AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. What we're doing here is exciting. Having a reliable power source that keeps your electricity costs as low, everybody should be rooting for that. Nuclear power plants are coming back from the dead to feed a growing demand for electricity from AI.

0:51This is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBOR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:59The United States is ravenous for electricity. And lately, that's been the focus of our environmental reporting project, Reverse Course. Today, we're taking a closer look at nuclear power. The White House wants to quadruple it by 2050 to meet the recent surge in demand for electricity for data centers and artificial intelligence. But nuclear reactors are expensive and difficult to build. So in the meantime, there are at least three states facing a crunch between their climate goals and that growing hunger for electricity. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa are all restarting plants that they closed just a few years ago.

1:44I recently visited two of them to see how it's going and what the neighbors think.

1:56The Palisades Nuclear Generating Station is nestled between sand dunes on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It shut down for financial reasons in 2022, but you wouldn't know it now, with hundreds of workers streaming through its security barriers every day. Palisades is on track to reopen early next year, and when it does, it'll be the first time that's ever happened to an American nuclear plant. Coal plants in Michigan are closing, but electricity demand is rising. Nick Kulp of Holtec, the company that owns Palisades, says nuclear can help fill the gap without contributing to climate change.

2:34Michigan used to be more than 50 percent coal generation maybe 15 years ago. How do you backfill that when you see demand on the horizon, like AI, like data storage centers, like keeping the lights on at home and for new manufacturing? So how do you actually bring a reactor out of retirement? It starts with the staff. Jim Bird is the plant's assistant operations manager. He had moved on to a nuclear plant in Mississippi after Palisades closed three years ago. When they started hiring back up, I got a very quick call, interested to come back, and I said, yes, I'm coming home. Palisades is my home.

3:13These people are my family. And that work family is growing. We'll come on back here. Bird shows me the training center, an exact replica of the reactor control room, right down to its 1960s pink and green color scheme. Right now they're going through, this is one of my initial classes, and they're doing abnormal operating procedures. We're going through, training them. If this event happens, here's what we do. Bird says he and his colleagues know how to run trainings. But recommissioning is something no one has done before. I had existing licensed operators that had a license from the NRC when we shut down.

3:52We had to work on getting those back. We had the reconstitute simulator. When we came back, there was over 20 missing parts in there that we had to put back in and get it back to the standards that you need to do to be able to test them. Just exactly like they were when we shut down. All that work is worth it, he says, to get the plant back up and running. What we're doing here is exciting. We may be the first, we won't be the last. Having a reliable power source that keeps your electricity costs as low, everybody should be rooting for that. Leaving the plant, everyone has to go through a radiation portal monitor, like a walk-through metal detector, but for radioactivity.

4:34Three, two, one, clean. Safety is, of course, a major concern for nuclear power plants. Regulators require plants to have an emergency plan for a 10-mile zone around each reactor. Bird points out he and a lot of plant employees live within that zone. So does Dewi Cook. Hello. Hi there. I'm Chris Bentley looking for Dewi Cook. She's the township supervisor of Covert, Michigan. Her family has been in the area for generations. Her dad actually helped build Palisades 60 years ago. And she says the plant has been an economic lifeline ever since. Having that stability and having that employment available for folks who live here is something that I think was taken for granted for a very long time.

5:23Taxes from Palisades at one point made up 40 % of the township's revenue. So Cook and others around covert are happy to see it coming back. Money is one thing. What about safety? Absolutely. I think you'd have to be pretty naive to not think about that a little bit. So I grew up with the sirens being tested. I think it was every last Saturday of the month growing up, and it was just a normal thing. But, you know, we always knew it was there. And because you had so many people who worked there and understood the plant and understood that industry, I think that helped a lot that, you know, education is key to understanding why people fear things like nuclear energy.

6:07Do you feel totally safe? I don't feel totally safe because I don't think you can 100 % trust any sort of technology, whether it be from a gas plant or a nuclear power plant or any sort of large industry. But I think what's important is that Holtec continues to be a good neighbor. Another nuclear power plant that shut down and is in the process of coming back is a name you might have heard before, Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania. From the banks of the Susquehanna River, just south of Harrisburg, you can see the cooling towers rising from Three Mile Island, which was home to the worst nuclear disaster in American history in the 1970s.

6:51One of the reactors on the island had a partial meltdown, And in fact, the incident helped close a chapter in the history of American nuclear power. But the other reactor on the island kept going and produced power until 2019, when it shut down for financial reasons. That reactor, like Palisades in western Michigan, is in the process of coming back online.

