AI’s appetite for electric power fuels interest in nuclear option

Artificial intelligence tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will require 160% more electricity by 2030. That spike in energy demand has Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power.

Microsoft made a deal to restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant, the site of a serious nuclear accident in 1979, while Google and Amazon are investing in new types of reactors. It’s stirring something of a “nuclear revival” for the U.S. after decades of stagnation.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anna Erickson, professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about the push to revive the nuclear energy sector.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Anna Erickson: Nuclear power provides about 20% of total electricity in the United States, and if you put it in numbers, it’s about 100 gigawatts. Is it a lot? Is it not a lot? What I can tell you right now is a lot of that is going to be consumed by other applications such as data centers, as well as the surge in electric vehicles, so we expect a significant increase in U.S. nuclear capacity and the needs for power. But what’s interesting is nuclear provides about half of the carbon-free power generation, and that’s a number I’d like to bring up in addition to the 20%.

Meghan McCarty Carino: I mean, what do you think accounts — I’m sure, you know, we’ll get into this. But why did nuclear power sort of stagnate after coming online?

Erickson: Well, it’s true that in the past two decades we have not seen increase in nuclear power. In fact, until just a couple of years ago, we’ve seen nuclear power plants being shut down, sometimes due to the old age and sometimes for no other good reasons than [the] economy. All it took was two really bad accidents for people to say, is this worth it? And we know that nuclear power has been a topic that is relatively controversial compared to other sources of power, so public opinion and relatively high cost of new nuclear construction have held it down quite a bit, but we’ve seen recently that nuclear power provides advantages and opportunities that cannot be realized with renewables alone. And we’re certainly happy to see that the public is embracing nuclear more, and of course, the U.S. government is making more investments as well as private [equity].

McCarty Carino: So we’ve heard about these plans to revive retired power plants like Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island or Michigan’s Holtec Palisades plant. What does it take to bring these older plants back online?

Erickson: It may be preferable in the short term. In fact, if you look at the current number of reactors, we have 94 reactors across 28 states, and the economics of putting multiple reactors together is very good. It’s about 30% cheaper to have more than one reactor on site. So we’re looking at not only restarting the older reactors that shut down, but also possibly adding new units on existing infrastructure. So in terms of the numbers, how much does it cost to restart the reactor? Well, we’re projecting — “we” as in the industry, not me — maybe about $2 to $3 billion in three to five years. This is consistent with the [Three Mile Island] estimates. To build a new reactor, right now, it’s quite spendy simply because we don’t have enough scale. There’s not enough supply chain.

McCarty Carino: We’ve also been seeing a lot of excitement around smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Google and Amazon recently announced some investments into companies that are developing these. What are they? How do these compare to kind of the older, traditional model?

Erickson: Well, they are part of the family of what we call advanced nuclear reactors, and they provide a range of innovative technologies across two generations of reactors. We call them Gen III+ and Gen IV. So Gen III+ reactors are just an evolution of the current fleet. So they will be large reactors, similar to what we have already, based on light water technology, but they will employ some innovative features related to safety and efficiency. The small modular reactors are part of what’s called Gen IV — Generation 4 — reactors, and those include non-water coolants, meaning that we don’t have reactors like that currently operating in the United States. But they do provide a number of advantages for expanded uses compared to the current reactors. For example, they can provide high-temperature heat for industrial application. They also provide a smaller footprint, which means you can install them in a variety of spaces where the large reactors would be, perhaps, not as convenient to plan for. So if we’re going to talk about increasing the nuclear capacity across country, in fact, not just increasing it, but tripling it, as was pledged by recent meeting in the [United Nations], we will need a combination of Gen III, restart of the current reactors, as well as the advanced reactors, such as small modular reactors — Gen IV.

McCarty Carino: What have been the biggest barriers to nuclear power revival in the U.S. up to now?

Erickson: Well, the biggest barriers, of course, include the economic considerations, right? It is still expensive to construct new nuclear reactors. Part of it is due to the actual expenses associated with nuclear fuel cycle, but part of it is due to the supply chain and lack of trained nuclear workforce. We will need to at least triple the nuclear workforce in the next two decades to about 300,000 workers, instead of 100,000 we have right now. That’s not easy. The other aspect of that is, in this country, we regulate nuclear heavily. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews every design that comes its way. So no nuclear reactor can be built, or even considered to be built, without thorough review by the government, and that may take years and it costs millions of dollars, so there is a relatively high barrier of entry to even consider proposing a new nuclear design.

McCarty Carino: How does nuclear power compare to, you know, some of the other alternative energy sources that are out there, solar, wind, in terms of its kind of benefits and drawbacks? Why do you think these Big Tech companies aren’t just making massive investments in solar or something? Why go to nuclear power?

Erickson: That’s a great question. Nuclear has one characteristic that you will never find in renewables such as solar and wind, and that means capacity of operation. Nuclear power can operate comfortably at about 94% availability, day and night, 24/7, 365. It is not affected by the weather. It is not affected by fluctuations in production or supply chain once it’s operational. Where we’ll see more of that in demand is, I mentioned, the data centers already, and they absolutely cannot have power fluctuations, right? This is why you see Google and Amazon go towards nuclear, because they want this 94% availability day or night, regardless of weather conditions.

McCarty Carino: How safe is nuclear power? This is obviously a concern that comes up, you know, a lot when people hear “restarting Three Mile Island, oh no!”

Erickson: Well, part of the, I guess, uncertainty with Three Mile Island is perhaps a lot of folks don’t realize that Unit 2 of that plant is the one that experienced partial damage to the core, and since then it was sealed off, and it’s being monitored and making sure that there is no radiation release of any kind. Unit 1 is completely separate from Unit 2, so the two units are located in separate buildings, but they do share infrastructure. Regulatory requirements in this country make nuclear one of the safest industries because of its overregulation at every level. And I’m not saying that this is a wrong thing. I’m saying that this what makes nuclear quite safe because even if there’s a core damage in most cases, in all cases in this country, the design includes multiple levels of protection, from containing the core within its own environment all the way to sealing the entire reactor if that needs to be done. Chernobyl [the Ukrainian site of a nuclear accident in 1986 that irradiated the surrounding areas] did not have that type of design, and that’s the one that people frequently think about. Oh, global release. Well, yes, because the design was just not adequate for the safety standards we have in this country.

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As Erickson mentioned, nuclear power is very tightly regulated — which has often pumped the brakes on growth in the sector.

And just days ago, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sent jitters through the markets when it blocked a deal — seen as a model for the industry — between Amazon and the power company Talen Energy to direct more electricity from a Pennsylvania nuclear plant to one of Amazon’s data centers.

Then there’s the issue of nuclear waste, or as Erickson prefers to call it, spent nuclear fuel. She told us nuclear waste is kind of a misnomer because the material still stores a lot of energy.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, spent fuel still contains 90% of its potential energy. The U.S. does not currently recycle nuclear fuel, but regulators last month approved a design concept for a new facility in Idaho that will recycle spent fuel from a decommissioned plant to help power a new reactor.