Is the smart money moving into nuclear power?
A flurry of recent announcements from America’s biggest high-tech companies:
Amazon goes nuclear, plans to invest more than $500 million (NBC)
Google Backs New Nuclear Plants to Power AI – WSJ
Three Mile Island nuclear site to reopen in Microsoft deal (BBC)
The Microsoft deal is to help restart the remaining undamaged reactor at the existing Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
The Amazon deal is for a new, small modular reactor (SMR) to be built at an existing conventional nuclear plant in central Virginia.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday:
Google will back the construction of seven small nuclear-power reactors in the U.S., a first-of-its-kind deal that aims to help feed the tech company’s growing appetite for electricity to power AI and jump-start a U.S. nuclear revival.
AI is artificial intelligence. And the boom in this new technology is fueling massive new demand for electricity to power new computer data centers. This being Silicon Valley, that power needs to be carbon-free. Unlike the other two deals, the Google plan involves a start-up company:
Under the deal’s terms, Google committed to buying power generated by seven reactors to be built by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power. The agreement targets adding 500 megawatts of nuclear power starting at the end of the decade, the companies said Monday.
…
“The end goal here is 24/7, carbon-free energy,” said Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Alphabet’s Google.
The key term here is “24/7.” The occasional power provided by wind and solar won’t keep those data centers humming around the clock. A telling detail from the WSJ story:
The 500 megawatts of generation that would be built by Kairos for Google is about enough to power a midsize city—or one AI data-center campus
I was astounded by this detail from the Amazon announcement in Virginia:
[Amazon] plans to invest $35 billion by 2040 to establish multiple data center campuses across Virginia, according to an announcement from [VA Gov.] Youngkin last year.
That’s billion, with a “b.”
Once again, the future looks like it will be nuclear-powered.