Awaiting NRC Approval, SMR Designer X-energy Starts Construction on Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Site Exteriors

A subsidiary of small modular reactor designer X-Energy, which has signed future supply deals with Dow Chemical and Amazon, has started above-ground construction on its advanced nuclear fuel fabrication facility with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

X-Energy Reactor Co. and wholly owned subsidiary TRISO-X are working to fabricate X-energy’s proprietary tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) fuel. This fuel would power X-energy’s proposed deployment of the Xe-100 reactor in partnership with the Dow on the Texas Gulf Coast.

In early 2025, X-energy announced a $48.2 million award to Clark Construction Group for the completion of the core and shell of the 214,812 sq ft facility. The initiation of building construction highlights the transition from site development to full-scale facility construction, which is expected to be completed by mid-2026.

TX-1 will be a Category II fuel fabrication facility licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the first new fuel facility in over 50 years, upon completion. TX-1 will provide enough fuel for up to 11 Xe-100 reactors with an estimated output of 5 metric tons of uranium (MTU) or 700,000 TRISO pebbles per year.

TRISO-X is working with the NRC on the license application review and hopes for regulatory approval by May 2026. X-energy already is doing qualification testing of the TRISO-X fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor.

X-energy is moving ahead with planning for its initial proposed four-unit Xe-100 plant at Dow’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast. The 320-MW SMR nuclear plant would replace an aging gas-fired generation site and produce carbon-free electricity for Dow’s operations at Seadrift.

The NRC is reviewing Dow’s application by power subsidiary Long Mott Energy LLC. Dow’s Long Mott-Seadrift project, once operational, could cut Seadrift’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 440,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, according to estimates.

X-energy’s Xe-100 design is a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor model driven by TRISO-X fuel. The plan for high-temperature steam and heat is designed for optimal industrial application.

X-energy is also working on its second plant, the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, with Energy Northwest in collaboration with Amazon. The project is part of a larger strategy with Amazon to bring more than 5 GW of new power projects online by 2039.

The U.S. has yet to build or operate an SMR nuclear site, but momentum is building around the need for sustainable and dependable baseload power to meet future data center, artificial intelligence modeling and industrial electrification growth. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Meta have announced agreements to procure conventional nuclear power capacity, while Google and others are signing future deals on eventual SMR plants.

Since no SMR projects have been built or completed in the U.S., the timeline for more is commercial operations by the early and mid-2030s. Anticipated demand by the AI and data center industries, meanwhile, may force the need for another 125 GW and more of added capacity by 2030.