‘Potential issues’ with Coalition’s planned nuclear reactor sites, safety expert warns
Graham Readfearn
Thu 24 October 2024
Tarong power station in Queensland has been proposed as one of the seven possible nuclear sites.Photograph: Krystle Wright/The Guardian
A senior government nuclear safety official says the sites of coal-fired power plants “might not be adequate” to house the opposition’s proposed taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors.
Government agencies and departmental officials were grilled in parliament on Wednesday at a government-backed inquiry into nuclear energy. The inquiry was tasked with scrutinising the Coalition’s controversial plan to lift Australia’s ban on nuclear power and build taxpayer-funded reactors at seven sites.
Several officials told the inquiry it would take at least 10 to 15 years to start generating nuclear power once a future government confirmed an intention to build reactors.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said the Coalition expects to be able to build a small reactor by 2035 or a larger reactor as early as 2037.
The Coalition has said putting reactors at the sites of coal-fired power stations would reduce the need to build expensive transmission lines and towers to connect renewables to the grid.
Related: Stuck on repeat: why Peter Dutton’s ‘greatest hits’ on nuclear power are worse than a broken record | Temperature Check
At Wednesday’s inquiry, the Nationals MP Darren Chester asked the chief regulatory officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, Jim Scott, if that approach could save time.
Scott said it likely would, but added that this “presupposes that the sites of current coal-fired plants would be adequate for nuclear sites, because that might not be the case”.
He said: “You have to look at external events – flooding, natural events – that could occur. That’s part of the siting process. Given that, the potential issue [is] that the sites of current coal-fired plants might not be adequate for nuclear plants.”
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Simon Duggan, a deputy secretary in the energy department, listed some of the steps that would be needed for nuclear to go ahead, including setting up management frameworks for health, safety, security, environmental impacts, as well as transport of nuclear fuels and waste, storage of waste and the workforce capability to build, maintain and regulate plants.
“Based on the work and the assessments that you have seen from bodies such as CSIRO and the [International Energy Agency] you are looking at around a 10- to 15-year timeframe to put all those prerequisites in place in order to have nuclear power capability in Australia,” Duggan said.
Many officers raised the issue of social licence and community consultation, saying this would be a critical step if any nuclear reactors were to be built in the future.
The opposition energy spokesman, Ted O’Brien, who is also deputy chair of the inquiry, attacked analysis from the energy department which the energy minister, Chris Bowen, said showed the Coalition’s plan would mean a gap of at least 18% between electricity supply and demand.
Duggan said the analysis was based on assumptions supplied by the minister, where there would be no new investment in renewable energy, and that coal-fired power stations would stick to the closure schedule assumed by the Australian Energy Market Operator.
Related: Bill Maher puts the fate of the Great Barrier Reef in the spotlight – but do the claims stack up? | Temperature Check
But O’Brien said those assumptions, described by Bowen previously as reflecting Coalition plans, were “the opposite” of what they were planning and were “fundamentally flawed”.
He said the Coalition had made public statements “with respect to ensuring there’s no premature closure of baseload power stations, more gas is poured into the grid and renewables continue to be rolled out”.
O’Brien asked if Duggan was comfortable with how the minister had presented the analysis to the public. “I am very comfortable,” Duggan replied.
Officials from Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency both said Australia had deep expertise in nuclear regulation, and did not see problems in expanding that to accommodate a future nuclear power sector.
Clare Savage, chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, told the inquiry she did not believe nuclear could be deployed in enough time to cover the closure of coal-fired power plants, which she said were becoming increasingly less reliable as they aged.
She told the inquiry that on the same day of the hearing, 26% of the total capacity of Australia’s coal-fired power fleet was offline. Eleven per cent of the coal fleet was down due to unplanned outages, she said.
How Silicon Valley is sparking a new nuclear age
Matt Oliver
Wed 23 October 2024
Bill Gates says he believes next-generation nuclear energy ‘will power the future of our nation – and the world’ - BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN/NYTNS / Redux / eyevine
In the shadow of an old coal plant in Wyoming, Bill Gates is bankrolling what he hopes is the future of nuclear energy.
Terrapower, a start-up that the Microsoft billionaire started in 2006, wants to build reactors that will bring down the cost of nuclear power to previously unheard of levels.
