Big Tech's Nuclear Ambitions: Powering AI with Aging Reactors

Big Tech Wants Nuclear-Powered AI Now, But Here's What They're Not Telling Us

(Image Credit: PCMag Composite/Jeffrey Hazelwood; Just_Super/quantic69/Yuichiro Chino/via Getty Images) In the past year, nuclear power has reentered the conversation, hailed as a way to advance energy-hungry AI technology without devastating the planet and causing our electrical bills to skyrocket. So tech companies are going nuclear -- announcing plans to add more reactors in an all-out battle to secure as much data center power as possible and one-up each other's AI ambitions. It won't be easy. And it might not work at all. In 2027, Microsoft will reopen Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island -- nearly half a century after an infamous partial meltdown at the plant. A Microsoft spokesperson tells us that nuclear energy will help build "a decarbonized grid for our company, our customers, and the world." Also in 2027, Meta plans to reopen an abandoned Illinois reactor. Meanwhile, both Amazon and Google have invested in new reactor tech. President Trump has issued four executive orders to promote the nuclear industry. The administration and Westinghouse this month announced the opening of 10 new reactors in the US, with construction starting in 2030. But the company's last reactors in Georgia didn't fare so well: They were seven years late, $18 billion over budget, and bankrupted the company. This time, Westinghouse says it will use Google's AI products to streamline development. Essentially, AI will help in creating reactors to power AI. What could go wrong? To find out how feasible all of this is, I recently spoke to several experts in nuclear power. They point out major hurdles to growing our nation's nuclear capabilities, foremost among them high costs and long construction timelines. Then there's the potential public panic over a Chernobyl happening in their backyards. Plus, everything rests on new technology known as small modular reactors (SMRs), which is still in development and completely unproven at scale. It could be a long time -- decades, even -- before your conversations with ChatGPT are powered by nuclear energy, and nothing is guaranteed. Here's what Big Tech isn't telling you about the challenges ahead. AI Needs an Unimaginable Amount of Energy To power all of our data center demands with nuclear energy, we'll need significantly more capacity than is currently available or planned. Reactors' steady, consistent energy supply works well with AI models, which the public expects to be able to use to generate wacky images or vibe code at any time of day. But creating a meaningful amount of nuclear power is a tall order. According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, Big Tech companies would need 85 to 90 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear capacity to power their AI data centers, but just 10% of that will be available by 2030. Meta is currently accepting proposals to build projects that supply 1 to 4 GW, which translates to under 0.05% of Goldman Sachs's estimate. "Nuclear energy is a very realistic and well-suited option for data centers -- the only issue is timing," says Gary Cunningham, director of market research at Tradition Energy, an energy procurement and sustainability solutions advisor. "New nuclear would take years to deploy." Mark Gribbin, chief legislative analyst at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, a state legislative oversight firm, echoes Cunningham's analysis. "The short answer is that nuclear is a realistic solution in the long term, but it won't solve the current and near-term energy demand crunch," he says. Gribbin spearheaded a report about data center demands in Northern Virginia, a region with more such centers than anywhere in the world. Virginia residents could see their electricity bills rise $14 to $37 monthly by 2040 (independent of inflation), largely due to the spike in data center demand, Gribbin's team finds. The costs of building new grid infrastructure get passed to customers, as they would with any other large-scale project, including wind and solar installations. "Modern data centers are huge, as big as a stadium," Gribbin tells us. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions centers that would cover large parts of Manhattan. The power from Meta's Illinois reactor, run by Constellation Energy, "will go directly into the local energy grid managed by the utility, but support our operations in the region," a company spokesperson tells us. Big 'Not in My Backyard' Energy Will these old reactors be safe? None of the Big Tech companies is expressing any concern, at least publicly. But the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan, caused by a tsunami, renewed safety concerns among the public after decades of dormancy. (Chernobyl was in 1986.) Presumably, new plants will have better alarm detection and auto-shutoff features. Still, it's hard to imagine local communities embracing nuclear facilities in their backyards. Radiation exposure is a key concern in the event of an accident. It can cause a range of health conditions, such as cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. However, a decade