The theme of the day is the opportunity to include, or not, nuclear power in the energy mix with which to face the ecological transition of the coming years. And in particular, the use of small modular reactors (Smr), new generation reactors, miniaturised, modular, and very safe (at least on paper), which seem to convince the Government and in particular Minister Pichetto Fratin. Recently, these technologies have received a prominent endorsement: that of the giants of the web.
Amazon today signed three deals with Xenergy to develop small modular reactors, becoming the latest major tech company to push for new energy sources to meet data centers’ growing demand for electricity. Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state.
SMR’s Google has ordered seven from startup Kairos Power to power its cloud services and (in particular) artificial intelligence applications.
How mini nuclear power plants work
Kairos Power is a startup based in Tennessee, specialized in the development of small fourth-generation fission reactors cooled by molten salts, an alternative technology to traditional water cooling, which allows operation at very high temperatures and low pressure. For now, the company’s design still remains on paper, but thanks to the agreement made with Google (and if all goes well with the checks of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission) the plan is to have the first 75 Megawatt (Mwe) reactor operational by 2030, and the others (for a total of around 500 Megawatts) online little by little until 2035.
Kairos is the first newly developed reactor approved for construction in the US in the last 50 years. The prototype, code-named Hermes, is under construction, has benefited from about $300 million in grants from the US Department of Energy, and is expected to be operational in 2027.
Renewable energy is not enough
For its part, Google’s investment is made practically mandatory by the company’s commitment to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. An objective that clashes with the growing use of energy linked to investments in the field of AI ( an extremely energy-intensive technology), and which by the company’s admission cannot be achieved by relying solely on renewable energy.
On the other hand, another technological giant like Microsoft also seems to have reached the same conclusion. And just in recent weeks it announced an agreement to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back online, a plant in the process of being decommissioned, which will instead be put back into operation in 2028 to supply energy to Microsoft’s data centers with a twenty-year contract.
Furthermore, it is not the only dormant nuclear power plant for which reopening plans are being made in the US. The spread of information technologies that require huge data centers is unstoppable, and this will increase the need for electricity, and in particular energy not obtained from fossil fuels. And therefore the alternatives for the Tech giants (and the countries that host them) seem to be only two: reopening the old disused power plants (because building a conventional plant from scratch requires time and investments that are not compatible with the needs of the energy transition), or focus on the small, but for now still completely experimental, small modular reactors, which once developed commercially would have relatively short production times, scalable costs (because they can be purchased little by little, and progressively put online where they are needed ) and higher levels of security.
The Italian nuclear plan
Having no plants to put back into operation, the second option is the only viable one for our country. And it is what the Government seems intent on following, which in recent days has presented its strategy with the “National Program for Sustainable Nuclear”. A two-phase plan, which aims to bring the contribution of nuclear power to the Italian energy mix to between 11 and 12 percent by 2050, using small modular reactors, and in the meantime provides for investments in fusion research (clean nuclear power, without waste to dispose of) in the hope that it can become a resource in the long term.