According to the company, its reactors will be smaller, safer and cheaper to make than traditional power stations because of efficiencies gained by manufacturing their constituent parts in factories.
Gates, who published a book on climate change in 2021, is championing nuclear energy as a solution to reaching the world’s net zero climate targets, as well as to meeting the prodigious electricity needs of Silicon Valley as companies develop ever more complex artificial intelligence (AI) software.
Terrapower broke ground on its Wyoming site in June and has said it expects to finish construction in five years, assuming it secures regulatory approvals.
Pictured holding a shovel with other executives in June, Gates said: “I believe Terrapower’s next-generation nuclear energy will power the future of our nation – and the world.”
The company is just one of several start-ups that are shaking up the nuclear industry after decades of relative stagnation.
The push by “big tech” into AI is creating massive and growing demand for power, triggering a round of frantic deal-making as companies battle for uninterrupted supplies. Nuclear has emerged as a favoured option.
Last month, Microsoft signed an agreement with a utility provider to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, in Pennsylvania, in a deal worth $16bn (£12.4bn).
In 1979, Three Mile Island suffered a nuclear disaster, involving the partial meltdown of its Unit 2 reactor - Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg
That was swiftly followed by announcements this month that Google had ordered up to seven mini-nuclear reactors from Kairos Power, another start-up, and that Amazon was supporting rival X-Energy to build another four in Washington state.
Around the world, a plethora of upstart companies are hoping to ride the wave with their own small reactor designs, including NuScale, Holtec, Last Energy and Ultra Safe Nuclear. They are competing against larger industry incumbents such as GE Hitachi, Westinghouse and Britain’s Rolls-Royce.
Some businesses want to deploy old technology, such as water and gas-cooled reactors, in new ways. Others are looking at designs not widely used yet, such as molten salt or liquid metal-cooled reactors.
It has kindled hopes that private enterprise could shake up the previously state-dominated nuclear industry, in an echo of how Elon Musk has revolutionised rocket travel.
Gates is one of several big hitters to have entered the fray, with investment guru Warren Buffett joining him as an investor in Terrapower.
Meanwhile, X-Energy’s backers include Kam Ghaffarian, the billionaire behind space start-ups Axiom Space and Intuitive Machines, and Ken Griffin, the boss of US hedge fund Citadel.
Peter Thiel, the Donald Trump-supporting billionaire who founded PayPal, has also backed a nuclear fuel start-up through his Founders Fund vehicle.
“Big tech is forcing an industry that is used to moving at a glacial pace to move at warp speed,” says Ben Finegold, a nuclear analyst at London-based investment house Ocean Wall.
“There’s going to be a conflict where someone’s going to have to have to budge, and I think it’s going to be the nuclear industry – because the technology companies are going to throw tens of billions of dollars at this.”
Power-guzzling data centres
Silicon Valley’s newfound interest in nuclear energy is based on sheer pragmatism. AI requires far more computing power than other activities such as internet search. Technology giants have concluded nuclear is their best bet for large, dependable supplies of electricity.
At the same time, many are being told there is no longer enough grid capacity to accommodate their giant, power-guzzling data centres – meaning they have to look elsewhere or find their own source of generation.
Nuclear plants have proven difficult to build in the West for a variety of reasons, not least because of their complexity and the thickets of planning regulations companies must battle.
Against that backdrop, Mark Nelson, the managing director of consultancy Radiant Energy Group and a nuclear engineering graduate from Cambridge University, suggests that tech companies may at first prioritise switching on old plants that can be brought out of retirement, or complete construction of those that were only part-built or planned but never delivered.
However, in the longer run, they are likely to turn to newer innovations being pioneered by startups promising “smaller and safer” nuclear plants.
These should be simpler and less expensive than big power stations thanks to “modular” construction, meaning their constituent pieces can be mass produced in factories and transported to sites by truck.
This newer generation of reactors need less space and so can sit next to other buildings, rather than being remotely located as large nuclear plants are for safety reasons.
“The beauty of these smaller reactors is that they are simpler, they’re easier to construct and they’re more finance-able, which is why we’re seeing the private investor market coming in to support delivery now,” says Carol Tansley, the vice president for projects and head of UK at X-Energy, which wants to build reactors in Teesside.
