X-energy picks Fluor for nuclear-island engineering at Energy Northwest's Cascade SMR project

X-energy said on 5 November 2026 that it has chosen Fluor to carry out design and engineering work on Energy Northwest's proposed Cascade Advanced Energy Facility near Richland, Washington, which would use Xe-100 small modular reactors.

Fluor will handle the nuclear island, the part of the plant that houses the reactors and their support systems, covering its engineering and design development, supply chain work, cost estimating and project controls. X-energy says this is the second commercial contract between the two companies for engineering and design of the nuclear island: Fluor is already doing that work on the first project X-energy has proposed for the Xe-100, in Texas, a project in the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. X-energy says it wants to carry lessons from one project to the next and lower cost and shorten schedules over the long term through standard designs and repeatable execution.

The progressive design-builder for Energy Northwest is Cascade Nuclear Partners, whose partners are Kiewit Nuclear Solutions, Black & Veatch and Aecon. X-energy says the joint venture handles the conventional island and coordinates requirements across the whole plant, with possible later phases of the project in mind.

X-energy describes the Xe-100 as a gas-cooled reactor of 80 MWe that runs at high temperature on TRISO-X fuel and is built as standard plants of four or twelve units. It says the design's inherent safety characteristics mean it needs far fewer safety-related systems than light-water reactors, so most of the plant outside the nuclear island can be built with standard commercial off-the-shelf parts from the wider industrial supply chain, and two partners can work on separate parts of the plant at the same time.

X-energy says Cascade is the first project under its collaboration with Amazon, which aims for 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity by 2039; a second, with American Electric Power in Indiana, was announced recently. X-energy puts its commercial pipeline at 11.5 GW, the equivalent of 144 Xe-100 units.