Speaker 1: A ChatGPT query uses about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search. That difference is the catalyst for a new era of energy consumption, one where our evolving technology demands are now reshaping how the U.S. and the world power our future.

Speaker 2: Nuclear energy at a turning point, see momentum as power demand jumps from electrification in data centers. Nuclear power and technology, or big tech getting involved in it. Nuclear power has sort of gotten back into the conversation. We're going to be way ahead of A.I. and we've got to produce tremendous amounts of electricity.

Speaker 3: We're in the midst of a nuclear renaissance right now, and that's because power demand is meaningfully rising for the first time in a few decades. And at the moment, we just don't have enough clean energy options to meet that power demand from things like reshoring, electrification, as well as data centers.

Speaker 1: This is why big tech is betting on nuclear power. Data centers around the world built by tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are hungry, not just for A.I. training sets, but for energy. Artificial intelligence driven by massive computing power is reshaping not only how we work, but also how we think about energy consumption.

Speaker 4: What A.I. did is it escalated the power demand at individual data centers by a factor of 10, or even 100 if we're looking forward into the future. That means those are data centers that are needing power along the same scale as entire cities.

Speaker 1: The Department of Energy estimates global electricity demand could rise from a third to three quarters by 2050, with the U.S. energy grid seeing an unprecedented strain. Data centers powering artificial intelligence and cloud computing will be among the biggest contributors to this growing demand. Energy use was already slowly ticking up, but oil and gas prices skyrocketed as energy powerhouse Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and geopolitical volatility was on the rise.

Speaker 3: That's really when these dialogues started to happen again in earnest, the idea of what is energy security, what does energy independence mean, and that's when we saw countries start to look at nuclear once again.

Speaker 1: As open A.I. introduced chat GPT to the masses in November 2022, the buzz and investment around large language models put the U.S. on a path to an A.I. future and the energy demands that come with it.

Speaker 4: It wasn't the tech company's problem to understand how electricity worked. They knew that they could build a data center, plug into the grid, and there was enough power. And then their marketing people made sure that they had enough renewable energy credits to claim that they are actually using renewables to power their data center.

Speaker 3: And so really right now, everyone is trying to play catch up of how are we going to meet all of these power demand goals as well as reduce our emissions. And so that's where nuclear comes into the picture. Solar and wind are great, but they're intermittent resources. That means that it's not always sunny. It's not always windy. So they aren't 24-7. And what nuclear is, is it's 24-7 baseload emissions-free energy.

Speaker 1: Major tech companies are leading the charge. Just last spring, Amazon agreed to a nuclear power purchase agreement with Talon Energy in Pennsylvania and bought the adjacent data center from Talon for $650 million. Now, Amazon is investing over $500 million into a number of nuclear power projects ranging from Virginia to Washington state. Microsoft is working with Constellation Energy to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear facility with plans for $1.5 billion in upgrades there. Meanwhile, Bill Gates founded TerraPower is also working on a plant in Wyoming. Then there's Google, who's working with startup Kyros Power to bring advanced reactors online in the next decade, though no dollar amounts have been announced for those investments yet. Tesla also says it's looking into nuclear power, targeting one to four gigawatts in new energy capacity. But these investments and partnerships are becoming an industry-wide trend, all driven by a shared belief. Nuclear is the only solution.

Speaker 4: The tech companies have a vision of the world based on AI. That world is only possible if they produce a large amount of clean, steady power. That's why their work into nuclear now is fundamental to whether their entire world vision can come true.

Speaker 1: These are existing and retired nuclear sites in the U.S. with space for new reactors. The next step in the sustainable transition is to design, build, and bring those new reactors online alongside the existing ones. Enter SMRs, or small modular reactors. Unlike traditional reactors, SMRs are smaller, faster to build, and more cost effective. They produce around 300 megawatts of energy compared to the typical one gigawatt output of traditional plants. And their modular designs allow for off-site assembly, reducing construction costs and build timelines. Tech and energy companies are working to bring several of these reactors online over the next decade as incremental steps toward a broader energy transformation.

Speaker 3: You can assemble them at a factory and then bring them to the site for the final assembly versus having to build it from scratch on the location. So that's what's traditionally been done with commercial reactors. And that's why they've often been very expensive. And so there's a lot of hope that with these smaller modular reactors that are about 300 megawatts or even micro reactors, which can be tens of megawatts, that could kind of address some of the issues of these cost overruns.

Speaker 1: SMRs don't operate much differently than traditional reactors, but the efficiency gains they do offer will be important for intermittently scaling our energy future.

Speaker 5: Obviously, there's a role to build still some of these plants, but small kind of scales more naturally with how demand growth goes, especially when you look at the AI side of data center space. A lot of sweet spots are in the couple hundred megawatts in terms of total usage. But those are building up in dozens of megawatt chunks per time. So they themselves are modular. So the smaller plants really can match that growth more organically.

Speaker 1: While SMRs hold promise, they're still a few years away. All plans in the U.S. are currently slated to open in 2030 and beyond. Right now, there are no SMRs operational in the U.S. and regulatory approval will remain a challenge for years to come. There are also experts who say our nuclear solution should be a combination of these new smaller output designs in addition to building more traditional commercial reactors.

