source of reliable power.

Cullen said the hope is that Energy Northwest can build additional SMRs to further increase capacity. The Amazon agreement could lead to a dozen SMRs in Richland, he said, providing power not only to the data centers but to residential customers across the region.

SMRs in Oregon

There’s a good reason Amazon is planning to source its nuclear energy north of the Columbia River.

In 1980, Oregon voters prohibited the construction of new nuclear reactors until the federal government developed a nuclear waste site. With no site in existence more than four decades later, new nuclear reactors are effectively banned within the state.

Anti-nuclear energy activists have not dropped their opposition even with the rise in interest for SMRs. They maintain that the financial, environmental and safety issues related to traditional reactors are still present with SMRs.

They also point to the Hanford Site as an example of the perils of nuclear pollution. Hanford, which isn’t too far from Energy Northwest’s facilities in Richland, was a one-time plutonium production facility used to build nuclear weapons that went on to become the most nuclear polluted area in the Western Hemisphere. The federal government expects the clean up effort to last several more decades.

Howard described the nuclear reactors of Hanford and SMRs as “night and day,” with the former being an “unregulated” plutonium production facility for use in nuclear weapons during World War II and the Cold War, and the latter being subject to the highly regulated world of modern day nuclear energy.

Energy Northwest already operates a nuclear power plant and Cullen said there are misconceptions about the nature of nuclear waste.

“Despite what you might have seen in ‘The Simpsons,’ it is never a green goo in 55-gallon drums that glow,” he said. “It is always in a solid form.”

Cullen said Energy Northwest’s nuclear waste is stored in casks strong enough to withstand an earthquake or plane crash. Howard said only 5% of nuclear waste – spent fuel rods and assemblies – can’t be recycled or reused, a strong percentage compared to other forms of energy.

Howard said nuclear energy produces much less waste compared to a fossil fuel like coal, and may be even less wasteful than other forms of carbon-free energy. Cullen said Energy Northwest owns solar panels and batteries that are nearing the end of their lifespans but can’t be recycled.

Nuclear energy is also a rare source of bipartisan consensus. President Joe Biden recently unveiled a plan to triple the country’s nuclear energy capacity and President-elect Donald Trump has signaled that he’s open to further nuclear expansion.

State Rep. Bobby Levy, R-Echo, represents a district neighboring the Amazon data centers. She said she supports nuclear power because of its reliability and stability. She previously sponsored a bill that would have had Oregon voters revisit the ballot measure banning nuclear facilities.

She’s also the chief sponsor on a bill that would back a Umatilla County commission effort to start an SMR pilot program there.

Eastern Oregon data centers

SMR supporters are bullish on the reactors’ ability to produce large amounts of carbon-free energy with affordable construction costs.

What’s less certain is when this technology will actually go on line. There are no active SMRs in the U.S.

Tech companies aren’t letting this uncertainty stop them from embracing nuclear energy. In addition to their project with Energy Northwest, Amazon is looking to install SMRs in Virginia and is a part of a group that’s investing $500 million in X-energy to develop its SMR technology. Decades after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island helped inspire Oregon’s ban on nuclear facilities, Microsoft announced this year it wanted to revive the plant to supply the tech giant’s data centers.

Energy Northwest has a two-year agreement with Amazon to conduct feasibility studies, environmental reviews and other planning activities, Cullen said. An optimistic SMR construction timeline would include an estimated completion date somewhere in the range of 2032-2035, he added. If the initial SMRs prove successful, Cullen said Amazon has agreed to share the energy from additional nuclear expansion with local utilities.

But Amazon and tech companies are trying to sell AI products today, a trend that could put pressure on utility prices for Oregon customers who are already seeing dramatic rises in their electric bills, as residents compete with tech giants for a limited amount of power. Miller, the Amazon executive, said the company is “cautiously optimistic” that it can start drawing power from SMRs in the 2030s, but said it’s aware of its potential effect on utility prices.

“We’re very focused on taking a look holistically at the energy grid and making sure that extensions of that grid for our stake are ones that we’re paying for, that we’re not compromising the availability of power on the grid,” he said. “That’s going to continue to be the way we operate.”

While an estimated time of arrival for SMRs is still a moving target, Howard said he expects them to start becoming big players in the energy sector sooner rather than later.