The Nuclear Technology Race Is Exciting. It’s also going to be really Frickin’ Hard

Big week for nuclear power. On Monday, Google announced that it has signed a deal to source its power from small nuclear reactors. Two days later, Amazon announced its plan to invest $500 million in developing its SMRs. The news comes just a month after Microsoft announced plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear facility to power its data centers.

After a long and painful decades, nuclear power is back. Tech companies, hungry for growing data centers and incredible AI power costs, may push the planet’s energy grid into the future. Nuclear power has many things to commend it, but there is a reason that more plants have been shut down than were built in the last fifty years. Nuclear power is expensive, construction times are long, and failure costs are deadly.

Nuclear power is efficient and, except when things go wrong, it is clean. It doesn’t heat up the planet like coal or oil and uses far fewer natural resources than other forms of energy. The world turned its back on it following a series of high-profile nuclear disasters but now big technology, fueled by the promise of new and different types of reactors, is rushing into nuclear’s future.

Why? The AI. “The grid needs new energy sources to support AI technologies that enable major scientific advances, improve business and customer services, and drive national competitiveness and economic growth,” Google said in a press release announcing its nuclear initiative.

Microsoft may be spinning off an old plant, but it’s also investing in new technology in Wyoming where construction has already begun on a new type of reactor using molten salt. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all pursuing small reactors that companies promise will be cheaper and easier to set up than older models. This new technology is designed to avoid one of the biggest problems of nuclear power: time and money.

Nuclear power plants are expensive and take years to build. A traditional plant can take a decade or more to come online. Georgia and South Carolina are the only states that have attempted to build new reactors in the past 20 years. Georgia won at great expense, South Carolina failed again at great expense.

South Carolina started its new reactors in 2008. It was a disaster. The government spent more than 9 billion dollars on the project and the reactors were never built. Construction was repeatedly delayed, cost estimates ballooned to $25 billion and the utility company managing the project began raising customers’ energy bills to cover the extra costs. A subsequent investigation into the project revealed that the construction was a fraud. Managers at the power companies lied about the cost of the project and how long it would take to complete. Many of them pleaded guilty to fraud and went to prison.

The new reactors in Georgia fared better, but the cost was staggering. The plan was to add two new reactors to the existing plant. Georgia approved construction plans in 2009. The first pitch was that it would be ready in 2017 and cost $14 billion. The last of the new reactors finally came online earlier this year and the total cost has reached about $35 billion. As in South Carolina, electric companies raised rates in Georgia and passed some of the cost on to consumers.

Before the power plants in Georgia, the new American nuclear power plant started operating in 2016. Construction on it began in 1973. Before that, the US had not seen a new nuclear power plant since 1996.

Europe always has more nuclear power than the US If nuclear power goes wrong, it gets worse. Disasters at a nuclear facility are rare, but they are by no means small and their impact extends far beyond the borders of the country where the facility is located. Chernobyl showed what horrors can happen, but it was Fukushima in 2011 that turned the world against nuclear power.

Germany closed its last nuclear power plant in 2023. Italy closed its factories after the Chernobyl disaster and decided to build new plants. Several countries in Europe have similar prohibitions regarding the construction of new plants. In South Korea, the issue of nuclear power is a bone of contention that informs the policy decisions of presidential candidates.

But technology is power hungry. Data centers and AI are burning thousands of megawatts every year. And the promise of nuclear power may be big enough for tech to invest both the time and money it needs to see a long-term return on its investment.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all pursuing new types of nuclear reactors that promise to be cheaper, easier to set up, and safer than previous forms. The pitch for small modular reactors is that they cost about one-third of a conventional reactor. Engineers promise they can be built quickly, take up less space than the giant cooling towers of a conventional reactor, and can be scaled up as needed.

So far, not a single small reactor has gone online. These new particles are a gamble, promising, but a gamble. According to Google, its first small reactors will appear in 2030. That’s a long time to wait in the fast-moving world of advanced technology. They won’t have a few data centers next year and it remains to be seen whether these tech companies can build power plants faster than they can use electricity.