Part 7
By Peter Cary, Contributing Writer
As data centers drain the grid in Virginia and utilities grasp for ways to generate new power, “nuclear renaissance” has become the buzz.
Across the country, nuclear plants are upgrading their capacity, data companies are spending hundreds of millions to renovate old reactors, and at least 90 companies are competing worldwide to produce small reactors that can be mass-produced.
Last year Dominion Energy requested proposals for a 300-megawatt small reactor at its North Anna site. Amazon signed on.
President Trump has signed four executive orders to speed the nuclear supply chain and plant approvals. He wants 10 plants under construction in five years and nuclear output quadrupled by 2050. He promised $80 billion in taxpayer dollars to help. Westinghouse signed on.
This followed Amazon, Google, Meta, Dow Chemical and Occidental Petroleum vowing to help triple of worldwide nuclear energy output by 2050.
Even public opinion is on a roll: 61% of Americans support nuclear generation, according to a March Gallup poll.
Without question, the U.S. will be producing more nuclear energy in five years than it does today. But can that solve the new energy crisis? Can that supply the 60 gigawatts of new data center demand that PJM’s utilities are forecasting for 2030?
There are reasons to doubt it.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration says 54 commercial nuclear plants are operating in the country, with 94 reactors. They provide about 20 percent of America's power. Virginia has two nuclear plants: Dominion Energy’s North Anna in Louisa County and Surry in Surry County, which together generate 3.3 gigawatts of power.
The nuclear improvements under way do not add much power to the grid. A couple of data companies are taking over shuttered nuclear plants, but the extra energy produced will be mainly for themselves. Building new plants is expensive and takes years: The only two reactors built in the last 30 years are cranking out 2.4 gigawatts, but they took 15 years and their cost was double what was planned.
As for the much-talked-about small modular reactors, or SMRs, being a godsend, the only ones operating are in Russia and China. American ones are a decade from commercial production. Dominion has scratched out a plan to build one a year for six years, from 2040 to 2045, but that would add only 1.94 gigawatts of power. Significant amounts of power from nuclear fusion are even further away.
Some think that if every data center powered itself with an SMR, the energy crisis would be solved. But data centers are approved by locals who are notoriously resistant to having nuclear plants nearby. And there still is no national storage depot for their waste, meaning it will have to be stored on site or at a nearby plant.
Loudoun Supervisor Mike Turner, whose county’s 200 facilities are the world epicenter of data center development, and who has warily watched its data center power load increase, does not see the small reactors as a solution in his county.
“There is no way in the world this county is going to sit still for nuclear waste being stored in Loudoun County,” he said.
Still, bit by bit, the nation’s nuclear footprint is growing.
This photograph of the North Anna nuclear plant hangs in the visitors center. Dominion Energy may add a small reactor there. Photo by Doug Stroud.
Upgrades
A nuclear fission reactor works by aligning tubes full of uranium pellets to create a reaction, which generates immense heat. Coolant – in most cases, water – is piped in from a lake or river to surround the rods. It absorbs so much heat it makes steam, which spins a turbine that runs a generator.
The fuel lasts about five years, after which it is removed and cooled in water for several more years, then moved to steel-reinforced concrete canisters and stored on site.
Whether nuclear energy is “green” is debated: The facilities do produce nuclear waste, and uranium mining is said to be environmentally destructive. However, the plants do not create greenhouse gases or toxic coal by-products, and they generate large amounts of power for the small land area they take up.
Utilities have found they can get more power out of the existing plants through “uprates,” essentially upgrades to existing machinery. Typical improvements include more efficient steam turbines, pumps, or generators. Uprates can boost output by up to 20%, but most struggle to add 5%.
In 1986, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved an upgrade to North Anna, raising its output by 4.2%, and in 2009 the plant added 1.6% more to reach 1,700 megawatts. In 1995 the NRC also approved a 4.3% power upgrade to Surry 1 and 2 reactors near Newport News, taking them to 1,600 megawatts.
All the “uprates” added 247 megawatts to Dominion’s nuclear power output for Virginia, which now runs at about 3,350 megawatts in summer. Uprates are paid for by ratepayers over time.
Most recently, PJM, the Mid-Atlantic grid operator, approved three uprates in Illinois and one in New Jersey. Together they are slated to add about 500 megawatts of power by 2029.
That’s enough to run five large data centers or one very large one, but it only incrementally addresses the 32,000 megawatt increase in data center demand PJM forecasts by 2030 – a prediction that may even double.
Power purchase agreements
Meanwhile, data centers are striking their own deals to obtain more power.
In late October, Google said it would buy power from a closed nuclear power plant in Iowa owned by NextEra, which said it would re-start it in 2029.