7:15When the plant was operating, I was a licensed senior reactor operator. Craig Smith is one of the people in charge of the recommissioning on Three Mile Island. He was in high school in nearby Hershey during the partial meltdown in 1979. He still lives within the plant's evacuation zone and says he was sad to see the remaining reactor close in 2019. Yeah, I mean, I understood the decision. I wasn't bitter about it. It's an economic decision, right? It was eerie, right? I mean, when you walk through the plant now, all the equipment's still there, but it's deathly quiet, right? You don't hear the hum of the motors, the steam going through the lines, and all that kind of stuff.

7:53So it's an eerie kind of feeling when you walk through the plant. That eerie feeling will be gone soon. A red LCD clock in Smith's office counts down the 540 days or so until the plant's scheduled reopening in late 2027, which, like the restart of Palisades in Michigan, is backed by federal loans. The recommissioned plant on Three Mile Island, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, will pump 800 megawatts into the regional grid. But all that electricity is spoken for. Microsoft agreed to buy an equivalent amount for the next 20 years to power its data centers. Smith says that's a sign of how fast things are changing in the energy industry.

8:35The nuclear renaissance, I've seen three or four of them in my career. but we need to keep a balanced portfolio of generation. You can't have all your eggs in one basket for generation. So I think it's great for the country to have nuclear able to be a baseload for the future. Gene Stilp has a different take. The people here, who are they here to serve? The shareholders of Constellation and Microsoft or the people who live here? And so we're sticking up with the people who live here rather than the shareholders of Microsoft and Constellation. Stilp has been fighting nuclear power on Three Mile Island since before the plant opened in the 70s and says recommissioning is an unnecessary risk to public safety.

9:16To make his point, he takes me to the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, a major hospital complex within the plant's evacuation zone. He's wearing a blazer with no TMI restart sewn in the back. What they're proposing for evacuation does not work, and so that's my line in the sand. And population increases in central Pennsylvania, the realization that there are so many people at risk here. The best thing to do is to take away that risk, eliminate the risk. That's where I stand. And Stilp is not alone. Eric Epstein runs a group called Three Mile Island Alert. At a coffee shop down the street from the Pennsylvania state capitol, he says the country is making mistakes in its rush to power data centers.

10:01There was no public discussion about whether or not we're going to restart Three Mile Island. We're going to do it. Tech bros are into it. We're going to do it. You know, it's like America loves a Hollywood ending. There ain't no Hollywood ending to nuclear power. You get electricity for a moment, but you get nuclear waste forever. Forever is a long time. Epstein says the economics might have changed for nuclear power, but the risks have not. You know, you can put all the green paint you want on nuclear power. There has been no viable solution to isolate nuclear waste. Who in their right mind would store nuclear waste on an island, in a river, that floods, that empties into the Chesapeake Bay?

10:42Constellation says the spent fuel on site has been safely stored on the island for decades, in fortified containers required by the government to withstand natural disasters. But those concerns are not lost on Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas. I personally am very interested in transparency and accountability for this in the sense of, you know, ensuring that it's as safe as it possibly can be, that we're tracking the cost and ensuring that the taxpayers aren't carrying any of the burden, that we have a good plan for the waste management, and that ultimately the community impact is positive.

11:14We plan for the worst and we hope for the best, right? So how big of a solution is recommissioning, anyway? Meeting the country's rising demand for electricity will take a lot more than reviving a few recently decommissioned plants. But it's a lot faster than building new ones. There are also technical updates that can squeeze more power out of some existing plants. And all that will help blunt the immediate electricity crunch from AI and data centers, says Jacopo Bongiorno of MIT. Realistically, in the next five years, nuclear could capture 20 % of that demand. If that demand continues in the 2030s, then you can make the investment now to build new reactors, and then nuclear can actually capture a lot more than 20%.

12:02If nuclear is going to meet rising electricity demand in the long term, it's going to mean a lot more new reactors going up all over the country. So while Western Michigan and Central Pennsylvania may be the first communities asking whether that's a good investment, they will not be the last.

12:23By the way, the third nuclear plant aiming to restart that I mentioned in the intro is the Dwayne Arnold nuclear plant in eastern Iowa. Its owner, NextEra, says it's looking at bringing the plant back online in late 2028 or early 2029. now that it's signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with Google. Coming up next, we're going to take a closer look at what it would take to build new nuclear plants. It will not be easy. Stick around. Thank you.

