On Dec 30, 2024, at 6:24 PM, Sara Barczak wrote:
Thanks to Tom Corlett for his original post. Very long article with lots of info (and hype per usual), but worth a full read. HALEU mentioned as well, the ADVANCE Act, and more...
Take care all,
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Another Big Data Center Win for Nuclear: Oklo and Switch Sign Historic 12 GW Deal
Sonal Patel Power Magazine
December 29, 2024
Advanced nuclear firm Oklo has partnered with Switch, a Las Vegas-based data center designer, builder, and operator, to deploy 12 GW of Aurora powerhouses through 2044 in a historic deal hailed as “one of the largest corporate clean power agreements ever signed.”
The two companies announced a groundbreaking Master Power Agreement on Dec. 18 to establish a framework for the collaboration. Under its terms, Oklo is set to develop, build, and operate powerhouses across the U.S. through a series of power purchase agreements (PPAs). While non-binding at this stage, the agreement envisions that individual binding agreements “will be finalized as project milestones are reached,” Oklo said.
A Historic 12 GW Deal For Nuclear
The deal marks yet another stunning milestone in the tech sector’s rapid shift toward clean energy. As POWER has reported, the tech industry is on a mission to secure reliable, round-the-clock power to fuel its rapidly growing operations while fulfilling ambitious sustainability goals. While data centers consumed 150 TWh of electricity in the U.S. and 340 TWh globally in 2023, projections indicate a dramatic surge by 2030, albeit at varying rates. However, the quest is compounded by urgency and the limited capacity of utilities to accommodate soaring demand. A recent EPRI survey suggests that the power industry is already grappling with the challenge of integrating large new loads from data centers.
Most corporate power agreements have so far prioritized renewables. In May, Microsoft secured a global renewable energy framework with asset manager Brookfield, targeting the development of over 10.5 GW of new renewable energy capacity by 2030. That agreement, which—before the Oklo-Switch deal—was nearly eight times larger than the largest single corporate PPA ever signed, seeks to decarbonize Microsoft’s cloud operations through a mix of wind, solar, and emerging carbon-free energy technologies.
Interest in advanced nuclear power as a potential future resource to power artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and data centers has surged significantly over the past few months, cemented by a series of groundbreaking commitments between the two sectors. Tech giants cite an assortment of drivers for the preference, even though advanced nuclear remains in developmental stages. For companies like Google, advanced nuclear promises to allay the dual pressures of surging energy demands and decarbonization goals, but it also offers scalability with modular designs and simplified construction, smaller footprints, and inherent safety features. The approach could reduce timelines, increase flexibility in deployment locations, and improve the predictability of project delivery.
In September 2024, Microsoft and Constellation Energy committed $1.6 billion to restart the Unit 1 reactor of the shuttered Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania by 2028, now known as the Crane Clean Energy Center. Then, in October, Google signed a Master Plant Development Agreement to facilitate the development of a 500-MW fleet of Kairos Power molten salt nuclear reactors by 2035 to power Google’s data centers.
That same week, Amazon said it would back the deployment of 5 GW of new X-energy small modular reactors projects, starting with an initial four-unit 320-MWe Xe-100 plant with regional utility Energy Northwest in central Washington. It also signed an agreement with Dominion Energy to explore a 300-MW SMR near Virginia’s North Anna Power Station to fulfill soaring power needs projected from Northern Virginia’s so-called “Data Center Alley,” which is already the world’s largest data center market.
Earlier this month, Meta announced plans to release a request for proposals (RFP) targeting 1 GW to 4 GW of new nuclear generation capacity in the U.S. by the early 2030s. “We believe working with partners who will ultimately permit, design, engineer, finance, construct, and operate these power plants will ensure the long-term thinking necessary to accelerate nuclear technology,” the company said.
Switch, a prominent data center developer founded in 2000 by CEO Rob Roy, operates several large-scale data center campuses across the U.S., including in Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia. The company, which specializes in cutting-edge, energy-efficient data center design, says it has powered its operations with 100% renewable energy since 2016, consuming nearly 1 TWh annually.
“The relationship with Oklo underscores our commitment to deploying advanced nuclear power at a transformative scale for our data centers, further enhancing our offerings of one of the world’s most advanced data center infrastructures to current and future Switch clients,” said Switch Founder and CEO Roy on Wednesday.“By utilizing Oklo’s powerhouses, we aim to ensure that Switch remains the leader in data center sustainability while supporting our vision of energy abundance.”
A Giant New Prospect for Oklo
For Oklo, the deal marks a monumental opportunity to solidify its leadership in the burgeoning advanced nuclear landscape. While the company continues to mature its liquid metal-cooled fast nuclear reactor technology—with intent to begin operation of the first powerhouse in Idaho in 2027—it is notably pursuing a “full value chain” approach. A key facet involves managing the design, build, and operation of smaller reactors through PPAs—essentially allowing Oklo to maintain greater control over costs and risk management.
