Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power

AI uses a lot of power. Some of the next generation data centers may use as much power as one million U. S. households. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta hope nuclear power will offer a climate solution for this energy use. Nuclear power plants can deliver hundreds of megawatts of power without producing greenhouse gas emissions. But some long-time watchers of the nuclear industry are skeptical that it's the right investment for big tech companies to make. Read more of science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel's reporting here https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5171063/artificial-intelligence-wants-to-go-nuclear-will-it-work. Interested in more stories about the future of energy? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. We'd love to hear from you! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Emily Kwong?

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• 0:17Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Hey there, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by NPR's most radioactive correspondent, Jeff Bruntville. Hey, Jeff.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Hi, Gina.

• 0:29Regina Barber?

  OK, so Jeff, we joke about this because you cover all things nuclear. You also sometimes cover artificial intelligence or AI.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  And recently, those two sides of my beat have been coming much closer together because the big tech companies, who are all leading this AI revolution, I'm talking about Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, they're also making big investments in nuclear power right now. And they're doing it because they need a lot more juice to run their AI programs. Some researchers estimate that a search using AI uses as much as 10 times the power of a normal Google search.

• 1:05Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I mean, when I think of AI and nuclear power together, it just sounds like this dystopian sci-fi movie.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in all the movies, you know, Terminator, whatever, when the AI gets a hold of the nukes, it all goes wrong. But in real life, we got a way to go because before AI can somehow use its nuclear power to destroy us all, Silicon Valley has to remake the nuclear industry, which has been frankly stagnant for years.

• 1:35Regina Barber?

  So today on the show, the AI and nuclear power collab. Why does big tech want to go nuclear?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  And is it really going to help with the big electricity crunch that's coming along with our AI revolution?

• 1:47Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:04Emily Kwong?

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• 3:30Emily Kwong?

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• 4:57Emily Kwong?

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• 5:09Regina Barber?

  OK, so Jeff, let's start with the problem. Like, why do these companies need all of this electricity?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this all goes back 10 years or more when big tech companies started making some big commitments over climate change.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  That by 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  Apple will be 100% carbon neutral for our entire end to end footprint, including.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  You know, all these companies accept that climate change is real, and they've pledged to reduce or eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions. And I wanted to dig into those pledges, so I called up Ted Nordhaus. He's executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a Bay Area nonprofit that tracks some of these commitments. And he said initially at least, the companies all wanted to do this with renewables.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  They were all focused on being 100% renewable energy powered.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Now, this isn't normally done by building a bunch of solar panels next to a data center or something like that. What these companies did instead was buy power from renewable companies, who then just put it out on the grid.

• 6:10Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  But the tech firms could still claim. That they were in effect covering their emissions with these power purchase agreements, which is what these things were called.

• 6:19Regina Barber?

  OK, so they're buying lots of renewable power. The wind and solar companies were using those profits to build more. Seems like a reasonable solution. Why can't they keep doing that?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Because AI is just way more power hungry than existing technology. The next generation of data centers are going to be total electricity hogs. Some of the next generation centers will end up using as much power as around 1 million US households.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  There's going to be a huge amount of new demand from these AI data centers. And if you take seriously that you're going to try to achieve these commitments, you're not going to do it with renewable energy.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  The problem really here is scale. I mean, you need lots of energy storage. For example, you'd have to have absolutely massive batteries on site, say, to run a solar powered data center at night. And the battery tech isn't there yet. And also, there's just a lot of demand for batteries elsewhere. So it'd end up being really, really expensive.

• 7:17Regina Barber?

  OK, yeah, the storage problem is huge, right? It's been going on forever. But anyway, I do understand why they need a lot of power and they don't want to produce greenhouse gases. But why are they specifically focusing on nuclear power?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Well, I think the best way to answer that question is with a field trip to the most well-known nuclear plant in America. I'm talking about Three Mile Island.

• 7:39Regina Barber?

  The one that melted down?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  That's right, in 1979. This was the biggest nuclear accident in American history. The reactor overheated, the fuel started to melt. It was mostly contained, but more than 100,000 people had to evacuate. But here's the thing that most people don't realize. Only one of the reactors at Three Mile Island melted down. The other reactor was restarted and it produced power for decades. It did it without emitting greenhouse gases because nuclear power, for all its risks, like meltdowns and nuclear waste generates just staggering amounts of electricity without any carbon dioxide emissions.

• 8:20Regina Barber?

  OK, so you recently went to a reactor at Three Mile Island, the one that didn't melt down, right?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. I was on a press tour with a handful of other reporters and our guide was Brian Hanson, the Chief Generation Officer for the utility Constellation, which owns the plant. And Brian has a very close personal connection to TMI because in 2019, he was the guy who had to close it down.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  It was such a hard day for me emotionally, watching the plant shut down.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  It had become uneconomical to operate. Basically, nuclear energy is more expensive than natural gas and renewables in today's electricity market. And Three Mile Island became a casualty of that reality. So they actually had one of the operators who'd restarted the plant after the 1979 accident, turned the reactor off. And then they just put the whole thing in mothballs.

• 9:12Speaker 06

  I had to certify a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that we weren't going to operate the plant or load fuel again. And I actually sat on it for a couple of days. And my, my team was asking me, what are you waiting for? You know, I'm like, it was just emotional.

