Heavy industry needs more than electricity: it needs intense heat for making concrete, steel, glass, chemicals, and plastics. Solar and wind can generate power, but they cannot easily supply that heat, and conventional water-cooled nuclear reactors do not run hot enough. According to MIT Technology Review’s 2026 climate tech list, X-energy’s proposed Xe-100 reactor uses helium gas as a coolant, allowing it to operate at lower pressure and higher temperature. The heat can produce super-heated steam for industrial use, generate 80 megawatts of electricity, or do both.
The reactor is a small modular design using TRISO fuel pebbles that resist corrosion and melting. X-energy says the reactor is intrinsically safe: if temperatures rise during a power loss, the nuclear reaction naturally slows and stops. Up to 12 units could be clustered to provide on-site, around-the-clock power for manufacturers or data centers. But the source also notes caveats: the only commercial helium-cooled reactors today are in China and have struggled to run continuously, SMR electricity could cost more than six times as much as solar, and the Xe-100 may produce up to ten times the spent-fuel volume per unit of energy, though its waste is lower-level.
Next steps include a fuel fabrication license and a factory expected in 2028, plus an Xe-100 for Dow’s chemical facility in Texas that could operate by the early 2030s. X-energy is also working with Amazon on a four-reactor cluster in Washington and on a larger fleet in northeast England. Because this article draws on a single source, there are no differing viewpoints to compare.