TX-1 plant will provide fuel for company’s Xe-100 reactor
Maryland-based advanced reactor developer X-energy and its wholly-owned subsidiary Triso-X have chosen Ohio-based construction and engineering company Geiger Brothers to develop the site of a first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The facility, known as TX-1, will provide the fuel for the first and subsequent deployments of X-energy’s Xe-100 High-Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGR).
X-energy said the $40.8m (€39m) site development phase will create approximately 100 jobs and is projected to be completed in July 2025.
Joel Duling, president of Triso-X, which is X-energy’s advanced nuclear fuel fabrication and development subsidiary, said the planned facility will manufacture fuel for a global fleet of advanced reactors.
Retail giant Amazon said in October it was buying a stake in X-energy as part of a collaboration aimed at deploying advanced reactors to provide low-carbon electricity to power its data centres.
X-energy said Amazon had agreed to anchor a $500m fundraising, which would help X-energy finance the development and licensing of its new generation of small modular reactors.
Earlier this year, X-energy was awarded a $148.5m federal tax credit for construction of the fuel fabrication facility.
X-energy is developing its initial Xe-100 plant at US chemicals company Dow’s UCC Seadrift manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The company said the project will be the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor deployed to serve an industrial site in North America.
The Xe-100 is a Generation IV HTGR. Each reactor is engineered to operate as a single 80 MW unit and can be optimised as a four-unit plant delivering 320 MW. It can provide baseload power to an electricity system or support industrial applications with 200 MW thermal output per unit of high pressure, high temperature steam.
