The race for technological transformation towards nuclear power is intriguing and will also be extremely challenging.
It’s a big week for nuclear energy. Google announced on Monday that it has struck a deal to get some of its energy from small nuclear reactors. Two days later, Amazon announced its plan to invest $500 million in developing its small and medium-sized businesses. These news come just a month after Microsoft’s announcement of plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power station to power their data centers.
After decades of long and painful withdrawal, nuclear energy is making a comeback. Perhaps technology companies, hungry to supply booming data centers with fuel and staggering electricity costs for AI, are pushing the planet’s power network towards the future. Nuclear energy has many things to recommend it, but there is a reason for more nuclear power stations closing down than being built in the last fifty years. Nuclear energy is expensive, construction takes long, and the cost of mistakes is deadly.
Nuclear energy is efficient, clean, except in cases when things go catastrophically wrong. It doesn’t heat up the planet like coal or oil, and uses much fewer natural resources than other forms of energy. The world turned away from it in the wake of a series of prominent nuclear disasters, but big technology is now feeding it the promises of new and different types of reactors, pushing with force towards a nuclear future.
Why? Amnesty International. Google said in a press release announcing its nuclear initiative: “The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that drive scientific progress, improve services for businesses and customers, boost national competitiveness and economic growth.”
Perhaps Microsoft is building an old factory, but it is also investing in new technology in Wyoming where construction has already begun on a new type of reactor using molten salt. Both Google, Amazon, and Microsoft aim to develop small modular reactors that promise to be cheaper and easier to set up than older models. This new technology is designed to avoid one of nuclear energy’s biggest problems: time and money.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take years to build. Traditional factories can take a decade or more to become operational. Georgia and South Carolina are the only states that have attempted to build new reactors in the last twenty years. Georgia succeeded at a high cost, while South Carolina also failed at a high cost.
South Carolina began operating its new reactors in 2008. It was a disaster. The state spent over $9 billion on the project and the reactors were never built. Construction was repeatedly delayed, cost estimates skyrocketed to $25 billion, and the energy company responsible for the project started raising energy bills for customers to cover the excessive costs. Subsequent investigations into the project revealed that the construction was a scam. Energy company executives lied about the project’s cost and duration, and many of them admitted guilt to fraud charges and went to jail.
New reactors in Georgia were in better shape, but the costs were unbelievable. The plan was to add two new reactors to the existing plant. Georgia approved construction plans in 2009. The initial offer was that they would be ready by 2017 and cost $14 billion. The last new reactor started operating earlier this year with a total cost of around $35 billion. As in South Carolina, energy companies raised prices in Georgia and passed on some of the extra costs to consumers.
Prior to Georgia’s power plants, the newest nuclear plant in America came online in 2016. It began construction in 1973. Before that, the United States hadn’t seen a new nuclear power plant since 1996.
Europe is more pessimistic than the United States about nuclear energy. When nuclear energy goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Disasters at nuclear plants are rare, but they are never small, and their impact extends beyond the borders of the state where the plant is located. The Chernobyl disaster pointed to potential horrors, but Fukushima in 2011 was what truly turned the world against nuclear energy.
Germany closed its last nuclear plants in 2023. Italy shut down its plants after the Chernobyl disaster and halted the construction of new ones. Many European countries have similar bans on building new plants. In South Korea, the nuclear energy issue is a controversial one that affects the political decisions made by presidential candidates.
But technology is thirsty for power. Data centers and artificial intelligence burn thousands of megawatts each year. The promise of nuclear energy may be big enough for technology to invest the time and money needed to see a long-term return on its investments.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are also working on producing new types of nuclear reactors that promise to be cheaper, easier to set up, and safer than previous forms. The idea of small modular reactors is that they cost about a third of the traditional reactor cost. Developers promise they can be built quickly, with a smaller footprint than the massive cooling towers of traditional reactors, and can be expanded as needed.
So far, no small modular reactor has been operated. These new reactors are a gamble, promising, but still a gamble. According to Google, their first small reactors will be operational in 2030. This is a long time to wait in a fast-moving advanced technology world. There won’t be fewer data centers next year, and it remains to be seen whether these technology companies can build power generation plants faster than they consume electricity.
