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The story
On October 19, 2026, Amazon announced it is considering building 12 small modular reactors (SMRs) in Indiana, USA. Working with reactor developer X-energy and utility American Electric Power (AEP), the plan targets a combined output of 960,000 kW to power the local grid and data centers in the region. On 5ch, a thread lit up with jokes about where such a reactor would go if built in Japan (“Tokyo or Osaka?”), concerns over uranium supply and safety, and surprised comments like “Wait, isn’t Amazon supposed to be just an online bookstore? Now it’s building nuclear plants?”
On October 19, Amazon announced it is considering building 12 small modular reactors (SMRs) in Indiana, USA.
Working with reactor developer X-energy and utility American Electric Power (AEP),
the plan targets a combined output of 960,000 kW (960 MW). The electricity generated would supply the local power grid and Amazon’s data centers.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Tokyo uses a ton of power, so it'd make more sense to build it there
Maybe right next door to your house would be best
Osaka needs it since it's actively courting data centers
All-out push to attract data centers: Osaka forms a public-private group, backs NTT's new facility permits
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF09C150Z01C26A0000000/
1.21 jigowatts (a pun on the famous 'Back to the Future' mistranslation of gigawatt as 'jigowatt')
Well, food uses kilocalories as the everyday unit too
so it makes sense that kilowatts are the standard everyday unit for electricity too
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/f3/93/33f393ada3ba26c2e61f4d3d2ffb8a28.jpg
Amazon needs it
These are small modular reactors (SMRs), so output per unit is lower than a conventional reactor.
The advantage of going smaller is a larger surface-area-to-volume ratio for heat dissipation, which even allows air cooling in emergencies.
Odaiba would be perfect — the Museum of Maritime Science is gone, the hot spring's gone, and so are the Gundam statue, Venus Fort, the Ferris wheel, and the Toyota showroom
There used to be an experimental reactor in Saitama's Shintoshin district
Yokosuka already has one — or rather, lives with one — so it's a bit late to ask now
Apparently shellfish and other stuff end up sticking to them, making maintenance a pain
It's news precisely because approval looks likely
Even then, there'll probably still be anti-fusion-power activists
So the fusion power from SimCity is becoming reality?
What about microwave power transmission?
They're safe, and there's no transmission loss
At least keep it to the Tokyo Bay waterfront
Seriously, I'd want one right in front of the Prime Minister's office
But can uranium reserves actually keep up with supply?
There's a uranium mine out in some rundown Canadian backwater — population was like single digits, I think
I recall hearing it's about a 150-year supply.
Uranium's also dissolved in seawater, and once extraction from that becomes viable,
supply concerns are supposed to go away entirely.
Wait, don't small reactors run on plutonium?
Thing is, this design doesn't have accidents
And now it's building nuclear power plants
The actual development is being done by another company though
Companies owning their own power plants is nothing new — there've been tons of them for ages
but the reason reactors got bigger in the first place
is that bigger is fundamentally more thermally efficient.
Uranium, the fuel for nuclear power, isn't actually that abundant a resource,
so isn't it a problem if small reactors become the trend?
It's costly, but you can also extract it from seawater
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Amid surging electricity demand from AI data centers, Amazon and other major US tech companies have increasingly turned to nuclear power to secure their energy supply. The SMR design at issue here is X-energy’s Xe-100, which uses TRISO fuel (high-assay low-enriched uranium) rather than plutonium. While the thread was full of jokes about where such a reactor might be sited, opinions split between concerns over uranium depletion and the view that seawater-extraction technology could offset it. It’s also worth noting that Amazon itself won’t own or develop the reactors — it will receive power through contracts with the utility and the reactor developer — a distinction that wasn’t fully appreciated in the thread.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “Amazon Considers Building 12 Small Reactors in US to Power Data Centers and More.”
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