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SAN FRANCISCO, November 24 ------ Silicon Valley is putting big money into nuclear energy projects to power ambitious plans surrounding artificial intelligence, pitching the sustainable power source as crucial to its green transition. Some of the technology world’s biggest players, like Facebook’s parent company Meta, are eyeing such cleaner energy options to run their power-intensive data centers.

Many have their sights set on small modular reactors (SMRs), which are advanced nuclear reactors with a power capacity of about a third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors. They are a fraction of the size of conventional nuclear reactors and can be assembled at a factory and transported elsewhere for installation. Some experts said these SMRs are also up to 8 per cent more efficient than traditional reactors. “That efficiency gain … is exactly what the world needs to meet sustainability goals and also realize a net zero trajectory,” said David Brown, director of the Energy Transition Practice at global analytics provider Wood Mackenzie. “That's an important shift for the sector that we believe features very prominently in discussions with governments and potential offtakes.”

A CARBON-FREE ALTERNATIVE

Power demand from data centers, fueled by AI computing, is set to make up about 8 per cent of global power demand by 2050, according to experts. That will make phasing out fossil fuel power plants even tougher, especially given that data centers require constant stable power. Many believe nuclear energy can help bridge that gap as it is a cleaner, carbon-free alternative.

For example, tech giant Google inked an agreement with Kairos Power last year to build SMRs. In what it called a “world’s first” deal, Google ordered six or seven SMRs from the nuclear power startup, with the first set to be completed by 2030 and the remaining by 2035. The search engine and cloud computing powerhouse, which is owned by Alphabet, said nuclear provides “a clean, round-the-clock power source that can help us reliably meet electricity demands”. Microsoft and Amazon have also recently made similar investments. In September, Microsoft signed a deal to resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. This was the site of the most serious reactor meltdown in the United States’ history.

Source: channelnewsasia.com