For five years, Reactor number one at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania has been idle. Now, thanks to a deal with Microsoft, the reactor will be brought back online in 2028, this time to exclusively supply the tech company with large amounts of low-carbon electricity.
This is all part of an ongoing flirtation between Big Tech and nuclear power. In March, Amazon Web Services agreed to buy a nuclear-powered data center from Susquehanna. Station in PennsylvaniaAt an event at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai Small modular nuclear reactors were mentioned as a potential power source for data centers. The links don’t end there: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chairs the boards of nuclear startups Oklo and Helion Energy.
The rise of artificial intelligence has forced tech companies to look for low-carbon energy sources to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that Electricity demand generated by AI, data centers and cryptocurrencies could more than double by 2026. Even their lowest estimates suggest the additional demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or, in the case of high consumption, Germany.
This surge in energy demand is music to the ears of the nuclear power industry. Electricity demand in the U.S. has been fairly stable for decades, but the sheer scale and intensity of the AI boom is changing that dynamic. A December 2023 report from an energy industry consultancy The report stated that the era of flat energy demand was over thanks to rising demand from data centers and industrial facilities. The report forecasts that peak electricity demand in the U.S. will increase by 38 gigawatts by 2028, roughly equivalent to 46 times the output of Three Mile Island reactor one.
“(AI) is really taking off and getting a lot of attention in the energy industry,” says John Kotek, senior vice president of policy development and public affairs at the nuclear industry trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute. Kotek says there’s a national security angle, too. “People rightfully see AI as a field of competition between the United States and our global competitors.” The fact that the U.S. is falling behind in the AI race because it doesn’t have enough power “is something that’s really making people focus their attention,” he says.
Nuclear power is attractive to tech companies because it provides low-carbon electricity around the clock, unlike solar and wind, which operate intermittently unless combined with a form of energy storage. Reactivating reactor one will provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of low-carbon power over the 20-year term of the deal. Since Microsoft has committed to being carbon negative by 2030The growing demand for electricity from AI poses a major threat to the company’s climate plans unless it can find low-carbon energy sources. By 2023, Microsoft’s emissions will be 100% lower than in 2020. increased by 29 percent compared to 2020, driven mainly by the construction of new data centers.
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant has two reactors. The second reactor was the site of a partial meltdown in 1979 and has remained out of service ever since. But reactor one continued to operate without incident until 2019, when it was taken offline for financial reasons, mainly due to competition from gas- and wind-generated electricity. Kotek says there are relatively few idled reactors that could also be brought back online fairly quickly, but that many power plant owners are interested in extending the operating licenses of their existing plants to try to ride the AI energy wave.