Carol Tansley, of UK at X-Energy, wants to demonstrate the economic viability of smaller reactors
“That said, none of these things are up and running right now, so the role we have to play is to demonstrate they can be delivered on time and on budget, and that they are economically viable,” she says.
The new generation of reactors are generally divided into so-called small modular reactors (SMRs) and next-generation, advanced modular reactors (AMRs).
SMRs – including all those being considered in the Government’s design competition – are based on existing water-cooled reactor technology, only miniaturised.
These have long been used in nuclear-powered submarines and are now being commercialised by major companies including Rolls-Royce.
Other “micro” versions of these reactors have also been developed, such as the 20 megawatt plants that Last Energy wants to build at a former coal power station in Bridgend, South Wales.
“We’re using proven technology that is absolutely understood and already utilised around the world,” says Michael Jenner, the boss of Last Energy UK.
‘The holy grail of nuclear’
AMRs will use different designs – and novel types of fuel. Many will also feature “passive safety” designs that, it is claimed, make it impossible for them to suffer meltdowns.
“We’ve designed reactors that are 100pc safe,” Mr Ghaffarian, who founded X-Energy in 2009, told Forbes in an interview last year.
“If there’s a tsunami, an earthquake ... or a plane crashes into it, they can never go super-critical. And because of that, you can have them in the middle of cities, or anywhere.”
X-Energy’s reactor will be helium-cooled and use so-called Triso fuel particles.
Short for tri-structural isotropic, these “pebbles” look like metallic-coloured billiard balls but have been described as “the most robust nuclear fuel on Earth” by the US Department of Energy.
They are made from poppy-seed sized pieces of uranium, encased in layers of tough carbon-based and ceramic materials that keep radioactive material trapped inside.
This makes them tough enough to handle temperatures of up to 1600C, according to a 2015 Cambridge University paper. (The upper melting point of stainless steel is just over 1,500C.)
Mr Ghaffarian describes the company’s Triso-based design as “the holy grail in nuclear”.
Using these pebbles, X-Energy’s reactors will each generate about 80MW (megawatts) of power – or 320MW in “four packs” – and produce steam at a temperature of 565C.
In Texas, they are set to be used by Dow Chemical at the company’s Seadrift complex, where a variety of plastics are made, along with glycols for bottles and oxide derivatives used in beauty products.
It is one example of how mini-nuclear plants could help to decarbonise parts of the economy that might otherwise be extremely difficult or expensive to serve with renewables or hydrogen.
Triso is also the foundational technology that underpins Gates’s Terrapower and Google’s partner Kairos Power, with the former opting to use liquid sodium as a coolant and the latter using molten salt.
For now, the race is on to bring the first working reactor to market. More than 70 projects have been awarded some kind of seed funding by the US government.
Terrapower’s Wyoming plant is among them, with Gates and his investors having agreed to match $2bn (£1.6) provided to them by taxpayers.
The plant is envisaged as the first of many, with efficiencies of scale then set to bring the price of generation to parity with natural gas. In Europe, this is currently around €40 (£33.35) per megawatt hour.
“I think they will reshape the industry,” says Mr Nelson of the new crop of start-ups. “The tech companies are so profoundly rich and their futures are so constrained by this problem that they’re going to have room for multiple bets.”
Tech's nuclear option: Why AI's insatiable appetite for energy is fuelling a radioactive renaissance
Adeleine Halsey
Wed 23 October 2024 at 5:09 am GMT-6·6-min read
Tech's nuclear option: Why AI's insatiable appetite for energy is fuelling a radioactive renaissance
Three Mile Island, a US power plant infamous for a nuclear meltdown in 1979, is getting a restart and a rebrand to fuel artificial intelligence (AI) endeavours.
The reason behind this change in fortunes? None other than the multi-billion-euro tech behemoth, Microsoft.
Under a deal announced in September with power giant Constellation Energy, which owns part of the nuclear facility, Microsoft will use carbon-free energy from the plant to power its data centres.
To add to this agreement, Constellation Energy announced it will launch a rebrand of the island as the "Crane Clean Energy Center".
Related
Soaring demand for AI could see the technology consume enough energy to power a small country
"This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft's efforts to help decarbonise the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative," Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s Vice President of Energy, said in a statement, explaining the significance of this purchase as part of the company’s larger long-term energy goals.
