tech giants are increasingly looking to nuclear reactors to power their energy-hungry data centers. amazon and Microsoft signed major deals this year with nuclear power plants in the United States. And both Microsoft and Google have shown interest in small, next-generation modular reactors that are still in development.
New ai data centers need a lot of electricity, which has pushed companies away from their climate goals as their carbon emissions increase. Nuclear reactors could potentially solve both problems. As a result, Big tech is breathing new life into America's aging nuclear reactor fleet while supporting emerging nuclear technologies that have yet to prove effective.
“Certainly the outlook for this industry is better today than it was five or 10 years ago,” says Mark Morey, senior advisor for electricity analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration.
“Certainly, the prospects for this industry are better today”
Much of America's aging nuclear fleet came online in the 1970s and 1980s. But the industry has faced a setback following high-profile accidents such as Three Mile Island and the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Nuclear power plants are also expensive to build and generally less flexible than the gas plants that now make up most of the US Electrical Combination. Gas-fired power plants can rise and fall more quickly with the ebb and flow of electricity demand.
Nuclear power plants typically provide constant “base load” power. And that makes it an attractive energy source for data centers. Unlike manufacturing or other industries that operate during daytime business hours, data centers operate 24 hours a day.
“When people are sleeping, offices are closed and we don't use as much (electricity), what combines nuclear power very well with data centers is that they practically need power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Morey says.
That consistency also distinguishes nuclear power from wind and solar power, which decline with the weather or time of day. Over the past five years, many technology companies have accelerated their climate goals, pledging to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions.
However, additional energy demand from new ai tools has made those goals even further out of reach in some cases. Microsoft, Google and amazon have seen their greenhouse gas emissions increase in recent years. Getting electricity from nuclear reactors is one way companies can try to reduce those carbon emissions.
A feat that has never been achieved before in the US.
Microsoft signed a agreement to buy power at Three Mile Island, closed in September. “This agreement is an important milestone in Microsoft's efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to becoming carbon negative,” Microsoft vice president of energy Bobby Hollis said in a press release at the time.
The plan is to reactivate the plant by 2028, a feat that has never been done before in the United States. The plant “was closed prematurely due to economic issues” in 2019, according to Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of the company Constellation, which owns the plant. But the prospects for nuclear power are now brighter than they have been for years, as companies seek sources of electricity free of carbon pollution.
In March, amazon Web Services purchased a data center campus powered by the adjacent Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. That $650 million deal obtains electricity from the sixth largest nuclear facility in the US (by 54 sites today).
Google is considering purchasing nuclear power for its data centers as part of its sustainability plans. “Obviously, the trajectory of investments in ai has increased the scale of the task needed,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a interview with Nikkei this week. “We are now studying additional investments, whether solar, and evaluating technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors, etc.”
It refers to next-generation reactors that are still in development and are not expected to be ready to connect to the power grid until the 2030s at the earliest. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission first certified a design for an advanced small modular reactor last year. These advanced reactors are approximately a tenth to a quarter the size of its larger predecessors; Their size and modular design are supposed to make them easier and cheaper to build. They could also be more flexible than larger nuclear plants in adjusting the amount of electricity they produce to adapt to changes in demand.
Bill Gates, for example, is totally interested in nuclear energy. He is the founder and president of TerraPower, a company that develops small modular reactors. Last year, Microsoft posted a job opening for a senior program manager to lead the company's nuclear energy strategy that would include small modular reactors.
Bill Gates, for example, bets on nuclear energy
“I firmly believe that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important,” Gates said in an interview with The edge last month.
This week, the Department of Energy released a new report project that US nuclear capacity could triple by 2050. After stagnant for years, Demand for electricity is expected to increase in the US thanks to electric vehicles, new data centers, crypto mining and manufacturing facilities. According to the report, this growing demand is changing the prospects for nuclear energy. Just a couple of years ago, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors. They are now extending the life of the reactors to 80 years and plan to restart those that have been shut down, he says.
“It stands to reason that technology companies could catalyze a new wave of investment in nuclear energy, in the United States and around the world. “There has been a lot of talk about the idea in the industry,” Ed Crooks, senior vice president at Wood Mackenzie and thought leadership executive for the Americas. ai-reviving-nuclear-industry/”>wrote in a blog post this week.
This doesn't necessarily mean that everything is going smoothly for nuclear power in the United States. New reactor designs and plans to reopen shuttered nuclear plants are still subject to regulatory approval. Efforts to build both old-school power plants and new designs have clashed very high costs and delays. amazon already faces opposition to its nuclear power plans in Pennsylvania over fears it could end up raising electricity costs for other consumers. And the nuclear power industry still faces criticism over the impact of uranium mining on nearby communities and concerns about where to store radioactive waste.
“It's an interesting and challenging time in many ways,” Morey says. “We'll see what happens.”
