Following Oracle, Microsoft, Google and other companies, Amazon also announced its investment in nuclear power and supports the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in the United States. To meet the growing demands of data centers and artificial intelligence, these tech giants are looking for new sources of carbon-free electricity.
Nuclear power has become the new favorite of giants.
01Choose nuclear power
Since last year, artificial intelligence has become popular around the world with the popularity of large model applications such as ChatGPT. Behind the era of artificial intelligence is strong demand for computing power, and the cornerstone of computing power is huge energy consumption. The expansion of artificial intelligence computing power requires a large amount of electricity and produces a large amount of carbon emissions, which is an important issue that cannot be avoided at present. According to reports from foreign research institutions, ChatGPT responds to about 200 million requests every day and consumes more than 500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, which is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 17,000 American households. Not only that, the International Energy Agency released a report stating that if artificial intelligence is fully integrated, taking Google search as an example, its power consumption may increase tenfold. According to forecasts released by Goldman Sachs, U.S. electricity demand will grow by approximately 2.4% from 2022 to 2030, of which 0.9% will be related to data centers. Technology giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence. The cloud computing business units of these companies are supported by a large number of data center groups, which also means a large amount of energy consumption.
On September 20, Microsoft announced that it had reached a 20-year agreement to purchase energy from an out-of-service nuclear power plant, which will be put back into operation. This was no ordinary nuclear power plant: Three Mile Island in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, was the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history in 1979 when one of its reactors suffered a partial meltdown.
The move is emblematic of the tech giant's need to power its growing artificial intelligence, while also raising questions about how to safely restart shuttered nuclear power plants — especially since Three Mile Island isn't the only one being restarted.
The Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert, Michigan, an 805-MW nuclear power plant, closed in May 2022. But Holtec International, the energy company that owns the plant, plans to reopen it. The reversal in fortunes for the nuclear plant was prompted by a pledge of $1.5 billion in conditional loans from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), which sees the plant as a way to help the country meet its climate goals. The Palisades Nuclear Power Plant is expected to reopen by the end of 2025.
Amazon has currently cooperated with three companies. Although AI was not mentioned in the cooperation, judging from the direction of future efforts, these nuclear power resources should be used to promote Amazon's various AI services. Amazon says it has a plan to meet its growing power needs: investing in small nuclear reactors, such as those purchased from Kairos Power. It will work with utility Dominion Energy to explore installing a small modular reactor near the existing North Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia. The e-commerce giant is investing in early-stage development work in reactor developer X-energy and is partnering with Central Washington utility Energy Northwest to install four X-energy reactors there.
Google also said it was signing a contract to purchase nuclear power from multiple small modular reactors planned to be developed by nuclear technology company Kairos Power. "The technology we need to achieve 24/7 clean energy is not just for Google, it's for the world," said Michael Terrell, Google's senior director of energy and climate.
Google said it hopes to build its first small modular reactor by 2030 at the Kairos nuclear power plant, with more reactors to be built by 2035. The nuclear power plant is expected to bring 500 megawatts of electricity to the grid. Google consumed more than 24 terawatt hours of electricity last year, according to the company's annual environmental report. 1 terawatt equals 1,000,000 megawatts.
After a severe recession in the 1990s and 2000s, the share of nuclear energy produced by new nuclear power plants around the world is starting to rise again. Although the United States has 94 conventional nuclear power plants, about one-fifth of the global total, very few new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in recent decades. There are currently more than 60 nuclear power plants under construction around the world, mainly in China and Russia. The number of nuclear power plants under construction elsewhere is also increasing. In July this year, the Czech Republic finalized a nuclear project plan worth $17 billion. At the same time, there is growing interest in small modular reactors (SMRs), which are cheaper and easier to build. A new era of nuclear energy may be beginning.
By the end of the 2030s, the three companies state that combined they may generate more than 5,000 megawatts of electricity, and possibly more.
02Nuclear Energy: Modular Reactor
The United States is developing small modular reactors that can generate about one-third the power of conventional reactors. Developers say small reactors can be built faster and cheaper than larger ones and can be tailored to the needs of a specific site.
If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves their design for construction and operation and the technology is successful, the developers aim to start generating electricity in the early 2030s.