Speaker 3: While the SMRs are cheaper up front, they also provide meaningfully less power. And so while there's so much momentum behind SMRs, there are others that say we really need new commercial scale reactors to meet our energy goals and to meet our climate goals. And right now, there are no commercial reactors under construction in the U.S.

Speaker 4: I think that for a country like the United States, the natural process is we need an enormous number of large reactors, like that's how much power we need, is that SMRs will be a way to open up the conversation. SMR gives us a term that sounds like it's new and advanced. So it makes a lot of people a lot more comfortable talking about nuclear.

Speaker 3: Nuclear has always been very polarizing from the get-go. And then accidents like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima really kind of influenced the public discourse on nuclear and its benefits versus its drawbacks.

Speaker 2: The Three Mile Island power plant, the plant's reactor cooling system malfunctioned yesterday. It exposed about eight workers to some degree of nuclear contamination.

Speaker 1: Experts argue much of the opposition is based on misinformation.

Speaker 5: Cars were being checked with Geiger counters. You're not finding anything, are you, Brian? Not a damn thing.

Speaker 1: In today's information age, more people have access to data that highlights nuclear's safety and effectiveness.

Speaker 4: Many people think that meltdowns created the anti-nuclear movement. That's not the case. Meltdowns confirmed to the anti-nuclear movement that they were right and converted a lot of people who were previously pro-nuclear or neutral. Because there was already an anti-nuclear movement based on fear of nuclear weapons and opposition to abundant energy, it was able to reinterpret and add public fear to otherwise essentially benign accidents like Three Mile Island.

Speaker 3: The other main opposition to nuclear has always been around its cost. What's different this time around is tech companies have a lot of money and they also have a very big vested interest in getting these nuclear power plants off the ground. This is incredibly long term. These reactors can be online for 60 to 80 years. And so in the long term, that nets out into a very attractive option.

Speaker 5: I think when you look at a lot of use cases around energy growth and scale up just in history, it's often going to be dictated and driven by, you know, where it solves the most pressing issues and the most people who are in the most pain. And I think what we're seeing is there's a crunch on that on the tech side and that helps because those companies also happen to be some of the biggest companies in the world, which then supports, I think, some more aggressive scale up and scale out.

Speaker 4: Depending on how long a nuclear plant's been closed and how much has been already taken apart, the cost to bring back a nuclear reactor can range from maybe $100 million in the case of a recently closed plant with no updates needed to a billion or more if significant rework has to be done and parts need to be bought and installed.

Speaker 1: Energy demand in the U.S. is rapidly rising at a rate never seen before, expected to increase as much as 20 percent over the next decade. Right now, nuclear makes up about 20 percent of our energy use in the U.S., but that share is only going to increase. While there are other factors in our increased power needs, data centers and A.I. are the main drivers. Market interest in A.I.'s potential has also gone up, part of the reason for the complete shift in focus toward the technology and now its energy needs.

Speaker 4: The problem is the tech companies eventually needed enough power that they exceeded the ability to get it from the grid. And because the grid was not well prepared for big tech, because big tech had been pushing in the opposite direction, the wrong direction for baseload power, they had to realize that they had to make it themselves. So big tech had to build out of the box that they themselves had put themselves into.

Speaker 3: It feels like every single day there's a big new study saying, you know, it's going to stress the grid, it's going to cause all of these problems. And so there are many in the industry who say that because it gets smarter with time, it won't require as much energy. And that could certainly end up being the case. And on the other hand, we have power demand growing from other things like reshoring and electrification. And so there is no doubt that power demand is going up.

Speaker 1: But the bigger picture here is the growing potential of a nuclear powered future. By driving innovation and funding critical infrastructure, companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are helping to reshape the energy landscape.

Speaker 5: I think maybe the best way to phrase it is to borrow what I've heard Sam say, which is abundant intelligence is largely built on abundant energy. And so I think tech's ability to continue to scale and deliver better things for humanity is going to be underpinned by availability of energy.

Speaker 1: The path to a nuclear powered future is not without challenges, though. Building new plants and reviving old ones is a challenge met with obstacles like regulatory hurdles, supply chain complexities and long timelines for construction.

Speaker 3: For the first time, we're now bringing old reactors back online. Right now, there's not actually a blueprint for how we go about doing this. But I think right now the industry is trying to figure out how do we go about doing this? What are the first steps?

Speaker 1: Yet the momentum is clear with SMR set to come online in the 2030s and existing plants being revived for the first time in decades. Tech is now leading the way toward a new era of energy and sustainability.

Speaker 4: We are finally moving in the right energy direction now that the hungriest energy users in society have found nuclear energy and plan to deploy it. It's not the profitability of their investment in nuclear, per se, that they're chasing. What they're hoping to do is unlock a future that looks a lot like what techno-optimists dreamed of in the 1960s and 70s when we thought we would have a thousand nuclear plants in the U.S. In a way, tech, through power needs for AI, are unlocking the beautiful future we thought we were headed to before the oil shocks of the 70s.