13:46The Secretary of Energy says there's a nuclear energy renaissance coming to the United States. In addition to those restarts that we were just hearing about, the Trump administration is backing plans to build a fleet of new power plants. But how realistic is that? And what needs to happen to make it a reality? That's what we asked Katie Huff at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy from 2022 to 2024 under President Biden, who also thought nuclear energy was part of the country's power-hungry future, not its past.

14:25The Biden administration thought nuclear could help the country meet its climate goals. And while the current president is not so interested in climate goals, Trump, of course, is cutting funding for clean energy projects and pulling permits for wind and solar farms. His government has gone all in on nuclear. Katie Huff tells Peter O'Dowd there is a lot of potential for nuclear power, which right now provides about 20 % of U.S. electricity. Yeah, you know, nuclear energy is in the spotlight because it is the country's single largest source of carbon-free energy, and the Biden administration recognized that if you work backwards from, you know, net zero goals by 2050, for example, then you need an incredible amount of nuclear energy.

15:09We estimated we would have to triple nuclear power in the United States in order to get there by 2050. The reality is that is a very fast timeline for builds. It rivals the fastest rate that we've ever produced new nuclear power plants in this country, which happened over the course of two decades in the 70s to the 90s. Well, let's talk about why that's so difficult, because we've only seen two new nuclear reactors come online in the past decades. The Vodal plant in Georgia in 2023, those reactors were seven years late and$17 billion over budget. Why is it so difficult to build this stuff? Yeah, delays and cost overruns are often because each nuclear power plant build is treated as a first-of-a-kind project.

16:02You know, imagine trying to build a commercial airplane when every single part has to be custom designed and approved by the regulator for the first time. That's really slow and expensive until you get to a place where you no longer have to approve those parts and design approaches and construction processes. But ideally, if you can build more of them on a quick pace shortly after the first few, then you should see some lessons learned. But new reactor designs are also being proposed as well. And they'll face those first-of-a-kind risks for the first few units. One promising technology that we've been hearing about for years is something called a small modular reactor.

16:43They're smaller than these typical nuclear plants. It means, you know, in theory, they're cheaper and easier to get the permitting for. How likely are those at this point to play a big role in the future energy mix? Yeah, I think because those capital costs are going to be lower per unit, because they're a little bit more flexible in terms of deployment in fleets, the hope is that we'll also get to that nth of a kind quicker if each unit is smaller. But per megawatt hour generated, they probably will be slightly more expensive than the bigger units, which get economies of scale. How realistic is it that they're being built where some of them are being built right now?

17:23One of the things I think is interesting about this, you mentioned the Biden administration's climate priorities, and that's why it liked nuclear. The Trump administration is also into nuclear, but for different reasons. And the president now is promising$80 billion to build nuclear reactors. Here's his energy secretary, Chris Wright, on CNBC last month. There's huge interest for private capital to come back in, but the early moving projects will have a government either credit guarantees or debt that's provided. We'll be out of that business in three, four, five, six years. This is just to get an industry started again.

18:04How does that sound to you, that government subsidies are at this point necessary to bring down the cost and get the industry started again? Yeah, absolutely. You know, because of the enormous capital investment required to build a big, complex, precise machine, government support has played a key role in unlocking private investment, especially through the loan programs office. But just as important are those committed customers, whether it's companies like Dow Chemical or chip manufacturers or data centers. That early demand also helps to reduce risk and build those first few reactors, after which we hope the costs will come down rapidly.

18:44So I guess my question is, what's a reasonable timeline for a revival like this? Because as we talked about these small modular reactors, even they take years to build. We spoke recently with MIT's Vijay Gadapali, and here's what he told us. 20 years from now, can I see a large part of our grid being nuclear? It's certainly possible, but not in the next five and certainly not in the next two or three. So if we're talking about meeting electricity demand that's rising rapidly right now, is a nuclear buildout too slow to be of much help? Yeah, I think that is a real concern. In order to meet that moment, you're going to have to build nuclear power plants, you know, on time and on budget, even if those budgets are fairly high initially.

19:33And some of those schedules will take a decade to get a reactor online from start of construction to connection to the grid. Though there is certainly a hope that some smaller reactors might get from construction to grid connection quicker, time will tell. And we'll have to see whether the U.S. engineering and construction companies involved in these projects are ready for that challenge. Have we figured out a solution to the safety problem necessarily? Is that still an issue in what to do with the waste? Ah, that's a very reasonable question. First, it's important to know that over the last 60, 70 years of commercial nuclear energy in the U.S., our spent nuclear fuel has never harmed anyone.