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy, Katherine Harf, said that if new clean energy is not introduced during the construction of data centers, the United States is likely to "paralyze the grid", that is, use more electricity produced by non-clean energy.
Small nuclear footprint
Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, said the new reactor designs are well suited for industrial applications because they can be built on a smaller footprint and produce reliable power, and some can provide high temperatures on-site. heat.
"It seems to be well-suited to support these facilities and can support many different applications depending on the amount of power the customer requires," he said.
Amazon and Google have both committed to using renewable energy to combat climate change. By 2030, Google has committed to achieving net-zero emissions and running carbon-free energy every hour of every day on every grid it operates. The tech giant said it already meets 100% of its global electricity consumption every year through the purchase of renewable energy. However, the company has still not made progress in reducing its emissions.
A partnership between tech companies and nuclear power companies could be a match made in heaven. Big tech companies need electricity to power new massive artificial intelligence data centers, as a lack of electricity in the U.S. threatens to slow technology development.
Nuclear power is a climate solution because its reactors do not emit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, as do power plants that burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. Global demand for electricity is surging with the electrification of buildings and vehicles and the rise of artificial intelligence.
The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2026, the total electricity consumption of data centers may reach more than 1,000 terawatt hours, more than double that in 2022. It is estimated that one terawatt hour of electricity can power 70,000 homes for a year.
“Artificial intelligence is driving a huge increase in the number of data centers and the power needed on the grid,” said Kevin Miller, vice president of Worldwide Data Centers at Amazon Web Services. He added: “We think advanced new nuclear power capacity is really the key and Essential.”
Amazon says it will meet all of its global electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy by 2030, and recently announced that it has achieved this goal by early 2023. While the company has matched its consumption by purchasing equivalent amounts of renewable energy, that does not necessarily mean it is using renewable energy to power its operations.
According to Amazon's 2023 Sustainability Report, its electricity emissions fell by 11% from 2022 to 2023, but its direct emissions, including the fuel used to transport and deliver packages, increased by 7%. The company also plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
03AI and the prospects of nuclear power
In 2021, after investing $375 million in Helion Energy, the nuclear fusion startup of which Altmann is chairman, he said: “Fundamentally, the two constraining commodities that are everywhere in today’s world are artificial intelligence and energy. "Microsoft agreed last year to purchase power from Helion starting in 2028. Altman is also chairman of Oklo, a company that focuses on the opposite reactions - fission, which creates energy by splitting atoms, and fusion, which creates energy by merging atomic nuclei.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2022, when the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates commercial nuclear power plants and materials, rejected the company's application to design the Aurora plant in Idaho, saying it did not provide enough safety information. In October, the Air Force withdrew its intention to award a contract for a microreactor pilot project that would provide power to a base in Alaska.
Oklo's proposed Aurora nuclear power plant, which would occupy 13,000 square feet and feature a 15-megawatt fission reactor, would be smaller than its predecessors and look more like a sleek ski lodge than one of those iconic Cold War-era curves. tower. The plant will be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research facility in Oklo that received a Department of Energy grant to test recycling nuclear waste into new fuel, and the design is also safer, he noted. It's liquid metal, not water.
The nuclear power industry's share of the U.S. energy mix has not significantly expanded in decades. Despite popular opposition caused by rare but catastrophic accidents such as Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011, the nuclear power industry has struggled to move forward. Even the latest nuclear power plants produce waste that may remain dangerously radioactive for centuries, requiring efficient disposal or recycling like the one Oklo is trialling.
But as the climate crisis intensifies, a majority of Americans now support expanding nuclear energy — a Pew Research Center survey last year found that this share rose to 57% from 43% in 2020. Nuclear energy currently accounts for only 19% of total U.S. electricity generation, with 93 commercial reactors currently operating, down from a peak of 112 in 1990. It is estimated that up to 800 gigawatts of new nuclear energy will be needed by 2050 to meet current green energy goals.
However, no matter how fast demand grows, efforts to expand nuclear power should not be rushed. We need nuclear energy to achieve a low-carbon future. But for engineering projects that have historically taken decades to complete, the regulatory process needs to be methodical, and if we rush to achieve our goals, we risk making serious mistakes.