In June, Amazon signed a deal with Talen Energy to buy up to 1,920 megawatts of nuclear power a year from Talen’s 42-year-old Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, 25 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The deal will present Talen with $18 billion in new revenue, which it can use to upgrade the 2,500-megawatt plant and possibly add small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services will use the power for an adjacent AI data center and other Pennsylvania operations.
Another big power purchase agreement in Pennsylvania will spur refurbishment of the mothballed Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island. Unit 2 was shuttered following its disastrous accident in 1979, but Unit 1 continued to operate until it was closed for efficiency reasons in 2019. Both Three Mile Island and Susquehanna are in the PJM zone.
Microsoft has signed a 20-year agreement to purchase power from Three Mile’s owner, Constellation Energy, for its AI data centers in the PJM region. The deal would increase Constellation’s profits and help fund the rehabilitation of Unit 1 to produce 850 more megawatts of power.
Microsoft promised the NRC that Unit 1 would be operating in three years, but some consider that highly optimistic for a plant with 51-year-old parts. The plant would need $1.6 billion in upgrades to turbines, generators, transformers, and cooling systems, and more to turn its control systems digital.
It will have to go through a rigorous application process, public hearings, and safety reviews that are much stricter than when it was first licensed.
New construction
New construction in the nuclear business is rare: Only two large reactors have been built in the United States in three decades. Completed in 2024 in Georgia, Vogtle 3 and 4 cost $36.8 billion – more than twice what was promised – and ran seven years past their planned eight-year construction time.
There were many fits and re-starts. Construction of the two Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors was to start in 2009 but the project ran into delays, cost overruns and lawsuits. In 2015, the prime contractor left and Westinghouse took direct control. Two years later Westinghouse, which was also struggling with losses in a similar project in South Carolina, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That year brought another delay due to design approvals, and construction estimates shot up $11 billion to $25 billion. Bechtel eventually finished the job in 2024.
The roughly $20 billion in cost overruns will have to be paid for by the ratepayers of Georgia Power and its partners Oglethorpe Power and the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, both of which sued Georgia Power because of the overruns. When the second reactor was finished, average ratepayers' bills increased by more than $14, part of an overall $43 monthly bill hike in 2024.
“If other states are paying any attention, the two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle should be the last reactors ever built in the United States,” said Patty Durand, former president of the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative who just launched Georgia Utility Watch.
Kirk Schnoebelen, former president of the uranium supply company Urenco, says plenty of lessons were learned in Georgia, and he expects that now big nuclear plants could be built a lot faster – maybe even in as little as six years.
Energy company Fermi America thinks it can meet that timeline. It is seeking NRC approval to build four one-gigawatt reactors as part of a massive combined gas, solar, nuclear and data center facility near Amarillo, Texas, with the first reactor intended to come online in 2032.
Still, when it comes to lessons, South Carolina may offer the most. That state’s failed project became dubbed “Nukegate.” It was properly known as Virgil C. Summer Units 2 and 3, employing two Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. After Westinghouse’s bankruptcy and seeing potential cost overruns of $15 billion, the owner, a utility called SCANA, stopped the project in July 2017 after four years of work.
A prosecutor later called what remains an “$11 billion nuclear ghost town.” Now overgrown with weeds, what remains are half-finished concrete walls, an unshielded containment vessel that looks like a silo, and spires of rusting rebar that jut into the air.
SCANA’s CEO, Kevin Marsh, spent 17 months in federal prison for covering up costs and delays. COO Kevin Byrne got 15 months’ home confinement. Two Westinghouse executives got six months to one year for lying to SCANA or federal agents.
SCANA went bankrupt and Dominion bought it in 2019 for $13.4 billion, inheriting the cost of the failed project. Dominion’s South Carolina customers are paying $8 a month over 15 years to erase $2.3 billion in debt.
Last October it was reported that members of the governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council proposed a study to see what it would take to complete the project.
In Virginia, Dominion received NRC approval in 2017 for a new North Anna Unit 3, then halted it, apparently for economic reasons. Spokesman Timothy Eberly said Dominion is now looking at building SMRs there.
The bottom line is that after 15 years of nuclear plant work, the U.S. has two new reactors churning out 2.4 gigawatts of power as data centers add 50 times that load to the national grid.
SMRs
To overcome obstacles associated with traditional nuclear reactors of cost, build time and safety worries, industry attention has shifted to small modular reactors. They come in all shapes and sizes, but many are cigar-shaped, with a typical 200-megawatt model sized at 15 feet in diameter and 75 feet tall.
Unlike the traditional big 1,000-megawatt reactors, they produce less than 300 megawatts, can be assembled in a factory, and, advocates argue, are safer due to their size and design. And they can be stacked in gangs to approximate the output of their big cousins.