It marks the beginning of what could be a renaissance for nuclear energy thanks to the soaring demand for power-hungry AI. In recent weeks, Big Tech giants Google and Amazon have both announced they will use mini nuclear reactors to power their data centres.
But why, when nuclear sites are increasingly being wound down, are they seeing a rebirth?
'Relatively free energy'
Microsoft’s usage of nuclear energy on such a wide scale is part of an urgent push in the US toward renewable energy.
Graham Peaslee, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Notre Dame, emphasised the massive amount of power needed to fuel AI. He added that if the US wants to stay "in the lead in AI," it will need significantly larger server farms, which require a lot more power.
[The] impact of Three Mile Island, technically and physically and health-wise, is vastly overestimated, particularly in the USA.
"AI in the next century will be driven by these huge computer farms," he said.
"The computers are getting smaller and smaller, but the fact is that they need a football-sized field building to hold all of them, and they need enough electricity from a nuclear power plant to run them all".
The agreement is also an economical decision, Peaslee said. Building new plants could cost billions of dollars while restarting former plants is much more cost-efficient.
Peaslee speculated that other corporations would follow suit if Microsoft were successful, a prediction that is already being borne out by subsequent announcements from Google and Amazon.
"Once a nuclear plant is constructed, it’s relatively free energy," he added.
Related
AI and the environment: Chatbot ChatGPT consumes more energy than a traditional Internet search
The relaunching is set to have groundbreaking economic and environmental impacts. Experts expect Microsoft to benefit monumentally, as the success of the project would create enough power for 800,000 homes.
The US would likely see thousands of direct and indirect jobs created, hundreds of millions of dollars in state tax revenue, and more than 800 megawatts of carbon-free electricity generated, according to the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council, whose members maintain and create the infrastructure in commercial and industrial industries.
Bid to calm concerns
In 1979, the plant in Pennsylvania was the site of the worst commercial nuclear incident in US history, when its Unit 2 reactor experienced a partial meltdown before going offline.
Though parts of the plant eventually recovered from the incident, there are still concerns regarding the safety of the plant and the practicality of Microsoft's endeavours.
Though the affected Unit 2 reactor is still in the decommissioning phase, the deal with Microsoft would see the re-opening of the plant’s Unit 1 reactor, which operated safely and independently until 2019.
Nuclear plants have finally been recognised by the European Union and by the governments as being clean – a big, important word.
Charles McCombie was initially a front-end reactor specialist in the UK and Switzerland and is now a radioactive waste management expert. He believes the relaunching is a wise and sensible move for Microsoft and an excellent source of firm energy, or energy guaranteed to be available.
"[The] impact of Three Mile Island, technically and physically and health-wise, is vastly overestimated, particularly in the USA," McCombie said. "Of course, anything that happens in America has a worldwide impact".
However, nobody died in the partial meltdown and parts of the plant went on to operate successfully for decades to come, McCombie emphasised.
The US is not the only country moving forward in nuclear energy. McCombie classified nuclear energy as a positive "upward trend," at the moment, one that countries all over the world - in the West, Asia, Africa, and South America - are following.
Related
Europe to see 168% increase in data centre investment as European Commission awaits energy reports
These countries, he said, are all in the process of increasing their nuclear fleets for different reasons.
"The most important one [reason] from my point of view as a nuclear enthusiast, is the environmental part," McCombie added. "Nuclear plants have finally been recognised by the European Union and by the governments as being clean – a big, important word".
McCombie also touched on the gigawatt challenge. Data centre demand in the US will double by 2030 to accommodate the power needs of AI, according to data from the US Data Center.
In other words, the rapid expansion of data centre capacity needed to power AI means that the US must provide 35-gigawatt of power to fulfill soaring demand.
Is Europe playing catch-up?
McCombie’s observations highlight a larger cross-continental conversation about the role of nuclear energy in Europe over the last year, as well as more widespread concerns about nuclear waste.
In March, Europe saw its first Nuclear Energy Summit, where 14 of the EU's 27 heads of government gathered to discuss the future of nuclear energy and a potential re-incorporation of nuclear energy operations.
During the convention, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton proposed the EU Nuclear Technologies Act, a piece of legislation that would attempt to proactively develop this sector in Europe.
Though the EU must overcome financial barriers and other issues, the summit was a progressive and promising beginning for more intentional steps towards widespread firm energy in Europe.