• 9:26Regina Barber?

  Wow. But I take it, you're not taking this tour just to look at an empty nuclear plant. Like, what's happening now?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Well, I mean, what's going on is in September, Microsoft came along and signed one of those power purchase agreements I was talking about, specifically for Three Mile Island. And all of a sudden, they were back in business. They're now working with regulators to restart the plant. They're trying to hire more people. And Constellation's given it a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  This is the Crane Clean Energy Center Turbine Deck.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  This is where the electricity was generated for decades using steam from the plant's nuclear reactor. And in a few years, Brian says, it's going to start again.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  I talked about the steam generators. We did all those inspections, did the maintenance. Those are ready to go for plant startup in 2028 already.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Now, restarting this plant isn't cheap. Constellation projects it's going to cost around $1.6 billion with a B. But they're willing to make the investment, thanks to Microsoft.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Microsoft has purchased the power of this unit for the next 20 years. That gives us the financial certainty to invest our money.

• 10:38Regina Barber?

  Wow. Okay, so Three Mile Island is coming back online, but is one nuclear power plant gonna be enough power to power all these like AI data centers?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  No. In fact, TMI puts out around 800 megawatts of electricity, and that all by itself is around the power consumption of what a single AI data center might eat. So these companies are gonna need even more. Yeah, it's just the amount of power is really staggering here. And that's why Google, Meta, Amazon are all making investments towards new kinds of nuclear reactors. And these reactors will look nothing like the old ones.

• 11:14Regina Barber?

  Wow, nothing like Homer's job.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  No, exactly, exactly. So to get a sense of that, I went just outside DC to the headquarters of a company called X Energy. It recently got somewhere around $250 million from Amazon for its reactor design. Clay Sell is the CEO.

• 11:33Speaker 07

  X Energy has developed a design very different from what most people think about in terms of large, traditional, conventional nuclear power plants.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  So what do you think about in terms of large, traditional nuclear power plants, Regina?

• 11:46Regina Barber?

  Well, Mr. Burns, he owns the power plant in Springfield, and it has those like big, like, I don't know, can like hourglass looking things, right?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Cooling towers, yep.

• 11:59Regina Barber?

  Cooling towers, yeah, all the cooling towers and like the inanimate carbon rods, and I don't know.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  That's absolutely right. You know, I mean, you've just described Three Mile Island, actually, which I think was the template for The Simpsons. But this reactor won't have any big cooling towers. And critically, the fuel is not going to be in these rods, which is what traditional plants put them in, these long rods of uranium. X Energy plans to run off little round balls of uranium instead.

• 12:28Speaker 07

  We put it in a round pebble, about the size of a cue ball. And we fill the reactor core with these pebbles, and they flow through the core like gumballs through a gumball machine.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Clay says these reactors are going to be small and modular, and it's going to actually take several units to power a data center. But crucially, he says, this system has one really big advantage.

• 12:52Speaker 07

  The plant cannot melt down under any scenario that you can imagine.

• 12:56Regina Barber?

  Okay, so a meltdown-proof reactor. I mean, it sounds great.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds great. I mean, the question is... Can they make it work? The thing is only on paper right now. You know, there's never been a reactor like it built in the US before. There is one operating in China, but that's only a demo project. And there's a lot of things that can make this really tricky to get running. For example, normal reactors use water to cool their core. The water runs through, it turns into steam, the steam goes into a heat exchanger, and that heat runs a turbine. It's actually quite similar to how other kinds of power plants work. But this reactor is going to use high-pressure helium gas. It's a completely new coolant. Also, these pebbles that they're fabricating haven't been used as reactor fuel before either. There's just a lot more uncertainty in the design.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And so it's going to take time to make sure it works and then convince the regulators to let it operate.

• 13:50Regina Barber?

  OK, so let's get back to the original point of all of this. Like, these companies are trying to fight climate change. This is what they say. Is time really on their side here?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  You know, that's exactly the question to ask, right? This AI revolution is happening right now. I mean, it's at breakneck speeds. And because of accidents like Three Mile Island, nothing in the nuclear industry ever happens quickly. Everything has to be scrutinized and done very, very carefully, regulated, overseen. These are just two super different engineering cultures, you know? And the way I've come to think about it is Silicon Valley loves to go fast and break things. The nuclear industry has to move very, very, very slowly because nothing can ever break.

• 14:32Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  So Sharon Squasone is a research professor at George Washington University who studied nuclear power's potential to fight climate change. And she wonders whether Silicon Valley really knows what they're getting into.

• 14:43Regina Barber?

  You know, I'm happy that they're looking for low-carbon electricity generation options, but I'm really perplexed.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Given the history of all the nuclear projects that have run behind schedule and gone over cost, she really wonders whether this is the right investment to be making.

• 15:03Regina Barber?

  You need the biggest bang for the buck in the shortest amount of time. And nuclear is not that. If that's where you're putting your money on, you're consigning us to, you know, severe climate change.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Because until these reactors are up and running, Gina, these AI data centers are going to operate using power from natural gas plants. And that means emissions are going to go up.

• 15:30Regina Barber?

  Jeff, thank you so much for bringing us this story.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 15:36Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and James Willetts was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 16:08Speaker 03

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