Big Tech's big bet on nuclear power to fuel artificial intelligence
It might have seemed like one of the weirder headlines of 2024: Microsoft is paying $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island. That's the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania whose reactor #2 had a partial meltdown in 1979. There were no injuries, and nobody died, but it set the nuclear industry back years. Only two new plants have been started since that accident.
"This is hallowed ground in the nuclear industry," said Joe Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, which owns about half of America's 54 nuclear plants (including Three Mile Island). "This is a place where we learned and got better."
He says that, as a result of the 1979 accident, there have been thousands of changes in protocols and procedures regarding nuclear power. "The thing that people forget is that there was another reactor at the site," he said. "That site, that reactor, continued to operate until 2019, when it was closed for economic reasons. Cheap natural gas, low demand, subsidization of different technologies in the business, [and] no policy supporting nuclear caused plants to start retiring."
So, what is Microsoft's interest?
All of the Big Tech companies have ambitious goals to fight the climate crisis. That includes Google and Microsoft, which have each pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions. They were making progress, too; each has invested billions in wind and solar energy.
And then, then artificial intelligence came along. AI data centers require huge amounts of electricity. Big Tech realized that they wouldn't make their emissions goals without taking power into their own hands.
Dominguez said, "Microsoft is going to enjoy the benefit of the reliable, clean energy for 20 years."
He says reopening the existing Three Mile Island facility would be quicker and less expensive than constructing a brand-new nuclear plant. "At least 10 times cheaper than building a new plant," he said. "And we think we could get it going in about three years, versus the last plant that was built, [which] took almost 10 years."
But if you're a tech company, what do you do if you don't have a recently-retired nuclear plant handy? You develop new ones. Only weeks after Microsoft's announcement, both Amazon and Google announced major investments in nuclear power.
Google is supplementing its already enormous green energy investments with a new kind of nuclear, called small modular reactors. "These are not the nuclear power plants of yesterday, with the very large cooling towers," said Michael Terrell, who heads Google's decarbonization efforts. "These are much smaller facilities. But because they're modular, you can stack them together to make bigger power plants.
He anticipates the first advanced nuclear reactor will be online by 2030. "And we're not going to do just one reactor, but we hope to buy from what will be a series of reactors that follow that," Terrell said.
Nuclear power still isn't perfect; it still produces waste that has to be safely stored. But unlike solar and wind, nuclear power is always on, which is essential to those AI data centers.
So, Google is funding a company called Kairos Power to design and build this new generation of reactors. Kairos is building three small demonstration plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the very spot where uranium was processed for the first atomic bomb.
CEO Mike Laufer says that his reactors don't use fuel rods; they use fuel pebbles, about the size of golf balls – mostly graphite, with tiny kernels of uranium. And each pebble has as much power capacity as four tons of coal.
And how much carbon dioxide emissions, compared to coal? "Zero," Laufer said.
The Kairos reactors also run at lower power and lower pressure than traditional reactors, which means lower risk.
Well, this all sounds great! But what's the catch?
"There's only one problem with small modular reactors: They don't really exist," said George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni, who spent 15 years researching nuclear safety for the government. She thinks Big Tech companies might be in over their heads. "I think they're going to find out pretty quickly that it takes way too long and it's way too expensive," she said. "I think we're going to see just how strong their commitments are to clean energy futures."
"So, you're saying they may have to turn to burning stuff [for power]?" I asked.
"I'm pretty sure they will," Squassoni replied.
"Do you think there's a little bit of tech-bro overconfidence therein?"
"Oh, completely, completely!" she laughed.
Kairos' Mike Laufer admitted, "Yes, it's really hard. I will totally agree with anyone. But we're doing it at smaller scale to start, and then building on that in the future."
Joe Dominguez's team is getting Three Mile Island ready for Microsoft, including renaming the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center. And if AI is igniting a renaissance in American nuclear, he says: full steam ahead.
I asked, "Why do all new plants take so much longer and cost so much more than projected?"
"Honest answer? We don't build enough of them," Dominguez said. "You don't want to build a unique design; you want to do kind of a cookie-cutter, one-after-another design."
"Is it well understood in government and the industry that if you start doing the same design over and over, we can get there faster and cheaper?"
"It's probably the best understood idea," Dominguez said. "It's understood by both Republicans and Democrats, which is a hard thing to say about anything! Everybody understands that if you build a common design, you build a bunch of them."
"So, you think we'll get there?"
"I do."
Google's Michael Terrell agrees, and believes his company will make its zero-carbon goal by 2030. "It is an incredibly ambitious goal: 24/7 carbon-free energy everywhere we operate every way around the world," he said. "But it's something we're working very hard to achieve, and we hope to get there."
For more info:
- Constellation Energy
- Google's Sustainability (blog)
- Kairos Power
- Sharon Squassoni, George Washington University
Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Remington Korper.
See also:
- 40 years ago: Three Mile Island nuclear accident ("Sunday Morning")
- Almanac: The Chernobyl nuclear accident ("Sunday Morning")
- Nuclear explosions: Preserving images of terrifying, swift power ("Sunday Morning")
- From 1980: Living near Three Mile Island ("Sunday Morning")