The European Economic and Social Committee held a conference on October 17 to assess the latest scientific developments regarding nuclear energy and waste and also discuss allowing local communities to "have their say". Conversations are ongoing.
Related
ChatGPT: What is the carbon footprint of generative AI models?
McCombie said the appetite for nuclear power has "massively increased" over the last few years, indicating that the US will not be the only player on the world stage of nuclear-powered data centres in the future.
One example, he said, is Finland, a country making advances in radioactive waste disposal. In 2021 alone, nuclear power amounted to 33 percent of Finland’s total electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
"Geological disposal facilities" are currently being implemented to deal with the waste generated, he added. This includes sites like Onkalo, a vault cut 450 m deep in the bedrock of a Finnish island where used radioactive rods will be housed for the next 10,000 years.
It remains a waiting game to see if the rest of Europe will follow suit with nuclear energy should the project succeed and perhaps get up to par with nuclear-powered AI.
Three Mile Island nuclear plant gears up for Big Tech reboot
Laila Kearney
Tue 22 October 2024
1 / 5
Three Mile Island nuclear plant gears up for Big Tech reboot
FILE PHOTO: The Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant is seen at sunset in Middletown, Pennsylvania
By Laila Kearney
THREE MILE ISLAND, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Giant cooling towers at Constellation Energy's Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania have sat dormant for so long that grass has sprung up in the towers' hollowed-out bases and wildlife roam inside.
Armed guard stations at an entrance to the shut concrete facility, surrounded by barbed wire, sit empty. The plant, which would run so loud when operating that workers were required to wear hearing protection, is nearly silent.
"It's still eerie walking in here and it's, just, quiet," Constellation regulatory assurance manager Craig Smith said during a tour of the plant last week. Smith, who worked at Three Mile Island when Constellation shut the site’s remaining reactor in 2019, is now preparing for a restart.
Constellation announced last month that it would revive the half-century-old Three Mile Island with the purpose of fueling Microsoft's data centers. Microsoft is expected to pay at least $100 a megawatt-hour, nearly double the typical cost of renewable energy in the region, as part of the 20-year power contract.
The agreement shows the dramatic lengths Big Tech is willing to go to procure electricity for its artificial intelligence expansion and the undertaking by the U.S. power industry to meet that demand.
The effort to restore Unit 1 at Three Mile Island is expected to take four years, at least $1.6 billion, and thousands of workers to complete the unprecedented task of restarting a retired nuclear plant.
Constellation has already ordered costly equipment for the site and identified fuel for the unit's reactor core, with work expected to start early next year, according to Reuters' interviews with company executives, contractors and a tour of the site.
Successfully resurrecting Three Mile Island, which is widely known for a 1979 partial meltdown that cast a pall over the U.S. nuclear sector for decades, would put the plant at the front edge of an industry revival.
Nuclear creates large amounts of carbon-free electricity. That is attractive to companies, like Microsoft, that have climate pledges and face increasing public scrutiny for their voracious power use.
Microsoft would consider signing other power purchase agreements to restart shut plants, Alistair Speirs, senior director of Microsoft's Azure Global Infrastructure, told Reuters.
"I don't think anything's off the table," Speirs said.
Relaunching Three Mile Island would supply to the regional grid 835 megawatts of electricity - enough for all of Philadelphia's homes - to help offset Microsoft's power consumption.
A restart of the plant, however, is not certain. Three Mile Island, which will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Complex, still requires licensing modifications and permitting. Local activists have also vowed to fight the project over safety and environmental concerns.
If the plan suffers the same lengthy delays and cost overruns that have plagued nearly every nuclear build in the country's history, it could stymie other deals and set back Big Tech's quest to rapidly expand, power experts say.
MILLIONS OF FEET OF BUILDING
Earlier this year, Constellation finished initial testing of the plant's Unit 1 to determine whether it was financially reasonable to resurrect it.
After learning that the central generator, which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to replace, was in strong condition, the company moved ahead with its plan.
“We have a perfectly ready-to-go main generator just waiting for the rest of the plant to get started,” said Smith, standing in front of a row of massive turbines.
About a thousand carpenters, electricians, pipefitters and other tradesmen are expected to be deployed to the site, said Rob Bair, president of Pennsylvania Building Trades.
Work will likely start in the first quarter of 2025 with restoring two 370-foot (113-m) high cooling towers, which were stripped bare after the plant shut.