after Fukushima, the UN found no statistically significant correlation between the disaster and cancer rates. The Washington Post reports that small towns across the US are already protesting data centers located too close to their homes. One Virginia community has suffered from constant roars and screeches coming from an Amazon data center, the Prince Williams Times reports. Meta's Georgia facility guzzled so much water that local kitchen taps almost went dry, the New York Times reports. "In Virginia, we already have a lot of local-level community opposition to solar and gas facilities," Gribbin says. "I expect you'd see the same local opposition for proposed new nuclear facilities, especially if the facility is located away from one of the state's two existing nuclear plants." The World Nuclear Association says every industry has accidents, and nuclear power has had relatively few of them despite their high-profile nature. "The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity," says the pro-nuclear organization. "The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining." It All Rests on 'Unproven' Small Modular Reactors Technological developments are also a key part of making nuclear energy a bigger reality. The reactors at Three Mile Island and Meta's Illinois plant are old. They are stereotypical-looking plants with giant, gray smokestacks billowing steam across the landscape. But experts say these reactors are not what would power a nuclear-rich future. Instead, small modular reactors (SMRs) are the new It Girl of nuclear energy. According to Idaho National Laboratory, they're anywhere from one-tenth to one-fourth the size of legacy reactors. They can be manufactured in a factory, meaning they're easier to scale and deploy to grids around the country. "There are a lot of companies throwing their hat into the 'build new nuke' circus, to attract investors and government funding, but the most likely candidates are not going to be the same tech used in prior builds, which are decades old, and instead will lean towards the small modular reactor designs being worked on," Cunningham says. There's just one glaring problem: SMRs have never been deployed at scale anywhere in the world. The technology is still in a costly development phase, and "there are no guarantees they ever actually get deployed at utility scale because that hasn't been done before," Gribbin says. Allison Macfarlane, a professor who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 2010s, writes that the "primary obstacle for nuclear energy, particularly SMRs, is cost -- and the fact that they currently do not exist and are therefore unproven." Macfarlane also raises the issue of waste disposal. If we have reactors all over the US, where do we put the nuclear waste? The US, she writes, "has no long-term plan for nuclear waste disposal, as progress towards a deep geologic repository for disposal of high-level nuclear waste remains at an impasse." Plans for a dumping ground in Nevada's Yucca Mountain have yet to become a reality. A consultant working with the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission "thought the earliest SMRs could start being deployed at utility scale would be 2035," Gribbin says, but that "could be moved up if big-pocketed companies continue dumping resources into them." Amazon and Google's nuclear plans are both focused on SMRs, not legacy reactors. Google says its deal is the "world's first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors." It plans to bankroll the manufacturer, Kairos Power, to ensure its first SMR comes online by 2030, with more reactor deployments to follow by 2035. However, Macfarlane isn't optimistic SMRs will ever happen, recommending investment in other "proven energy sources," such as wind, solar, geothermal, and battery storage. "SMRs are unlikely to be ready to meet significant electricity needs for another 20 years or more, by which time electricity markets will have evolved, with cheaper storage and renewables more widely available," she writes. "If, in the coming decade, nuclear power -- particularly SMRs -- proves economically unfeasible, investments in the sector will be for naught." But before we dismiss the potential for nuclear energy, it's worth noting that Europe has had more success integrating it into its electrical grid. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, 65% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. In the US, it's currently 19%, per the US Energy Information Administration. Britain's Rolls-Royce is developing next-generation SMRs and is the furthest ahead on the technology, Cunningham says. If the company is successful, the US could presumably use its products. It remains to be seen if any country can go full nuclear. To power US data centers with the tech would require a large-scale, all-hands-on-deck deployment of (currently non-existent) SMRs in every corner of the grid. That means a flood of funding, the use of legacy reactors in the meantime (hopefully without any accidents), and a lot of luck. In the meantime, the explosive growth in data centers will create distress for local residents, as well as the planet. One has to wonder if all of this is worth it so that you can date an AI chatbot?

