Washington and Silicon Valley Push for Nuclear Revival

(The Epoch Times)—The emergence of cloud computing in the early 2000s and generative artificial technology in the 2020s has exponentially increased the U.S. technology industry’s demand for electricity.

In the coming decades, the massive data centers that power new technology will need far more energy than they currently consume.

Data centers in the United States are poised to consume more than 30 times more power in 2035 than they do currently, and government officials and tech giants are betting big on a once-vilified power source: nuclear energy.

New federal directives and billions of dollars in corporate investment are aimed at rapidly bringing next-generation nuclear reactors online while reshaping the U.S. energy mix and rewriting its regulations.

Data Center Demand

Since the launch of Amazon Web Services in 2006, cloud computing and storage solutions have revolutionized the way the world works, learns, and plays. But the rapid growth of the data centers that run the services is creating an incredible demand for electricity.

In an April report, a team of authors at Deloitte, led by Executive Director Kate Hardin, said U.S. data centers currently use about 33 gigawatts (GW) of power annually (enough to power about 27.5 million U.S. homes). That demand is projected to grow to 176 GW by 2035, according to the report.

“Nuclear energy presents a potential solution for meeting some of the growing electricity demands of data centers, with its reliable and clean energy profile,” Hardin and her co-authors wrote.

Currently, the Deloitte report states, nuclear is already punching above its weight in terms of electricity generation. Nuclear sites in the United States provided more than 19 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024 while representing less than 8 percent of overall generating capacity.

In 2023, fossil fuels generated 60 percent of the nation’s electricity, nuclear generated about 19 percent, and sources such as wind and hydropower produced about 21 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In July, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman joined President Donald Trump at an event in Pittsburgh to speak about the company’s $20 billion investment in the Keystone State. One plank of that plan is locating a new data center campus in Salem Township, near Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Amazon is investing heavily in nuclear energy. In a statement published in May, it called nuclear “a safe, carbon-free energy source that can be brought online at scale.”

The company stated that it has spent more than $1 billion on nuclear energy projects and technologies.

Representatives of the leading cloud service providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Google either declined or did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

However, in a September 2024 announcement, Microsoft Vice President of Energy Bobby Hollis said the company signed a power purchase agreement with the energy company Constellation that will enable the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, an 835-megawatt nuclear facility in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, that was fully retired in 2019.

In a statement, Hollis said the move was part of the company’s commitment to becoming a “carbon negative company.”

On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island suffered a partial nuclear meltdown. While nobody died in the incident, it is regarded as the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history.

Despite optimism from the leading cloud service providers, nuclear is currently the smallest component of the U.S. energy mix.

Right now, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the country, according to the Deloitte report. These reactors are, on average, about 40 years old.

Given the current pace of maintenance and expansion, Deloitte estimated that nuclear power will provide about 10 percent of the overall projected electrical demand to data centers in the United States by 2025.

Representatives of the Department of Energy (DOE) who spoke with The Epoch Times said the country’s nuclear infrastructure will likely greatly exceed those projections within the next decade, especially now that Washington is demanding rapid expansion of nuclear generating capacity.

Political Will

On May 23, Trump signed four executive orders that the White House stated would “usher in a nuclear renaissance.”

The orders call for aggressively expanding nuclear energy production in the United States and set a goal of quadrupling nuclear energy generating capacity by 2040.

They call for 10 new large reactors to be online by 2030, as well as for accelerated development of nuclear reactor technologies, use of nuclear power for artificial intelligence infrastructure and military installations, and expedited construction and testing of advanced nuclear reactors.

One of the orders also overhauls the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calling it a failure. The reforms are aimed at speeding up regulatory approvals and updating the commission’s safety models. The commission was established by Congress in 1978 to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials. The order states that since it was created, only two new reactors have come online.

“Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” the order reads.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, a senior official at the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy said the executive orders are already paying dividends.

The official highlighted recent public–private partnership announcements focused on small modular reactors. Those partnerships with the DOE involve firms such as Amazon, Dow, X-Energy Reactor Co., and TerraPower.

Currently, the DOE has $800 million set aside to help fund the initial deployment of small modular reactors. These smaller versions of nuclear fission reactors are designed to be built off-site and rapidly deployed in power plants.

To further accelerate novel reactor technology development, a senior official said the DOE established what it calls a test bed at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho. There, reactors can be tested under DOE authorization. In July, the Idaho National Laboratory announced that both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are involved with active projects to streamline novel reactor deployment.

Given the president’s requirement to test at least three new reactors by July 2026, the senior official said that it is “definitely very feasible” that at least one of the novel reactors tested at the Idaho National Laboratory will be deployed by 2030.

Apart from the Idaho National Laboratory, interest in testing novel reactor technologies remains high. So far, the DOE is receiving far more applications to begin trials than it was initially expecting before the executive orders were signed.

As for beating the Deloitte estimate, senior officials did not provide a specific expectation of how much energy nuclear will provide to data centers in the future. However, they did say that if the United States can get 10 large, GW-generating nuclear plants under construction by 2030, as the executive order calls for, then nuclear will provide “a significant fraction” of the power that data centers need to function.

Lingering Doubts

Because of incidents such as the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, and the more recent Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, some environmental activists oppose nuclear energy.

Representatives of leading activist groups such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

In its most recent article on the subject, the Bulletin questioned “whether government intervention can make new nuclear reactors built on [artificial intelligence’s] timeline without compromising safety or repeating past mistakes.”

In a July 22 appearance before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Stephen Burns was highly critical of the Trump administration’s reforms, which he said undermine the independence of the agency and could put safety at risk.

“Great care must be taken in streamlining licensing and regulatory processes to preclude erosion of nuclear safety standards,” Burns said. “Nuclear safety, not regulatory acceleration, must be the bedrock of this effort.”

Despite the history of high-profile accidents, public opinion polling from Gallup and Pew shows that Americans are generally supportive of nuclear power.

The most recent poll, published by Gallup in April, reported that 61 percent of respondents said that they favor the “use of nuclear energy as one of the ways to provide electricity.”

The DOE considers nuclear power plants to be one of the safest ways to generate power. Even countries that previously banned nuclear—including Germany, which decommissioned its final plant in 2023—are “waffling” on that decision, a senior official said.

The senior official acknowledged that getting new power online will be difficult, but echoed the comments of Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

“This is America,” Wright said in a July 22 interview with Fox News. “We put people on the moon. Can we build nuclear reactors again? Absolutely.

“Is it going to be a challenge? Do a lot of things have to change to get this ball rolling again? Yes. But can we do it? Yes, we can, and yes, we will.”