Google has inked a major deal with NextEra to buy electricity from Iowa’s only nuclear power plant — if, that is, the utility giant is able to restart the single-reactor station nine years after its permanent shutdown.
Under a 25-year agreement announced Monday afternoon, the tech giant will buy power from the Duane Arnold plant, which closed for decommissioning in 2020, once the 615-megawatt station returns to service in 2029.
“This partnership serves as a model for the investments needed across the country to build energy capacity and deliver reliable, clean power, while protecting affordability and creating jobs that will drive the AI-driven economy.” Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said in a statement.
But the number of still-salvageable nuclear plants sitting idle across the country is limited. Nuclear developer Holtec International is poised to make history before the end of the year by switching the single reactor at the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan back on, setting the regulatory precedent for reviving a shuttered atomic power station. And Microsoft last year signed a deal with utility giant Constellation to buy power from the restored reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant (the one that did not suffer a meltdown in 1979).
“Restarting closed facilities is clearly cheaper than building new ones, but there are only so many of those,” Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, told Latitude Media last year.
Some operating plants could still be uprated to crank out more electrons, but there aren’t many other plants on which tech behemoths with big electricity needs can bet. So the industry is getting creative; the Google deal is just one of a flurry of recent deals to get more nuclear power onto the grid, pushed by both the government and the private sector.
The agreement comes a week after South Carolina’s largest utility, Santee Cooper, announced plans to revive its infamously failed project to build the state’s first pair of AP1000s. The so-called VC Summer plant collapsed under surging costs in 2017 and led to two utility executives going to prison for lying about the project’s viability. But Santee Cooper is now in advanced talks with Brookfield about restarting the construction, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
The Westinghouse deal
Meanwhile, nuclear giant Westinghouse Electric Company announced a “strategic partnership” with the U.S. government on Tuesday morning to build a series of new reactors with “at least” $80 billion in funding from federal coffers.
The Trump administration sees the partnership with Westinghouse as part of President Donald Trump’s “grand vision to fully energize America and win the global AI race,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a press release Tuesday morning. And in his own statement, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the partnership “supports our national security objectives and enhances our critical infrastructure.”
“Together with Westinghouse we will unleash American energy,” he said.
Westinghouse’s two co-owners, investment giant Brookfield Asset Management and uranium producer Cameco, each said the deal would accelerate growth at both the national and international levels.
The move comes in response to one of Trump’s four executive orders from May designed to boost nuclear development. The order in question directed the Department of Energy to facilitate the swift permitting and construction of at least 10 new large-scale reactors in the country.
Given that the only new reactors built from the ground-up since the 1990s were a pair of AP1000s at Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the order was widely interpreted as a red carpet for Westinghouse, though some other companies expressed interest in bidding into the U.S. market, including Canadian rival Atkinsrealis.
It’s not clear if the Santee Cooper VC Summer project would count among those funded by the federal partnership.
Momentum for SMRs
There has also been recent movement for smaller-scale nuclear.
Separate from the company’s NextEra deal, Google is betting on next-generation small modular reactors to deliver new atomic electrons to the grid. In August, the Tennessee Valley Authority inked the nation’s first power purchase agreement between a utility and fourth-generation nuclear development to support construction of Google-backed Kairos Power’s first plant in the Oak Ridge area.
While the technology for fourth-generation reactors, which use coolants other than water, has been around for decades, the entire U.S. commercial fleet relies on light water reactor designs. A series of startups, including Bill Gates’ TerraPower, Amazon-backed X-energy, and Kairos are competing to build the country’s first commercial plants using small modular reactors that depend on high temperature gas, molten salt, or other coolants and therefore reach higher temperatures that may expand the applications nuclear can serve.
Last week, TerraPower won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its environmental plan. And earlier this month, X-energy unveiled the design of its debut station in Washington and confirmed its plans to build a dozen reactors with a total capacity of nearly a gigawatt. The deal represented the kind of de-risking for which the utility industry is looking to big tech. X-energy is designing the plant, and utility giant Energy Northwest will take and distribute the power — but Amazon is financing the construction.