Desperate for power, modern AI firms lean on a geriatric American nuclear fleet

After reviving Three Mile Island, Silicon Valley races to lock down more contracts at aging reactors, alarming some regulators and consumer advocates. MIDDLETOWN, Pa. -- The control room at Three Mile Island doesn't call to mind modern-day Silicon Valley. The nuclear plant's gadgetry has plastic levers and colored buttons chunky enough for a toddler's play set, push-button landline phones and monochrome monitors. But vintage facilities like these are now coveted by tech companies that need immense amounts of power today to propel their dreams for tomorrow. The nation's dwindling fleet of nuclear plants is being seized upon by tech firms such as Microsoft and Amazon as a foundation for their plans for an artificial intelligence-infused future. The aged but reliable survivors have emerged as one of the most viable ways to quickly feed tech firms' growing thirst for electricity to power the giant data centers needed for AI projects. Meta signed a 20-year agreement for the power flowing from a large legacy reactor in Illinois, Microsoft struck a deal to restart a reactor next to the one at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant that was shuttered in 1979 by a partial meltdown, and Amazon last month in the same state locked up power from a 42-year-old nuclear plant down the Susquehanna River. Tech companies are scouring the nation for other geriatric nuclear plants to power their AI dreams, according to interviews with nuclear industry officials and company earnings calls. Their interest is focused on the roughly two dozen operating plants in unregulated markets, which are in many cases free to sell power to the highest bidder. They make up about half of the 54 plants still operating in the United States. The tech firms say the deals give new life to plants at risk of going offline or that have already been shut down. Contracts that lock in rates for decades are attractive to plant operators, and the electricity flows without directly generating new carbon emissions. But critics say Silicon Valley's nuclear spree will make it more likely that consumers will face electricity rate hikes or shortages in coming years as the nation faces soaring demand for power -- driven in part by new data centers. By locking up aging nuclear plants instead of building new power generation, tech firms could leave communities to fall back on fossil fuels, extending the life of polluting coal and gas plants. A few years ago, nuclear energy struggled to compete with cheaper renewables and natural gas, but all power sources are now in greater demand. Contracts with tech firms can offer nuclear plant operators as much as double the market rate for electricity. Jackson Morris, a director with the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, said tapping nuclear energy allows companies to keep pledges to use carbon-free power, but "doesn't do anything to solve for the impact they're having on consumers." "They're insulating themselves from their own impact," he said. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft declined to answer questions about which additional nuclear plants they may be seeking to buy power from, as well as the potential impacts of such purchases on other ratepayers and the environment. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. All of the companies say they mitigate the impact of their energy use on other customers, by working with utilities to shield customers from funding infrastructure that serves only data centers and investing in bringing new clean technologies to the power grid. Tech firms say their data centers will eventually be powered by a new generation of cheaper but more sophisticated nuclear reactors, to be designed with help from AI. But the technology has been stymied by engineering issues, supply chain challenges and regulatory hurdles. Google and Microsoft are also investing in fusion energy, which is even less proven. "It turns out it is hard to go from all of that fancy new technology on a spreadsheet to an actual piece of infrastructure that isn't run with analogue controls," said Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based energy think tank. "Right now there is not much else to do other than try to squeeze every electron you can out of the existing nuclear fleet." Chain reaction Energy companies that own nuclear plants are thrilled by the tech industry's recent interest, calling it a springboard for nuclear power's resurgence. New Jersey power company PSEG told investors in February that it is in talks with tech firms about selling large amounts of power directly from its nuclear reactors on what is known as the Artificial Island complex in Delaware Bay. Company CEO Ralph LaRossa said in April that requests for new power from the utility by data centers has exploded over the past year, jumping 16-fold to 6.4 gigawatts, an amount of electricity that could power several million homes. In Texas, energy company Vistra says it is in talks with tech firms interested in buying energy from the Comanche Peak nuclear plant, near Fort Worth, and possibly others it owns in Ohio and Pennsylvania. "I think we will see more large deals," said Dan Eggers, executive vice president at Constellation Energy, which owns or partially owns 13 nuclear energy complexes across the country. Constellation has already rezoned land next to the Byron Clean Energy Center, a nuclear plant in Illinois, so tech companies can build data centers there. It is seeking similar changes at