Jankowski reported in mid-November 2025 that the CEO of X-energy said his company could be the first to energize a small modular reactor in the U.S.
Unit 2 reactor is seen at Luminant's Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant near
Glen Rose, Texas, Wednesday, March 23, 2011. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)
Tom Fox/Staff Photographer / THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
For Clay Sell, it is an exciting time. His company, X-energy, is making progress on possibly becoming the first to energize a small modular nuclear reactor in the U.S. The four planned reactors are set to power a Dow Chemical facility on the Texas coast. Sell’s company has a lot to boast about. At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Thursday, he ticked off what he sees as groundwork for his company to become a leader in the nuclear power industry, which has seen a surge of interest in recent years as political and regulatory forces have aligned behind nuclear power.
X-energy has raised $2 billion in capital. Amazon bought a 20% stake in the company in hopes of using it to power data centers, and the company is working through the federal regulatory process — sped up thanks to a Trump administration — to obtain approval to build reactors at the Dow Chemical site in Freeport.
“We have a lot of really important players that bought into our story that believe in us,” Sell said during the panel.
In Texas, enthusiasm about nuclear energy has exploded in the past three years. It enjoys bipartisan support at the Capitol and has a major cheerleader in Gov. Greg Abbott, who helped promote what became a $350 million grant program for nuclear power research and development.
X-energy has been at the forefront of the shift in attitudes toward nuclear power, playing a role in getting Abbott’s attention in 2023 on an industry that has atrophied in recent decades, said Reed Clay, a former Abbott staffer and head of the advocacy group Texas Nuclear Alliance. Now, the state is working to build a supply chain for nuclear power. For instance, the Texas A&M University System has created a nuclear proving ground at a campus in Bryan. Abilene Christian University is designing a research reactor on its campus with some funding from the state. Both are focused on small modular reactors.
The selling point behind smaller reactors is the promise of creating an industry that relies on an assembly line that builds reactors quickly and avoids the cost overruns and delays of large, legacy nuclear power plants.
Sell lives in Dallas but leads a company with major operations in Maryland and Tennessee. He said it is a foregone conclusion that a lot of nuclear power will be built in the U.S. Many energy experts view it as a national security imperative as the U.S. competes with foreign adversaries over dominance in developing power-hungry artificial intelligence.
But can Texas lead?
“How does Texas rise to the top? Same way it always does: an incredibly business-friendly environment, an incredibly rich and well-resourced talent base, people that want to live here, an educational system that produces great talent,” Sell said in an interview. “It’s the story that has been written about Texas for the last 25 years.”
Sell added that Texas is on track to be the leader in nuclear energy.
The worry, he said, is that competitors might trip up the momentum. Support for nuclear power has increased in recent years, but the industry is susceptible to sudden shifts in public opinion when something goes wrong.
“The failure of my competitors affects me worse than their success,” Sell said.
“There are serious players and there are less-serious players,” he added. “There are folks playing it for the long haul, and there are folks playing it for the near-term game.”
Sell said X-energy is on track for regulatory approval of its Texas reactors in the fourth quarter of 2026. He said the company has orders for 140 reactors from Dow Chemical, Amazon and the U.K. utility Centrica.
[Also see: Campbell, et al., 2025 (here)]
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