Its a huge week for nuclear energy.
Two days later, Amazon announced itsplan to invest $500 milliontowards the development of its own SMRs.
After decades of a lengthy and painful drawdown, nuclear energy is back.
In this aerial view, the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant stands in the middle of the Susquehanna River on October 10, 2024 near Middletown, Pennsylvania.© Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Nuclear power is expensive, the construction times long, and the cost of a mistake is deadly.
Nuclear energy is efficient and, aside from when things go disastrously wrong, clean.
This new tech is designed to sidestep one of nuclear energys biggest problems: time and money.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take years to build.
A traditional plant can take a decade or more to come online.
Georgia succeeded at great cost, South Carolina failed also at great cost.
South Carolina started its new reactors in 2008.
It was a disaster.
The state spent more than $9 billion on the project and the reactors were never built.
Subsequent investigations into the project revealed that theconstruction was a scam.
Several of them plead guilty to fraud charges and went to prison.
The new reactors in Georgia fared better, but the costs were incredible.
The plan was to add two new reactors to an existing plant.
Georgia approved construction plans in 2009.
The initial pitch was that it would be ready by 2017 and cost $14 billion.
Before the power plants in Georgia, Americas newest nuclear plant entered service in 2016.
Construction on it had begun in 1973.
Before that, the U.S. hadnt seen a new nuclear power plant since 1996.
Europe is ever more bearish on nuclear power than the U.S.
When nuclear power goes bad, it goes really bad.
Germanyclosedits last nuclear power plant in 2023.
Italy shut its plants down after the Chernobyl disaster and has a moratorium on the construction of new plants.
Several countries in Europe have similar prohibitions around the construction of new plants.
In South Korea, the issue of nuclear power is acontentious onethat informs the policy decisions ofpresidential candidates.
But tech is hungry for power.
Data centers and AI burn thousands of megawatts every year.
The pitch of small modular reactors is that they cost about one third of a traditional reactor.
To date, not a single small modular reactor has come online.
These new reactors are a gamble, a promising one, but still a gamble.
According to Google, its first small reactors will spin up in 2030.
Thats a long time to wait in the fast moving world of advanced technology.
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