the campus of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland on Chesapeake Bay. The company says it is also contemplating new deals with tech companies for long-term nuclear power contracts in Pennsylvania and New York. Lawmakers and regulators in some communities are concerned data center nuclear deals could increase costs for other ratepayers and weaken the power grid. Some Maryland lawmakers want to ban Constellation from inviting data center construction alongside Calvert Cliffs, which produces nearly 40 percent of the state's electricity. A report from the state's Public Service Commission warns that siphoning energy from the plant away from the power grid for data centers could destabilize the system. "In addition to being costly to replace a large nuclear plant, the quality of the generation ... would be difficult to replace," the report says. Unlike solar or wind facilities, nuclear power provides round-the-clock electricity when the plants are operating, in any weather. In many cases, nuclear power that gets redirected to tech companies would be backfilled on the power grid with gas or coal generation. Nuclear industry officials say the solution is not restricting deals, but building more plants. "It is short sighted to say we will just ignore all this demand over the next few years and tell these companies to get their power somewhere else, when this could set us up for a lot of growth in the industry," said Benton Arnett, senior director of markets and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. But even nuclear executives working with tech firms acknowledge that pulling zero emissions nuclear energy away from other customers will have an impact on the climate and can be out of sync with ambitious commitments tech firms have made to reduce their carbon footprint. "A growing list of people are realizing they can't have everything they want," said Robert Coward, principal officer at MPR Associates, one of the nuclear industry's leading technical services firms. Critical mass The scramble by tech firms to secure more nuclear energy quickly has led Silicon Valley companies to some unexpected places. They include a dormant construction site in South Carolina, where plans to build a Three Mile Island-size nuclear plant were abandoned in 2017, after the developer burned through $9 billion on a project that struggled with cost overruns and engineering setbacks. Local ratepayers were saddled with the bill. Federal prosecutors in 2020 secured prison sentences for executives involved with the project for lying to investors and ratepayers about its viability. Now, several big tech companies are among those that have expressed interest in bringing the V.C. Summer nuclear project back to life, according to testimony from officials at utility Santee Cooper, after it invited proposals for restarting the project. A utility spokesperson would not say if there are tech companies among the three or four proposals she said are finalists for a potential deal. Tech firms are also eyeing a revival of Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, a 1970s vintage nuclear plant majority-owned by NextEra that was mothballed in 2020 after a fierce storm damaged its cooling towers, according to company earnings calls. The repairs were initially deemed too costly, but data centers have shifted the economics of nuclear energy, and NextEra is mulling a reboot to serve the facilities. "If we continue to see the kind of prices Microsoft is willing to pay for nuclear power from Three Mile Island, these type of deals become a solid economic proposition," said Carly Davenport, a utilities analyst at Goldman Sachs. She said estimates show the tech company is paying as much as twice the going rate on the open market, and locking in for a 20-year contract. Duane Arnold is one of the last retired plants intact enough to restart. Many of the retired plants in the U.S. have already been dismantled. But tech companies are finding ways to squeeze more juice out of active reactors in the aging national fleet, pursuing reactor "uprates" from federal regulators that allow increased output. Nuclear power companies aim to increase the power output of the existing U.S. nuclear fleet by the equivalent of three large new reactors using that tactic. As more deals involving aging reactors emerge, consumer advocates and environmental groups are growing concerned about the impact on everyday ratepayers and the planet. Amazon reconfigured its deal in Pennsylvania after it was rejected by federal regulators that expressed concern about the effects on consumer electricity bills. The company had proposed routing power from the plant directly to nearby data centers, allowing it to avoid paying usage fees for the electric grid. The online retailer last month announced a deal with plant owner Talen in which it agreed to pay grid fees, a contract that will effectively lock up a large chunk of existing power generation at a time the Mid-Atlantic power grid desperately needs more energy. The deal is notable because it puts an existing nuclear plant on sound economic footing for another decade of emissions-free power generation, said former federal energy commissioner Allison Clements. But Amazon is also removing supply from the grid just as demand from AI and other uses such as electric cars and air conditioners is spiking. "There isn't enough power on the grid," Clements said, and the increased load forecast by analysts, utilities and grid operators cannot be met by existing power sources. "There's not enough room on the system."