A former coal plant on the banks of Indiana’s Wabash River could one day hold a dozen nuclear reactors. On October 19, Amazon, the utility American Electric Power (AEP), and reactor designer X-energy announced an agreement to develop 12 small modular reactors at the old Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County. Amazon is bankrolling the development work, and it would be first in line to buy the electricity.
Don’t expect shovels in the dirt just yet, however. The companies haven’t made a final investment decision, and nobody has put a price tag or a construction date on the project. AEP’s chief executive told investors on October 28 that the deal covers only development and feasibility work and that the decision could come in 2030 at the earliest.
If it does happen, the site near Fairbanks, on the river’s east bank, would host X-energy’s Xe-100. It’s a high-temperature gas reactor that uses helium as its coolant, and each unit is rated at 80 megawatts. The plans group the 12 reactors into three blocks of four, for a combined 960 megawatts. That’s just shy of a full gigawatt.
Amazon would then sign a long-term power purchase agreement (basically a promise to buy the plant’s output) that covers the plant’s costs. According to the company’s announcement, that power “would serve both the regional power grid and Amazon’s data centers.” The same announcement mentions more than 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent ones.
“Together, we’re looking to develop nearly a gigawatt of carbon-free power for the regional grid and pay our full costs without passing them to others,” said Josh Weissman, Amazon’s vice president for data center infrastructure capacity delivery.
AEP owned the Breed plant through its subsidiary Indiana Michigan Power. Bill Fehrman, the utility’s chairman, president and CEO, said that “advanced nuclear energy has the potential to provide dependable power for over half a century.” X-energy CEO J Clay Sell pitched the reactors as a solution “to meet growing energy demand and benefit Indiana and its communities for generations to come,” as World Nuclear News reported.
Sell’s point about demand isn’t just sales talk. Citing a decision by Indiana’s utility regulators, Utility Dive reports that Indiana Michigan Power expects its peak demand in the state to jump from 2,800 megawatts to more than 7,000 by 2030. That’s more than double, and new large customers such as data centers are the big reason why.
Indiana is also the second project for the Amazon and X-energy partnership, which is aiming for more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the U.S. by 2039. A plant of the same size, called Cascade, is already planned in Washington state.
There’s plenty of fine print, though. No reactor of this type is operating anywhere in the U.S. X-energy’s first Xe-100 project, four reactors at Dow’s Seadrift site in Texas, hasn’t broken ground yet. As TechCrunch points out, its construction permit is still in the final phases of review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So far, one of the furthest any similar effort has gotten in the country is the Tennessee Valley Authority’s permit for the first U.S. commercial small modular reactor at Clinch River.
Fehrman also said the agreements with Amazon and X-energy give AEP “all necessary capital protections and financial safeguards,” which the utility has said are essential for any nuclear project to move forward.
In Sullivan County, where AEP already owns about 7,500 acres (some 3,035 hectares), the news has landed with excitement and a little surprise among local officials.
“It’s going to change the face of Sullivan County in many ways, physically as you look at it,” Robert Davis, president of the county commissioners, told the local station WTWO.
Davis also ran through what he sees as the county’s advantages, from the major power lines that cross it to landowners who have been willing to sell, and he added one more: “we don’t have any zoning.”