"There is a ton of equipment that has to go back in those towers," said Bair, whose father helped build Unit 1, which opened in 1974.
Workers will be hoisted up the top of the towers to install lighting and restock the buildings from within. The structures' bases, which were once made of redwood, will be refurbished with modern materials.
Next, restorations inside of the plant will begin: some major equipment will be replaced. Constellation recently ordered the site's main transformer, which is expected to cost around $100 million including installation, to be delivered in 2027.
Piping and electrical work, scrubbing condensers and cleaning out power generators, will be among the next tasks. A million-gallon tank will be filled with water.
Much of the analogue control room, with a panel installed in the early 1970s, will stay the same. A benefit of keeping the analogue system is that it would be more secure against cyberattacks, officials said.
Completing the job will require several million feet of scaffolding, built by scaffologists, or carpenters with special licenses, to be assembled repeatedly around the island.
"And all of that has to be done before you can even put fuel on the site," Bair said.
The company has commissioned the fuel design for the reactor's core, said Constellation Chief Generation Officer Bryan Hanson. The core holds the enriched uranium, the fuel source for the plant, stacked in pellets and sealed in tubes.
Constellation, which is the biggest U.S. operator of nuclear plants, will tap into fuel from its existing enriched uranium reserves as one of the final steps before starting up.
The effort is part of a recent turnaround of U.S. nuclear power, which suffered from competition from cheap fuel and fears of meltdowns, said John Ciampaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management, which manages a large physical uranium fund.
In Michigan, Holtec is in the process of trying to restart another reactor site.
Constellation's stock price has soared by 135% so far this year amid fresh projections for record U.S. power consumption next year and a doubling of data center demand by 2030.
Not everyone is enthused about the prospect of a nuclear comeback. The power plants produce waste that can remain radioactive for thousands of years.
About a tennis court-size amount of spent nuclear fuel from Unit 1 is stored on Three Mile Island, which sits on a strip of land in the Susquehanna River. The decommissioning of Unit 2 is still underway about 45 years after the partial meltdown.
Local activist Eric Epstein, who remembers the March 1979 incident, said he will fight Constellation's request to resume operating and water use licenses.
"It's going to be a protracted battle," Epstein said.
The first chance for the challenges comes on Oct. 25, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled its initial public hearing on Constellation's plan to restart Unit 1.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Big Tech is going all in on nuclear power as sustainability concerns around AI grow
Daniel Howley
·Technology Editor
Updated Wed 23 October 2024
Artificial Intelligence has driven shares of tech companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Nvidia (NVDA), and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to new highs this year. But the technology, which companies promise will revolutionize our lives, is driving something else just as high as stock prices: energy consumption.
AI data centers use huge amounts of power and could increase energy demand by as much as 20% over the next decade, according to a Department of Energy spokesperson. Pair that with the continued growth of the broader cloud computing market, and you’ve got an energy squeeze.
But Big Tech has also set ambitious sustainability goals focused on the use of low-carbon and zero-carbon sources to reduce its impact on climate change. While renewable energy like solar and wind are certainly part of that equation, tech companies need uninterruptible power sources. And for that, they’re leaning into nuclear power.
Tech giants aren’t just planning to hook into existing plants, either. They’re working with energy companies to bring mothballed facilities like Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island back online and looking to build small modular reactors (SMRs) that take up less space than traditional plants and, the hope is, are cheaper to construct.
But there are still plenty of questions as to whether these investments in nuclear energy will ever pan out, not to mention how long it will take to build any new reactors.
A nuclear AI age
While solar and wind power projects provide clean energy, they still aren't the best option for continuous power. That, experts say, is where nuclear energy comes in.
Aerial view of the construction site of Linglong-1 (ACP-100), the world's first onshore commercial small modular reactor (SMR), on July 4, 2024, in the Hainan Province of China. (Wang Jian/VCG via Getty Images)
“Nuclear energy is, effectively, carbon-free,” explained Ed Anderson, Gartner distinguished vice president and analyst. “So it becomes a pretty natural choice given they need the energy, and they need green energy. Nuclear [power] is a good option for that.”
The US currently generates the bulk of its electricity via natural gas plants that expel greenhouse gases. As of 2023, nuclear power produced slightly more electricity than coal, as well as solar power plants.
