Over the past year, nuclear power has reentered the conversation, hailed as a way to advance energy-hungry AI technology without devastating the planet and causing our electrical bills to skyrocket. So tech companies are going nuclear—announcing plans to add more reactors in an all-out battle to secure as much data center power as possible and one-up each other’s AI ambitions. It won’t be easy. And it might not work at all.
Meta last month signed a new deal to expand three nuclear plants to power its data centers; it’s also planning to reopen an abandoned Illinois reactor. Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to reopen Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island—nearly half a century after an infamous partial meltdown at the plant. Amazon and Google have also invested in new reactor tech.
President Trump has issued four executive orders to promote the nuclear industry, and this week exempted new reactors from environmental review in the hopes of standing them up faster, NPR reports. But many challenges remain. For example, the administration and Westinghouse also plan to open 10 new reactors in the US, with construction starting in 2030. But Westinghouse’s last reactors in Georgia didn’t fare so well: They were seven years late, $18 billion over budget, and bankrupted the company. This time, Westinghouse says it will use Google’s AI products to streamline development.
Essentially, AI will help in creating reactors to power AI. What could go wrong?
To find out how feasible all of this is, I spoke to several experts in nuclear power. They point out major hurdles to growing our nation’s nuclear capabilities, foremost among them high costs and long construction timelines. Then there’s the potential public panic over a Chernobyl happening in their backyards. Plus, everything rests on new technology known as small modular reactors (SMRs), which is still in development and completely unproven at scale.
It could be a long time—decades, even—before your conversations with ChatGPT are powered by nuclear energy, and nothing is guaranteed. Here’s what Big Tech isn’t telling you about the challenges ahead.
AI Needs an Unimaginable Amount of Energy
To power all of our data center demands with nuclear energy, we’ll need significantly more capacity than is currently available or planned. Reactors’ steady, consistent energy supply works well with AI models, which the public expects to be able to use to generate wacky images or vibe code at any time of day. But creating a meaningful amount of nuclear power is a tall order.
According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, Big Tech companies would need 85 to 90 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear capacity to power their AI data centers, but just 10% of that will be available by 2030. Meta is currently accepting proposals to build projects that supply 1 to 4 GW, which translates to under 0.05% of Goldman Sachs’s estimate.
“Nuclear energy is a very realistic and well-suited option for data centers—the only issue is timing,” says Gary Cunningham, director of market research at Tradition Energy, an energy procurement and sustainability solutions advisor. “New nuclear would take years to deploy.”
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sits on an island in the Susquehanna River, near Middletown, Pennsylvania (Credit: George D. Lepp / The Image Bank Unreleased via Getty Images)
Mark Gribbin, chief legislative analyst at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, a state legislative oversight firm, echoes Cunningham’s analysis. “The short answer is that nuclear is a realistic solution in the long term, but it won’t solve the current and near-term energy demand crunch,” he says.
Gribbin spearheaded a report on data center demands in Northern Virginia, a region with more such centers than anywhere in the world. Virginia residents could see their electricity bills rise by $14 to $37 per month by 2040 (independent of inflation), largely due to a spike in data center demand, Gribbin’s team finds. The costs of building new grid infrastructure get passed to customers, as they would with any other large-scale project, including wind and solar installations.
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“Modern data centers are huge, as big as a stadium,” Gribbin tells us. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions centers that would cover large parts of Manhattan.
The power from Meta’s Illinois reactor, run by Constellation Energy, “will go directly into the local energy grid managed by the utility, but support our operations in the region,” a company spokesperson tells us.
Big ‘Not in My Backyard’ Energy
Will these old reactors be safe? None of the Big Tech companies is expressing any concern, at least publicly. But the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan, caused by a tsunami, renewed public safety concerns after decades of dormancy. (Chernobyl was in 1986.)
Presumably, new plants will have better alarm detection and auto-shutoff features. Still, it’s hard to imagine local communities embracing nuclear facilities in their backyards. Radiation exposure is a key concern in the event of an accident. It can cause a range of health conditions, such as cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. However, a decade after Fukushima, the UN found no statistically significant correlation between the disaster and cancer rates.
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A Pennsylvania community protests a planned nuclear-powered data center (Credit: Emily Forlini)
Towns across the US are already protesting data centers located too close to their homes. We visited one Pennsylvania community that’s losing land through eminent domain to make way for a new crop of them. Another Virginia community has suffered from constant roars and screeches coming from an Amazon data center, the Prince Williams Times reports. Meta’s Georgia facility guzzled so much water that local kitchen taps almost went dry, the New York Times reports.
