Is Big Nuke Back? How Big Tech Is Powering Atomic Cleantech

Artificial intelligence (AI), inflation, engineering advances, and a political push for greater energy security have put nuclear power back on the agenda. The Trump administration is making it easier to build new reactors and for investors to fund atomic tech startups.

It’s already having an impact. Big tech and big nuke are forging a partnership that could change the energy picture. The next phase of the renewables transition looks like a case of going back to the future.

We examine the emerging ecosystem of innovations, projects, and policies behind America’s next cleantech wave.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Back to the Future
3. From Fission to Fusion & Reactors Next Door
4. The Rise of SMRs
5. A New Era of Atomic Cleantech
6. The Bottom Line
7. FAQs
8. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Back to the Future
3. From Fission to Fusion & Reactors Next Door
Show Full Guide
4. The Rise of SMRs
5. A New Era of Atomic Cleantech
6. The Bottom Line
7. FAQs
8. References

Back to the Future

“America’s nuclear energy resurgence starts today”, said incoming US Energy Secretary Chris Wright in March. Announcing the launch of a $900 million funding program for nuclear energy tech startups, he was planting the flag for a key tenet of Trump-era energy policy.

A week before, the Department of Energy announced a $56 million loan and $1.5 billion in guarantees for the Palisades Project in Michigan, which will see a mothballed nuclear plant reopen and become the production site for a new type of small modular reactor (SMR).

The company’s unfortunately-worded press release promises to make the site ‘ground zero’ for America’s re-embrace of nuclear. Awkward allusions aside, the White House hopes its promised fleet of new mini-reactors will help address soaring US electricity demand.

Driven by rising AI use, data center expansion, and the ongoing electrification of everything from gadgets to EVs and the factories that make them, America needs power. Alongside its fulsome embrace of fossil fuels, the Trump administration sees nuclear energy as a proven, 100-percent net-zero way to get it.

The nuclear industry has struggled for decades to overcome safety fears, but the cost-of-living crisis and better technology have shifted public opinion. Despite the horrors of Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear has always been the statistically safest way to generate power. Yet its slice of the pie has stayed stubbornly flat at around 18%.

The tech sector wants that to change.

From Fission to Fusion & Reactors Next Door

Last October, Amazon announced a $500 million investment in startup X-energy’s advanced Small Modular Reactor. Even before the arrival of a pro-nuclear president, another big tech firm had concluded that nuclear was the best way to secure reliable, carbon-free power for its growing estate of mega-sized data centers.

The move placed Amazon next to Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others as nuclear’s new industrial champions. All have made big investments to top up existing generation capacity, build new plants, or restart old ones.

They’re also investing in SMRs while VC money pours into enabling technologies like annular linear induction pumps and accident-tolerant fuel cladding designed to make nuclear plants safer and more efficient.

They may lack the cool factor of a new smartphone or social media app, but those kinds of innovations are fundamental to keeping tech’s nuclear push on track.

The data centers hosting power-hungry generative AI models and global cloud platforms need a stable supply of carbon-free, price-predictable power that’s available 24/7. It needs to flow in sufficient volumes to drive AI and quantum computing dominance. Only nuclear ticks all those boxes.

The Rise of SMRs

Tech has opened the door for a nuclear re-think in more fundamental ways. Engineering advances and new reactor formats promise to make the process of building new plants faster, flexible and much more affordable.

While fusion tech startups strive to demonstrate commercial viability, small modular reactors (SMRs) promise a flexible and unlimited supply of carbon-free electricity.

Using existing light water reactor technology but in a much smaller format, they need just seven hectares of land. A traditional plant requires at least 250. SMRs are built in factories and then the components are assembled on-site.

The nuclear industry calls SMRs ‘cost-effective and convenient’ while EU policymakers, once highly nuclear-sceptic, are now promoting SMRs’ potential to accelerate the push to net zero.

A New Era of Atomic Cleantech

Small modular reactors have a unique ability to alternate their outputs from electricity to heat and back again. In industry lingo, that makes them better able to “load-follow” intermittent clean energy sources like wind and solar, filling in the gaps when they go quiet.

The ability to generate pure heat makes them ideal for steel mills and other temperature-intensive industrial settings. That places nuclear in a different role. Rather than relying on them to power entire cities, SMRs can be enablers of the renewables transition like grid scale batteries.

They can be erected next door to factories and data centers, and deployed on the grid alongside wind farms and PV arrays, which require less time and money to bring online.

Richard Stainsby, Chief Technologist for Advanced Reactors at energy infrastructure firm Jacobs, told Techopedia that small modular reactors can complement the on again, off again nature of wind and solar, while their ability to provide heat output for industrial applications “supports industrial decarbonization, which would be difficult to achieve clean energy sources that are constrained in terms of temperature output.”

Nuclear, he adds, should be factored in with rollouts of other renewable sources like wind, solar, and hydro, creating an overall clean energy mix that “meets today’s rising energy demands while advancing towards reducing carbon footprint.”

The Bottom Line

While new tech developments promise to ease the return to nuclear generation, in the end, it will come down to cost. SMRs can be easily constructed next to AI data centers, but atrophied supply chains for fissionable materials and the long lull in new plant construction mean their unit costs are high, even if the overall price tag is lower than a traditional plant.

But costs are coming down. The newest reactor at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant, which came online last year, cost 20% less to build than its predecessor, which was built a year earlier.

Data from Lazard shows that nuclear remains a more expensive type of generation than other baseload (always on) sources like natural gas power plants. For now, mushrooming power demand, the Trump administration’s determination to assert ‘energy dominance’ plus backing from tech titans like Google and Amazon, are all giving big nuke a momentum it hasn’t had in decades.

FAQs