20:16And while there's ongoing work in the Department of Energy about where to store it long term, that fuel is currently safely stored at reactor sites right now. Reactors themselves have historically been extremely safe in the United States. Even the Three Mile Island accident, which is the worst in our history, you know, killed no one. And we have real hopes that some of the passive safety features of this current generation of proposed and existing new construction will be even safer. But it requires strong regulation. And, you know, I hope to see that that continues. Katie Huff at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and former assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy.

21:01Thank you. Thank you. Well, Katie Huff mentioned the need to get costs down. That's really the whole thing right there. More on that after one more short break.

21:23It really struck me visiting those nuclear plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania, just how quickly things have changed in the electricity business. One guy's story really sums it up. The first person I ran into when I got inside the Palisades plant in Michigan was their chief nuclear officer, Rich Barone. He's new to Michigan, having spent four decades at New York's Indian Point Energy Center. That plant closed in 2021, and he helped shut it down. Not long after that, he moved to Michigan to restart Palisades. The trend three, four, five years ago was a lot of work on decommissioning, and now that's all changed.

22:05Nick Culp of Holtec says for now, restarting a plant costs about$2 billion, or less than a third of what it would take to build a new one, and a whole lot quicker. When you factor in how long it takes to construct a new nuclear power plant, especially here in the United States, and the amount of money that goes into it, it's a pretty good value proposition for getting firm baseload energy back online. As we've been hearing, there just aren't that many plants like Palisades that can be restarted. Definitely not enough to meet some of the projections for electricity demand over the next decade. But there's another way this little plant in Michigan is at the crossroads of some big trends in the industry.

22:44The Department of Energy promised Holtec up to$400 million in federal funding to build small modular reactors. As we heard from Katie Huff, that technology could help speed up the deployment of new nuclear power in the future. But so far, it has not been commercially viable. And that's really what's been holding back the American nuclear renaissance promised by politicians and industry boosters for years. It's expensive and slow to deploy. But maybe it doesn't have to be. Joe Kletcha is the chief nuclear officer of The Nuclear Company, a South Carolina startup that's raising money to try to revive the American supply chain for nuclear power.

23:26He says nuclear reactors require billions of dollars up front, but if you can get them built, they're cheap and reliable in the long term. Never been a nuclear plant finished in our country that didn't end up being a good investment for the utility that decided to continue to drive through the hard times and get those finished. So far, that argument is not swaying utilities. Too many remember how much it cost to build the Vodal plant in Georgia, the first new American reactors in decades. That project came online in 2024, several years late, and at roughly double the anticipated price tag, nearly$35 billion, which might make it the most expensive power plant ever built.

24:13That might be why, despite the flurry of announcements from the Trump administration, no new nuclear plants are actually under construction right now. As one energy lobbyist told E &E News, it's all kind of holographic until someone actually buys a reactor. Clecha's plan to change that includes slashing the cost of construction by standardizing the design of American nuclear plants. In France, where roughly two-thirds of the electricity comes from nuclear, they've long had a standard design. I heard a joke while reporting this story that the French have 90 kinds of cheese and one kind of reactor, while the U.S.

24:50has one kind of cheese and 90 kinds of reactors. I don't know how many kinds of cheese there are in China, but they're also building dozens of new large-scale reactors right now and dramatically cutting costs. So, why can't the U.S.? We've effectively lost the muscle in the U.S., mainly because we haven't built nuclear plants at scale for years. I mean, go back to the 70s and 80s, we were the best in the world at building nuclear plants. But it's not unlike any other technology where you've done a first-of-a-kind cycle, and it's pretty standard, whether it's nuclear or oil and gas and elsewhere, that you really need to drive through these learning curves in order for that process to work the way we think, to make these more competitive with the other technologies you're talking about.

25:38And we think there's a pretty clear path to get there. Clecha's business, the nuclear company, is getting a chance to flex that muscle. President Trump's executive order in May asked for 10 gigawatts of new nuclear to be construction in the next five years. That's a fast timeline for an infamously slow and expensive industry, and one where a renaissance has been promised for decades. But the energy industry can take some surprising twists. Just ask the plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania, rebooting their operations just a couple years after going dark. That's our show for today. Here and now, anytime, comes from NPR and WBUR Boston.

26:18You can find all our reverse course stories about clean water, climate change, renewable energy, carbon removal startups, and a lot more at hereandnow.org.