TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight Natrium 345 MW Advanced Nuclear Plants

TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight 345 MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Plants

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TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight 345 MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Plants

TerraPower, a nuclear innovation company, and Meta, which owns and operated multiple social media platforms, announced an agreement to develop up to eight Natrium reactor one and energy storage system plants.

This agreement supports the early development activities for two new Natrium units with rights for energy provided to Meta for up to six additional Natrium units. Each Natrium reactor provides 345 MW of baseload power, with built-in energy storage that can ramp up to 500 MW for over five hours. A dual Natrium reactor site can provide 690 MW of reliable 24/7 365  power, and up to 1 GW of dispatchable electricity. Each site selected by Meta is expect to host twin Natirum reactors for a total of 690 MW at each site.

Under this commercial agreement, Meta will provide funding to support the deployment of the Natrium plants, with delivery of initial units as early as 2032. This is Meta’s largest support of advanced nuclear technologies to date and is the firm’s first direct investment in a new nuclear build. It is expected that many of the data center sites selected to be powered by the TerraPower reactors will by hyperscalers supporting Meta’s customers using the platform’s artificial intelligence products and capabilities.

At a hypothetical cost of $6,000/kW, each Natrium reactor will cost about $2.1 billion and eight of them would require about $17 billion.

The size of the deal supports significant economies of scale for TerraPower’s supply chains as well as for the manufacturing of the reactors.

Power Will Support Meta Data Centers

Each reactor site will provide power for Meta’s data centers. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads. According to official Meta statistics, the combined user community world-wide is 3.9 billion users a month.

The companies will target identification of a specific site for the initial dual reactor unit later this year. The press materials did not indicate whether all sites would be limited to the U.S. Also, it was not indicated whether Meta would connect these sites to local/regional grids or select some or all of them as private wire installations for its data centers which would by pass the current multi-year backlog of FERC approvals of new grid connections.

The eight 345 MW advanced sodium cooled reactors would provide Meta with up to 2.8 GW of carbon-free, baseload energy. Each reactor comes with the Natrium technology’s innovative built-in energy storage system providing the capacity to boost total output to 4 GW of power.

Chris Levesque, TerraPower president and CEO said, “With our first Natrium plant under development, we have completed our design, established our supply chain, and cleared key regulatory milestones. These successes mean our TerraPower team is well-positioned to deliver on this historic multi-unit delivery agreement.”

Urvi Parekh, director of global energy, Meta, said, “This agreement with TerraPower, the result of Meta’s nuclear RFP process, which identified leading developers of nuclear energy to help us advance our energy goals, marks a significant step forward in advancing next-generation nuclear technology. Supporting new nuclear energy generation spurs job growth, drives innovation in our local communities, and reinforces America’s leadership in energy technology.”

TerraPower began construction on the first commercial-scale, advanced nuclear project in the United States, which is expected to be complete in 2030. The Natrium plant is the only commercial advanced nuclear technology with a complete environmental impact statement and final safety review as part of a construction permit application pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Betting on HALEU Fuel – Summary of TerraPower’s Nuclear Supply Chain

Meta and TerraPower are betting that sufficient supplies of HALEU uranium metal fuel will be available to fuel the reactors by the early 2030s. In October 2022 Global Nuclear Fuel–Americas (GNF-A), a GE-led joint venture, and TerraPower announced an agreement to build the Natrium Fuel Facility at the site of GNF-A’s existing plant site near Wilmington, NC.

In October 2024 TerraPower announced it executed a term sheet with ASP Isotopes Inc. to expand global production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The agreement is the first step towards a two-fold definitive agreement; TerraPower plans to invest in the construction of a HALEU enrichment facility in South Africa, and TerraPower would purchase HALEU from the facility. This serves as one of many investments TerraPower has made to secure access to the fuel for the Natrium reactor and energy storage system being developed in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

TerraPower has also made multiple strategic agreements and investments to help spur domestic production capabilities in the United States and ensure a robust and competitive front end of the nuclear fuel cycle. These include MOUs and agreements with Centrus for HALEU commercialization, Framatome to develop a HALEU metallization plant and Uranium Energy Corporation to explore the use of Wyoming uranium as a potential fuel source for Natrium plants.

