The US Department of Energy expects data center demand to account for 7% to 12% of the nation's electricity by 2028. If nuclear power is to grow to meet that demand, developers will need to use iterative designs and secure large-scale financing, panelists said Sep. 24 at the Atlantic Council Nuclear Energy Policy Summit.
"What we're seeing is a lot more investments and support and innovation on some of these newer technologies," said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy for Google LLC. "Not just thinking about what do we need for this decade, but constantly planting the seeds for what's going to be needed next decade, when a lot of this will really show up in scale."
Kairos Energy is working on an "iterative approach" to its Hermes 2 reactor design, said Jeff Olson, vice president of business development and finance for the company. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved construction permits for Kairos' Hermes 2 35-MW thermal test reactors, which use molten salt to cool the reactor cores at a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Kairos in October 2024 announced plans to work with Google to deploy 500 MW of advanced nuclear projects beginning in 2030 to help power the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary's data centers.
Kairos is also partnering with the Tennessee Valley Authority on its small modular reactor (SMR) demonstration project, with TVA expected to provide engineering, operations and licensing support.
The TVA announced an agreement earlier this month for ENTRA1 Energy LLC to provide the federal power authority up to 6 GW of new nuclear power. Entra1 is the commercialization partner for NuScale Power Corp.'s VOYGR 77-MW SMR design.
"It's an all-in approach," said Matthew Ramussen, chief nuclear officer at the TVA. "There is going to be small modular reactor deployment, there is going to have to be gigawatt-scale deployment. We are technology agnostic."
The TVA was drawn to Kairos' iterative approach for its reactor design and its commercial readiness, Ramussen said. TVA, which serves about 10 million people across seven states, has identified four primary sites and four alternate sites for potential new nuclear development, he noted.
The TVA's draft integrated resource plan estimated costs of new nuclear at $13,000 per kilowatt for large-scale reactors like the AP1000, or about $18,000 per kilowatt for a SMRs, said panel moderator Niko McMurray, managing director for international and nuclear policy at ClearPath.
"That'd be a challenge for any company to make and pencil out," Murray said.
To bring new technologies to the grid for large-load customers such as Google, utilities, regulators and large customers will need to work on rate structures to ensure other ratepayers don't bear the cost burden, Peterson Corio noted.
"Particularly now, as we see energy costs going up," Peterson Corio said.
In states already moving in that direction, "there's a strong draw towards those markets" for major industrial customers, Olson said. "It's just a different world that we're living in right now ... Those programs and that leadership, I think, will really start to drive where we see future technologies deployed."
But utilities cannot finance such pricey projects alone.
"That's not a conversation they can have alone," Ramussen said. "These partnerships, these relationships, bringing the customers, along with transmission organization, bringing in the expertise with the developers ... and getting them into a contractual form ... will just be incredibly important."
The nuclear industry has received increasingly broad support in recent years, but investment is just beginning, panelists said.
"People are starting to pick up checkbooks, and that matters," Ramussen said.
"Where we will see success is where we see large-scale financing from the investment community," Peterson Corio said. "The way that we're talking about financing this new nuclear is very different. It's historically always been utility financed, or rate-based or shareholder finance in some cases. In this case, we're really looking to the private capital markets and this is brand new for them."
If the nuclear industry can educate its private capital and infrastructure partners and design to mitigate risk, "I think we'd really be successful in deploying this at scale," Peterson Corio said.
