Short Wave - Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

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. Interested in more stories about the future of energy? Email us at [e-mail]. 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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey there, shortwavers. Regina Barbara here. And today I'm joined by NPR's most radioactive correspondent, Jeff Brunfield. Hey, Jeff. Hi, Gina. Okay, so Jeff, we joke about this because you cover all things nuclear. You also sometimes cover artificial intelligence or AI.

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

Yeah, I mean, in all the movies, you know, Terminator or 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. So today on the show, the AI and nuclear power collab. Why does big tech want to go nuclear? And is it really going to help with the big electricity? crunch that's coming along with our AI revolution. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Okay, so, Jeff, let's start with the problem. Why do these companies need all of this electricity? Yeah. So this all goes back 10 years or more when big tech companies started making some big commitments over climate change. that by 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative. Apple will be 100% carbon neutral for our entire end-to-end footprint. 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. They were all focused on being 100% renewable energy powered. 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. Okay. 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.

Okay. 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? 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 U.S. households. 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. 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 end up being really, really expensive. Okay. Yeah. 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? 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. The one that melted down. 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. Okay, so you recently went to a reactor at Three Mile Island, the one that didn't meltdown, right? 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. It was such a hard day for me emotionally, watching the plant shut down. 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 19th, 1979 accident turned the reactor off. And then they just put the whole thing in mothballs. I had a 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 days. And my team was asking me, well, what do you wait for?

You know, I'm like, it was just emotional. Wow. But I take it, you're not taking this tour just to look at an empty nuclear plant. Like, what's happening now? 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 constellations given it a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center. This is the Crane Clean Energy Center, Turbendet. 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. I talked about the steam generators. We did all those inspections, did the maintenance.

Those are ready to go for plant start up in 2028 already. 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. Microsoft has purchased the power of this unit for the next 20 years. That gives us the financial certainty to invests. or more. Wow. Okay. So Three Mile Island is coming back online, but is one nuclear power plant going to be enough power to power all these like AI data centers? 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 going to 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. Wow. Nothing like Homer's job. No, exactly, exactly. So to get a sense of that, I went just outside D.C. 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. X Energy has developed a design very different from what

most people think about in terms of large traditional conventional nuclear power plants. So what do you think about in terms of large traditional nuclear power plants, Regina? Well, Mr. Burns, he owns the power plant in Springfield, and it has those, like, big, like, I don't know, like, hourglass looking things, right? The cooling towers, yeah. Cooling towers, yeah, all the cooling towers and, like, the inanimate carbon rods. And I don't know. 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. 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 to a gumball machine. 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. The plant cannot meltdown under any scenario that you can imagine. Okay, so a meltdown-proof reactor. I mean, it sounds great. 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 U.S. 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. And so it's going to take time to make sure it works and then convince the regulators to let it operate. Okay. 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? 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. Yeah. So Sharon Squasone is a research professor at George Washington University who studied nuclear powers potential to fight climate change. And she wonders whether Silicon Valley really knows what they're getting into. You know, I'm happy that they're looking for low-carbon electricity generation options. But I'm really perplexed. Given the history of all the nuclear projects have run behind schedule and gone over costs, she really wonders, whether this is the right investment to be making. 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 severe climate change. 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 be. go up. Jeff, thank you so much for bringing us this story. Yeah, for sure. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts and James Willits was the audio engineer. Bet 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 Shortwave from NPR.