Making smaller reactors is not a new idea. In 1954 the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched, and the secretary of defense authorized the U.S. Army to develop small nuclear power plants to supply electricity to bases at remote locations.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, eight were built under the Army Nuclear Power Program, installed in Antarctica and Alaska, among other places, and at a training facility at the program’s headquarters at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. One was installed to power Camp Century, a U.S. base built under Greenland’s ice sheet to house a nuclear missile launch site. Assembled from prefabricated parts, the reactor put out 2 megawatts of power. It was shut down in 1963 and the project abandoned in 1966. The entire program was terminated in 1979 as it was not seen to be a necessary military program.
Still, academic and commercial interest remained. In 2007 Oregon State University researchers working with a company called NuScale Power built a prototype for non-military use.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy created a technical support program for small reactors, and in 2021 the Biden administration issued an order to promote SMRs with installations on military bases. Last year the U.S. Navy solicited ideas to put “contractor owned/operated nuclear power sites” on seven Navy bases, including the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. Forty responses are being reviewed.
And on Oct. 14, the Army announced that it was pushing to install up to a dozen SMRs to power bases in the Western United States in the next few years.
At the same time, the Defense Department was moving ahead with Project Pele, a program to create small 1- to 5-megawatt “micro reactors” that could be shipped to remote bases. A BXMT plant in Lynchburg, Va., is assembling a reactor that will be set up at Idaho National Laboratory in 2026 for testing. BMXT is also on a short list of eight companies to be considered for building microreactors on Army and Air Force bases. The hope is to have the first ones operating by the early 2030s.
On the commercial side, in 2022, NuScale obtained NRC approval for its design, which uses the same water-cooling process as big reactors. Partly funded by the U.S. government, NuScale joined with an association of Utah municipal power companies to develop a bank of 12 small 50-megawatt reactors that would send them 600 megawatts of power. But costs doubled to $9.3 billion, several cities pulled out, and the project was cancelled.
Then, last May 29, NuScale announced that it had received design approval for a higher-powered 77-megawatt design, and is now pursuing projects in Romania, Ghana and elsewhere outside the States.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in July that 74 small modular reactor designs are being pursued in 15 countries.
“The United States has about a quarter of those,” said Cindy Vestergaaard, a nuclear safeguards expert at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. “There's high-temperature gas reactors. There's molten salt, there's pebble beds, there's all these prisms. There's underground, there’s above ground. I mean, the whole breadth of different types of reactors are there now, at least in design phases.”
A Santa Clara company called Oklo is working on a small, 15- to 20-megawatt liquid metal-cooled reactor. On June 11 Oklo received a notice from the Defense Department that it was its choice to build a small reactor to power Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. (A notice of intent starts the period in which competitors can protest.)
But Oklo and NuScale are not alone. ”There’s just a massive amount of interest in companies that are in this space. Most of those are fission, but I think there's like 30 or 40 nuclear fusion companies as well,” said Brian Gitt, Oklo’s business development leader.
Some models, if approved, would be bought by utilities. Dominion listed six potential SMRS totaling 1,944 megawatts in its 2025 plan to add generation – it now hopes to build one a year starting in 2040. And in mid-October Dominion and Amazon signed an agreement to create new financing structures to promote development of SMRs in Virginia. It was unclear whether that would pertain only to Dominion’s six planned SMRs, or to others, too.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, a four-unit SMR that will produce 1.2 gigawatts has received the go-ahead to begin construction with a target for completion of 2030. The Tennessee Valley Authority wants NRC approval to build a 300-megawatt SMR at its Clinch River Nuclear site by 2032.
Gitt, however, thinks the answer to powering data centers will not lie with utilities, but with each data center building its own SMR.
Whether that will happen fast enough seems unlikely. Not a single commercial SMR has been licensed by the NRC to be built, and their initial output will be small.
Meanwhile, opposition is mounting. The Sierra Club calls them “unproven and risky” and is worried about waste disposal.
The Union of Concerned Scientists says they have been oversold. Ed Lyman, the union’s director of nuclear power safety, argues that they do not produce cheaper electricity and are not safer than large, conventional reactors.
But what may slow them most is reality. When a few finally are built in the early 2030s, they will still need a shakeout period of a couple of years with inevitable design changes, says Schnoebelen.
“These advanced reactor companies have grandiose visions that even before they start up a reactor, customers are going to be lined up around the block, wanting to place orders,” he said. “These guys are going to have to demonstrate not only that they work technically, but that they're economical, and then customers will evaluate whether they want to invest in an advanced reactor or a natural gas turbine or a solar farm to generate the electricity that they need.“
You can reach Peter Cary at pcary@faquier.com.
A Project by the Fauquier Times and Prince William Times
Designed by GoodPoint