Four Xe-100 reactors cleared for construction at a Texas Dow site

The NRC approved a construction permit for four X-energy Xe-100 reactors at a Dow plant in Texas, though power is not expected before the early 2030s.

X-energy announced on Monday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a construction permit application covering four Xe-100 reactors. They would be its first commercial units, sited at a Dow chemical plant in Texas. X-energy describes it as the first approval for an advanced nuclear reactor at an industrial site in the U.S.

Each Xe-100 is rated at 80 megawatts of electricity and 200 megawatts of heat. The design passes helium gas over uranium-containing fuel pellets. No small modular reactor currently operates in the U.S., so this permit moves the technology from paper toward construction. By X-energy's own account, the Dow reactors will not be operational until the early 2030s.

For energy abundance, the significance is the step itself. Firm, carbon-free power only gets cheaper if designs like this are actually built, and a construction permit is a concrete milestone on that path. Money is behind it: Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund led a $500 million Series C-1 round, Amazon has committed to buy 5 gigawatts of capacity, and an April IPO raised $1 billion.

The caveats are real. The cost and speed advantages of small modular reactors are not yet proven, and the first units are likely to be expensive. Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the NRC deferred critical safety questions to a later date instead of resolving them before approving construction, and the group questions X-energy's claim that its design is safer than many existing reactors. Investors are cautious too: shares trade at less than half the IPO price, and the permit news only recouped the prior week's losses. Watch for construction progress and what the first build actually costs.

Source: TechCrunch