Enrichment: ASP Isotopes / Centrus Energy – Producing HALEU UF6 gas and enrichment services.

Metallization: Framatome (Richland, WA) – Converting uranium gas/oxide into the metallic pucks required for the fuel pins.

Fabrication: Global Nuclear Fuel (Wilmington, NC) – Final assembly of the metallic fuel pins into fuel bundles.

Once enriched, Natrium’s fuel will be fabricated at the Natrium Fuel Facility in Wilmington, North Carolina , which is under development at the Global Nuclear Fuel–Americas site through a significant investment by TerraPower and the United States Department of Energy (DOE). TerraPower also remains an active member and participant of DOE’s HALEU Consortium.

TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear reactor, a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor, will require approximately 15 to 20 metric tonnes of High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) metal fuel for its first core load. Once operational, the reactor is projected to require roughly 3.6 metric tonnes of HALEU per year for refueling.

The Natrium Fuel Facility will be jointly funded by TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which aims to speed the demonstration of advanced reactors through cost-shared partnerships with U.S. industry. The facility represents an investment of more than $200 million.

The process, technologies, and expertise used to produce metal from depleted uranium can be used with uranium at the higher enrichment levels required to power TerraPower’s advanced reactor design. Production of HALEU metal is a crucial part of the fuel fabrication process which allows uranium to transform into a metallic feedstock that is used to fabricate fuel for advanced reactors.

Success in Uranium Metallization

In November 2025 Framatome and TerraPower achieved a key milestone in uranium metallization for advanced reactor fuel commercialization, producing successful elements of uranium metal. These metallic uranium ‘pucks’ represent a critical component in advancing the fuel supply chain for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor. The metallization fabrication line was completed at Framatome’s Richland, Washington, nuclear fuel manufacturing facility.

The input feed stock form is metallic fuel with sodium bonding up to 19.75% enriched feed material.  Metallic fuel fabrication – Feed material cast with melted zirconium to form a slug, processed into a rod up to 19.75% enriched fuel rods. Each Natrium reactor requires refueling outages every 24 months. The outages can be scheduled to occur staggered with two refueling outages every second year and one refueling outage between. For two unit sites, one unit can be operating while another is being refueled. (TerraPower briefing on fuel for the Natrium reactor – PDF file)

Big Tech Rivals Also Looking To Nuclear Power

(NucNet) Meta’s big tech rivals are also looking to nuclear power to help fuel their AI work.

Meta, Amazon and Google signed a pledge in March supporting the tripling of global nuclear energy production by 2050. All three companies have signed deals related to the development and use of nuclear power.

In June, Meta announced a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy so it could purchase purchase nuclear power from the company’s Clinton nuclear power station in Illinois beginning in 2027.

In 2024 Google said it will back the construction of seven SMRs from Kairos Power, becoming the first tech company to commission new nuclear power plants to provide low-carbon electricity for its energy-hungry data centres. Google has also agreed with electric utility NextEra to support the restart of the Duane Arnold nuclear power station in Iowa.

Microsoft announced that it would commit to buying 20 years’ supply of electricity from the mothballed Three Mile Island nuclear power plant – now renamed Crane – if Constellation restarted one of the two plants at the Pennsylvania site.

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online retail giant founded by Jeff Bezos, acquired US power producer Talen Energy’s Cumulus data centre campus at the Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.

In October Amazon unveiled updated plans for an SMR facility in Washington that have 12 reactors producing a maximum of 960 MW of electricity.

The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility will be constructed in three phases, each with four of X-energy’s 80-MW, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors.

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DOE Awards $2.7 Billion for Uranium Enrichment

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $2.7 billion to strengthen domestic enrichment services over the next ten years. The historic investment expands U.S. capacity for low-enriched uranium (LEU) and jumpstarts new supply chains and innovations for high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) to create American jobs and usher in the nation’s nuclear renaissance.

Enrichment Task Orders

Last year, DOE signed contracts with a total of six companies for LEU and HALEU enrichment that allowed them to bid on future work. Today, the Department announced task order awards with three companies that will transition the United States away from foreign sources of uranium and diversify the nation’s domestic fuel supply.