NUCLEAR POWERNuclear Has Changed. Will the U.S. Change with It?

By Christina Pazzanese

Published 14 January 2025

Fueled by artificial intelligence, cloud service providers, and ambitious new climate regulations, U.S. demand for carbon-free electricity is on the rise. In response, analysts and lawmakers are taking a fresh look at a controversial energy source: nuclear power.

Fueled by artificial intelligence, cloud service providers, and ambitious new climate regulations, U.S. demand for carbon-free electricity is on the rise. In response, analysts and lawmakers are taking a fresh look at a controversial energy source: nuclear power.

Two new reactors in Georgia are the first in consecutive years in the U.S. since 1990. In June, Congress overwhelmingly passed the ADVANCE Act, a bipartisan bill that boosts the number of reactors coming on line. Late last year, tech giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all pledged to invest in small reactors to help meet their future energy needs.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Daniel Poneman, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center, discusses the growing momentum behind nuclear power plants. Poneman served as deputy secretary of energy and chief operating officer at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009 to 2014. From 2015 through 2023 he was CEO of Centrus Energy, a supplier of nuclear fuel to power plants around the world.

Is nuclear power making a comeback?
I believe the answer is yes, because we have new factors present and they’re all converging to add momentum to nuclear. For a long time, a lot of people have been worried about climate change and reducing carbon emissions. The only source of clean power that’s been proven to work — day or night, season in, season out, in any geographic location, and successfully operating at large scale — that’s nuclear. It’s just shy of 20 percent of our total electricity production and nearly half of our carbon-free electricity.

On top of that is this vertiginous increase in electricity demand that’s driven by 1) the AI revolution and 2) the effort to decarbonize not only power generation, which is about one-quarter of total emissions, but also transportation and industrial processes. If you have electric vehicles and you get the power for the vehicles from coal plants, you haven’t solved the emissions problem.

The last factor is the hyper scalers, which have the wherewithal and frankly the balance sheets to support these very substantial investments in nuclear. So, you have all of those market-driven factors and strong recognition by the government of the importance of nuclear. I don’t think there’s any issue that has broader or deeper bipartisan support than this one. All of these things are converging to add new momentum to American nuclear energy.