Washington is putting real money behind advanced nuclear.
The US Department of Energy is gearing up to hand X-energy another $1 billion for its planned nuclear project with Dow in Texas, bringing total federal funding available for the project since 2021 to as much as $2.15 billion.
That is no longer demonstration-project pocket change.
CEO Clay Sell said Thursday that DOE had informed X-energy of the additional funding through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is intended to move next-generation reactors toward commercial deployment.
The new money comes with the same 50/50 cost-share requirement as the original award, meaning federal funding must be matched with private spending. Sell said the DOE grant is currently X-energy’s largest source of revenue.
The money is going toward something more ambitious than another reactor prototype.
X-energy and Dow plan to deploy the technology at Dow’s Seadrift petrochemical and plastics complex in Texas, where the reactors would replace existing energy and steam units and provide both electricity and industrial steam.
Sell said it is expected to become the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor deployed to serve an industrial site in North America.
Dow and X-energy submitted their construction permit application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year and are targeting operation in the early 2030s.
The size of the federal commitment also puts a harder number on Washington’s effort to push advanced reactors from promising technology into actual infrastructure. Up to $2.15 billion in public funding is now available for this project alone, with private participants required to put up matching capital.
That makes Seadrift more than a test of X-energy’s reactor design. It is also a test of whether billions of dollars in federal cost-sharing can get a new nuclear technology through licensing, construction and into commercial operation.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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