The plant that found a customer
For years the story of American nuclear power was subtraction: plants closing early, projects cancelled, a workforce aging out. Then the data centers arrived needing exactly what a reactor provides — enormous, constant, carbon-free power that doesn’t stop when the wind dies. Suddenly plants slated to close have buyers, and campuses are breaking ground that pair millions of square feet of servers with reactors on site. AI demand is the best thing to happen to clean firm power in forty years.
The physics isn’t subtle. A data center runs flat-out around the clock. Solar and wind are cheap but intermittent, and matching a 24/7 load with them alone means overbuilding plus storage that doesn’t yet exist at scale. Gas works and emits. Nuclear is the only firm, zero-carbon source that scales — and for the first time there’s a customer willing to sign the long contract that makes a new reactor financeable.
We part from the pure abundance builders on one thing: speed without care is how you lose. The orders waving projects past environmental review cut both ways, and quietly rewriting the safety rules so required
becomes should
is exactly how you get the cheap accident that sets the whole industry back another forty years. Build fast. Don’t build sloppy.
Where we concede ground: We’ve over-promised on cost and timeline for decades; most small modular reactors are still slideware, not steel.
What would change our mind: If the first data-center reactors land as late and over budget as the last generation of nuclear builds.
Read the full synthesis: Should AI data centers get their own power plants?