The Department of Energy will provide up to another $1 billion in public funding for the X-energy and Dow advanced reactor project at Seadrift, Texas, X-energy chief executive Clay Sell said on the company earnings call.
Total federal support for the project since 2021 rises to as much as $2.15 billion. The new money carries the same 50/50 cost-share requirement as the original award, so every federal dollar must be matched by private spending.
The funding flows through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which covers part of the cost of deploying small reactors through partnerships with United States industry. A spokesperson for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy confirmed both the award amount and the cost-share terms.
The project covers four Xe-100 small modular reactors producing 320 megawatts of electricity along with industrial steam at the Dow Seadrift Operations plant, a petrochemical and plastics site on the Texas coast. The reactors would replace aging power and steam units already running there.
Dow and X-energy submitted a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year, and the project has cleared an NRC environmental assessment milestone. The companies target the early 2030s for the start of operations.
Sell called the DOE grant the largest source of revenue for X-energy at its current stage of development. He said the installation is expected to become the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor deployed to serve an industrial site in North America.
Source: BIC Magazine - https://www.bicmagazine.com/industry/powergen/dow-x-energy-get-additional-billion-texas-nuclear-project/