Round up: Google and Kairos; Amazon and X-energy; China making glass; more

Internet search giant Google signed an agreement to purchase electricity from future small modular reactors made by Kairos Power, the company announced this week in a statement posted online.

“The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids,” reads Google’s statement.

Amazon also this week signed agreements that could lead to development of small modular reactors to power some of its data facilities, the company said Wednesday in its own statement. 

The “agreement with Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, will enable the development of four advanced [small modular reactors],” the company wrote in the statement. “The reactors will be constructed, owned and operated by Energy Northwest, and are expected to generate roughly 320 megawatts (MW) of capacity for the first phase of the project, with the option to increase to 960 MW.”

The company also announced it had made an investment, of undisclosed scale, in X-energy, a developer of small modular reactors. X-energy’s reactors would be used in the Energy Northwest project, Amazon wrote in its statement.

Karl Thedéen this week replaced Camilla Hoflund as president and CEO of Studsvik AB, the Nyköping, Sweden-based nuclear-power-services company announced Wednesday in a press release.

Thedéen was most recently CEO Outpost24, a Swedish cybersecurity company. He had held the post since April 2021, according to Outpost24’s website. Thedéen was brought aboard at Studsvik as part of a larger movement to grow the company, including by acquisition, according to Wednesday’s release.

China’s state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation said this week it started turning high-level radioactive waste into a glass-like solid in September in Guangyuan, a city in Southwest China’s Sichuan province.

The project was approved in 2004 and “designed through collaboration between China and Germany,” according to a post on the state-owned corporation’s English-language website.

Orano said it was added to the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s Disposability Assurance Support Framework, a contract the state-owned corporation uses to gather input about program management for a design of a future deep geologic disposal facility. 

The contract is worth up to £7 million over four years, Orano said in a press release.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September told conservative activist and author Roman Jankowski, working for the Daily Signal, that it had no records that matched any of the 100 Freedom of Information Act requests seeking correspondence from NRC officials that included the terms “Biden” and “25th” or “parkinsons” or “dementia.”

Jankowski and others have been part of a Freedom of Information Act Deluge reported on ProPublica. The NRC this week posted its response to Jankowski’s requests on the agency’s online public records repository.