It’s a huge week for nuclear energy. On Monday, Google announced it had penned a deal to get some of its energy from small modular nuclear reactors. Two days later, Amazon announced its plan to invest $500 million towards the development of its own SMRs. The news comes just a month after Microsoft announced plans to reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its data centers.
After decades of a lengthy and painful drawdown, nuclear energy is back. Tech companies, hungry to fuel burgeoning data centers and the incredible electric costs of AI, might just be pushing the planet’s power grid to the future. Nuclear energy has a lot of things to recommend, but there’s a reason more plants have been shut down than have been built over the last fifty years. Nuclear power is expensive, the construction times long, and the cost of a mistake is deadly.
Nuclear energy is efficient and, aside from when things go disastrously wrong, clean. It doesn’t warm the planet like coal or oil and it uses far fewer natural resources than other forms of energy. The world turned away from it following a series of high-profile nuclear disasters but now big tech, fueled by the promises of new and different kinds of reactors, is rushing headlong into a nuclear future.
Why? AI. “The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Google said in a press release announcing its nuclear initiative.
Microsoft may be spinning up an old plant, but it’s also investing in new tech in Wyoming where construction has already begun on a new kind of reactor using molten salt. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all pursuing small modular reactors which the companies promise will be cheaper and easier to set up than the older models. This new tech is designed to sidestep one of nuclear energy’s biggest problems: time and money.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take years to build. A traditional plant can take a decade or more to come online. Georgia and South Carolina are the only two states that have attempted to build new reactors in the last 20 years. Georgia succeeded at great cost, South Carolina failed also at great cost.
South Carolina started its new reactors in 2008. It was a disaster. The state spent more than $9 billion on the project and the reactors were never built. Construction was repeatedly delayed, cost estimates grew to $25 billion and the power company in charge of the project started to hike customer’s power bills to pay for the cost overruns. Subsequent investigations into the project revealed that the construction was a scam. Executives at the power companies lied about the cost of the project and how long it would take to finish. Several of them plead guilty to fraud charges and went to prison.
The new reactors in Georgia fared better, but the costs were incredible. The plan was to add two new reactors to an existing plant. Georgia approved construction plans in 2009. The initial pitch was that it would be ready by 2017 and cost $14 billion. The last of the new reactors finally came online earlier this year and the total cost landed at almost $35 billion. Like in South Carolina, the power companies hiked rates in Georgia and passed some of the cost overruns on to the consumer.
Before the power plants in Georgia, America’s newest nuclear plant entered service in 2016. Construction on it had begun in 1973. Before that, the U.S. hadn’t seen a new nuclear power plant since 1996.
Europe is ever more bearish on nuclear power than the U.S. When nuclear power goes bad, it goes really bad. Disasters at a nuclear plant are rare, but they’re never small and their impact extends beyond the borders of the country where the plant is located. Chernobyl signaled what horrors were possible, but it was Fukushima in 2011 that really turned the world against nuclear power.
Germany closed its last nuclear power plant in 2023. Italy shut its plants down after the Chernobyl disaster and has a moratorium on the construction of new plants. Several countries in Europe have similar prohibitions around the construction of new plants. In South Korea, the issue of nuclear power is a contentious one that informs the policy decisions of presidential candidates.
But tech is hungry for power. Data centers and AI burn thousands of megawatts every year. And the promise of nuclear energy may be great enough for tech to invest both the time and money it needs to see returns on their investment in the long term.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are also all pursuing new kinds of nuclear reactors that promise to be both cheaper, easier to set up, and safer than the previous forms. The pitch of small modular reactors is that they cost about one third of a traditional reactor. Developers are promising that they can be constructed fast, have a smaller footprint than the massive cooling towers of a traditional reactor, and can be scaled up as needed.
To date, not a single small modular reactor has come online. These new reactors are a gamble, a promising one, but still a gamble. According to Google, its first small reactors will spin up in 2030. That’s a long time to wait in the fast moving world of advanced technology. There won’t be fewer data centers next year and it remains to be seen if these tech companies can build power plants faster than they consume electricity.