Last week, Google signed a deal to purchase power from Kairos Power’s small modular reactors, with Google saying the first reactor should be online by 2030, with plants expected to be deployed in regions to power Google’s data centers, though Kairos didn’t provide exact locations.
Amazon quickly followed by saying just two days later that it is investing in three companies — Energy Northwest, X-energy, and Dominion Energy — to develop SMRs. The plan is for Energy Northwest to build SMRs using technology from X-energy in Washington State and for Amazon and Dominion Energy to look at building an SMR near Dominion’s current North Anna Power Station in Virginia.
Three Mile Island suffered a meltdown of its other reactor in 1979, but according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there was no serious impact to nearby people, plants, or animals, as the plant itself kept much of the dangerous radiation from escaping.
In 2023, Microsoft announced it would source power from the Sam Altman-chaired nuclear fusion startup Helion by 2028. Altman also chairs the nuclear fission company Oklo, which plans to build a micro-reactor site in Idaho. Nuclear fusion is the long-sought process of combining atoms that produces power without dangerous nuclear waste. No commercial applications of such plants currently exist.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also founded and currently chairs TerraPower, a company working to develop an advanced nuclear plant at a site in Wyoming.
Nuclear is expensive and some technologies are still untested
Nuclear power output has remained stagnant for years. According to US Energy Information Administration press officer, Chris Higginbotham, nuclear power has contributed about 20% of US electricity generation since 1990.
Part of the reason has to do with the fear of meltdowns, like the one at Three Mile Island, as well as the meltdowns at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011.
Chernobyl was the worst meltdown ever, spreading radioactive contamination across areas of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and Belarus, resulting in thyroid cancer in thousands of children who drank milk that was contaminated with radioactive iodine, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Plant workers and emergency personnel were also exposed to high levels of radiation at the scene. The Fukushima plant suffered multiple meltdowns as a result of a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which caused significant damage to three of the plant's six reactors.
An arial view of the Three Mile Island nuclear power. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) as of 2021, “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident.”
Outside of the perception, nuclear plants are expensive and take time to construct.
Georgia Power’s two Vogtle reactors came online in 2023 and 2024, after years of delays and billions in cost overruns. The reactors, known as Unit 3 and Unit 4 were originally expected to be completed in 2017 and cost $14 billion, but the second reactor only started commercial operations in April this year. The final price tag for the work is estimated to top out at $31 billion, according to the Associated Press.
The explosion in cheap energy from natural gas has also made it difficult for nuclear plants to compete financially. Now nuclear companies are hoping SMRs will lead the way in building out new nuclear energy capacity. But don’t expect them to start popping up for a while.
“The SMR conversation is really long term,” Jefferies managing director and research analyst Paul Zimbardo told Yahoo Finance. “I'd say almost all of the projections are into the 2030s. The Amazons, the Googles, some of the standalone SMR developers, 2030 to 2035, which is also what some of the utilities are saying as well.”
What’s more, Zimbardo says, power generated by SMRs is expected to cost far more than traditional plants, not to mention wind and solar projects.
Google Data Center Southland is seen from air in Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S., January 4, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
“Some of the projections are well above $100 a megawatt hour,” Zimbardo explained. “To put it in context, an existing nuclear plant has a cost profile of around $30 a megawatt hour. Building new wind, solar, depending on where you are in the country, can be as low as $30 a megawatt hour, or $60 to $80 a megawatt hour. So it's a very costly solution.”
Not everyone is buying the promise of SMRs, either. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the small-scale reactors are still an untested technology.
“Despite what one might think of all the brain power at these tech companies, I don't think they've done their due diligence,” Lyman told Yahoo Finance. “Or they're willing to entertain this as a kind of side show just so they have all their bases covered to deal with this postulated massive expansion and demand for data centers.”
Lyman also takes issue with the idea that SMRs will be able to get up and running quickly and begin providing reliable power around the clock at low cost.
“The historical development of nuclear power shows that it's a very exacting technology, and it requires time, requires effort, requires a lot of money and patience,” he said. “And so I think the nuclear industry has been trying to make itself look relevant, despite their recent failures to meet cost and timeliness targets.”
Still, with tech companies promising an AI revolution that requires power-hungry data centers, nuclear may be the only realistic green choice until solar and wind can take over permanently.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
