An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors. The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it's three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago. Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039. Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers. The companies' aggressive timeline still depends on X-energy successfully delivering its first power plant at a Dow Chemical plant southeast of Houston, Texas. The site, called Seadrift, has recently been at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations and permits. X-energy has yet to break ground at Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors to provide the chemical plant with heat and electricity. The company said its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review process.

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America is "making an unprecedented attempt to revive three shuttered nuclear plants to meet rising energy demand," reports the Los Angeles Times, "Two of the plants have contracts with Big Tech companies that will pay a premium to get large amounts of carbon-free energy for data centers..." No commercial nuclear reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after beginning the decommissioning process that takes one out of service, though some reactors have restarted after long outages. The Department of Energy is lending as much as $4.4 billion to restart the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa to restore a combined 2.25 gigawatts of electricity, which can power roughly 2 million homes and businesses. All three of the plants closed before their licenses expired, largely because the electricity they produced was considered too expensive... Restarting a reactor is a fairly quick way to get a lot of electricity, and it's cheaper than building a new, large reactor, said nuclear engineering expert Todd Allen... Edwin Lyman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the taxpayer money being used should go toward addressing safety risks. For example, most U.S. plants were built between 1970 and 1990 and were designed to withstand natural disasters of that era, said Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at UCS. But climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. "It's possible, if they set the right level of safety and spend the necessary funds to meet that, they could restore these plants to operable condition," he said. "That's not happening at this point...." NextEra Energy and Google are collaborating to restart Duane Arnold by early 2029... Microsoft has a contract with the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island just outside Harrisburg. The plant was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, leaving the plant with one functioning. In 2019, Constellation Energy's then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it. Constellation Energy announced in 2024 that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027... Palisades is expected to be the first nuclear plant in the world to resume generating power after beginning the decommissioning process.

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