“This Master Agreement highlights Oklo’s business model of simplifying clean energy access by selling power, not power plants,” the company said. “It offers customers a direct, flexible pathway to clean, reliable, and affordable advanced nuclear energy.”
Oklo’s Aurora Powerhouse is a vertically oriented compact passive fast-spectrum reactor derived from the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) that uses liquid metal as a coolant. The company recently uprated its design’s capacity offerings to 15 MWe and 100 MWe. The compact fast reactor uses a high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) metallic uranium-zirconium fuel enriched to about 19%. Courtesy: Oklo
Oklo says it already currently holds a customer pipeline of 2.1 GW, bolstered by a series of agreements across diverse sectors. Past partnerships include a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to supply electricity from its planned Aurora powerhouses in Southern Ohio and a non-binding Letter of Intent (LOI) with Diamondback Energy to provide 50 MW over a 20-year PPA for operations in the Permian Basin. Oklo was also selected by the Defense Logistics Agency Energy to site a microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, pending final procedural adjustments.
Under recent deals, Oklo has partnered with Equinix through a $25 million pre-payment for a 20-year PPA to deliver up to 500 MW of clean energy for its data centers. The company also has a non-binding LOI with Prometheus Hyperscale to supply 100 MW for a cutting-edge data center campus over two decades. In November, meanwhile, the company said it signed LOIs with two (unnamed) major data center providers for up to 750 MW.
Its new 12-GW multi-decade partnership with Switch represents a transformative leap—and distinctively dwarfs previous deals—in terms of potential market impact. “This enduring relationship over several decades will help accelerate Oklo’s early powerhouse deployments and also position the Company to scale in response to a growing demand pipeline,” Oklo noted on Wednesday. “This Master Agreement enables Oklo to leverage Switch’s best-in-class execution while developing the financial and infrastructure model for scaling advanced nuclear.”
Scaling Up: Overcoming Fuel and Licensing Hurdles
Still, like others in the advanced nuclear industry, Oklo still faces challenges before it can scale its technology to meet growing energy demands. Its hurdles hover over two key issues—fuel and licensing.
Aurora powerhouses will require high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU), a material with a limited commercial supply chain in the U.S. To fuel its first 15-MWe commercial plant, slated to deploy in 2027 at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), it is developing the Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility (AFFF), a facility collocated at INL, that will fabricate fuel using HALEU awarded through a cooperative agreement with INL. The facility in October garnered the DOE’s approval of its Conceptual Safety Design Report (CSDR). And while Oklo already also has a partnership with Centrus Energy, which is demonstrating HALEU production, its future plans involve building a commercial-scale fuel recycling facility.
“We are uniquely positioned here since only fast reactors can take recycled fuel and fresh HALEU,” Oklo recently told POWER. “The scalability of advanced fuel recycling is central to our strategy. We recently completed the first end-to-end demonstration of the key stages of our advanced fuel recycling process in collaboration with Argonne and INL. This success represents a critical step toward scaling our recycling capabilities and deploying a commercial facility capable of increasing advanced reactor fuel supplies. Our approach not only enhances fuel cost effectiveness but also contributes to long-term sustainability by diversifying fuel sources,” it said.
On the licensing front, Oklo has notably championed regulatory movement. It submitted the first-ever combined license application (COLA) to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an advanced non-light water reactor (LWR) in March 2020 (for its 15-MWe INL facility). Though the NRC denied that application in January 2022, the company has continued its extensive engagement with NRC staff. It expects to submit a new COLA—“a model for future applications” to the NRC in 2025. Subsequent COLAs could follow soon, in late 2025 and early 2026.
This time around, the company may have the benefit of the 2024 ADVANCE Act, which introduces key provisions that could expedite the process, including fee reductions—potentially cutting Oklo’s hourly licensing costs by more than 50%—and faster NRC reviews for reactors with unique safety features, like Oklo’s design. In addition, the company is “well-positioned to receive regulatory awards [outlined in the ADVANCE ACT] that would make licensing early plants essentially free,” it has noted.
According to Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo, the company’s historic agreement with Switch only adds more impetus to its prospects. “Rob Roy and the Switch team share the vision we have for nuclear energy’s role in powering artificial intelligence and providing the world with energy abundance,” he noted on Wednesday. Oklo, he said, expects “to benefit enormously from Switch’s record of turning visions into reality.”
The agreement’s multi-decade timeline provides a unique opportunity for Oklo to refine and expand its offerings over time, he noted. “The lifespan of this Master Agreement will allow us to iterate and evolve with Switch, from development to deployment to scaling. We believe that working with Switch will not only accelerate our early powerhouses but also accelerate our ability to scale by demonstrating customer demand for decades to come.”
—Sonal Patel is a POWER senior editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine)
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