“In Virginia, we already have a lot of local-level community opposition to solar and gas facilities,” Gribbin says. “I expect you’d see the same local opposition for proposed new nuclear facilities, especially if the facility is located away from one of the state’s two existing nuclear plants.”
The World Nuclear Association says that every industry has accidents, and nuclear power has had relatively few despite their high-profile nature. “The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity,” says the pro-nuclear organization. “The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining.”
It All Rests on ‘Unproven’ Small Modular Reactors
Technological developments are also a key part of making nuclear energy a bigger reality. The reactors at Three Mile Island and Meta’s Illinois plant are old. They are stereotypical-looking plants with giant, gray smokestacks billowing steam across the landscape. But experts say these reactors are not what would power a nuclear-rich future.
Instead, small modular reactors (SMRs) are the new It Girl of nuclear energy. According to Idaho National Laboratory, they’re anywhere from one-tenth to one-fourth the size of legacy reactors. They can be manufactured in a factory, making them easier to scale and deploy across grids nationwide.
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“There are a lot of companies throwing their hat into the ‘build new nuke’ circus, to attract investors and government funding, but the most likely candidates are not going to be the same tech used in prior builds, which are decades old, and instead will lean towards the small modular reactor designs being worked on,” Cunningham says.
Types of nuclear reactors (Credit: International Atomic Energy Agency)
There’s just one glaring problem: SMRs have never been deployed at scale anywhere in the world. The technology is still in a costly development phase, and “there are no guarantees they ever actually get deployed at utility scale because that hasn’t been done before,” Gribbin says.
Allison Macfarlane, a professor who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 2010s, writes that the “primary obstacle for nuclear energy, particularly SMRs, is cost—and the fact that they currently do not exist and are therefore unproven.”
Macfarlane also raises the issue of waste disposal. If we have reactors across the US, where do we put nuclear waste? The US, she writes, “has no long-term plan for nuclear waste disposal, as progress towards a deep geologic repository for disposal of high-level nuclear waste remains at an impasse.” Plans for a dumping ground in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain have yet to become a reality.
(Credit: David McNew / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images)
A consultant working with the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission “thought the earliest SMRs could start being deployed at utility scale would be 2035,” Gribbin says, but that “could be moved up if big-pocketed companies continue dumping resources into them.”
Amazon and Google’s nuclear plans are both focused on SMRs, not legacy reactors. Google says its deal is the “world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors.” It plans to bankroll the manufacturer, Kairos Power, to ensure its first SMR comes online by 2030, with more reactor deployments to follow by 2035.
However, Macfarlane isn’t optimistic that SMRs will ever happen, recommending investment in other “proven energy sources,” such as wind, solar, geothermal, and battery storage. “SMRs are unlikely to be ready to meet significant electricity needs for another 20 years or more, by which time electricity markets will have evolved, with cheaper storage and renewables more widely available,” she writes. “If, in the coming decade, nuclear power—particularly SMRs—proves economically unfeasible, investments in the sector will be for naught.”
Rolls-Royce SMR (Credit: Rolls-Royce)
But before we dismiss the potential for nuclear energy, it’s worth noting that Europe has had more success integrating it into its electrical grid. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, 65% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power. In the US, it’s currently 19%, per the US Energy Information Administration. Britain’s Rolls-Royce is developing next-generation SMRs and is the furthest ahead on the technology, Cunningham says. If the company is successful, the US could presumably use its products.
It remains to be seen if any country can go full nuclear. To power US data centers with the tech would require a large-scale, all-hands-on-deck deployment of (currently non-existent) SMRs in every corner of the grid. That means a flood of funding, the use of legacy reactors in the meantime (hopefully without any accidents), and a lot of luck. In the meantime, the explosive growth of data centers will cause distress for local residents and the planet. One has to wonder whether all of this is worth it just to date an AI chatbot?
About Our Expert
Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
Experience
As a news and features writer at PCMag, I cover the biggest tech trends that shape the way we live and work. I specialize in on-the-ground reporting, uncovering stories from the people who are at the center of change—whether that’s the CEO of a high-valued startup or an everyday person taking on Big Tech. I also cover daily tech news and breaking stories, contextualizing them so you get the full picture.
I came to journalism from a previous career working in Big Tech on the West Coast. That experience gave me an up-close view of how software works and how business strategies shift over time. Now that I have my master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, I couple my insider knowledge and reporting chops to help answer the big question: Where is this all going?
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