Meta Joins Race for Nuclear Power

Meta, the owner of Facebook, has officially joined the race for nuclear power generation to secure the energy supply for its artificial intelligence ambitions.

In a news release, the company said it was looking to contract developers to build between 1 and 4 GW of nuclear power generation capacity in the United States, to be completed by the early 2030s.

“We are looking to identify developers that can help accelerate the availability of new nuclear generators and create sufficient scale to achieve material cost reductions by deploying multiple units, both to provide for Meta’s future energy needs and to advance broader industry decarbonization,” the company said in the release.

Meta went on to say it would continue investing in wind and solar as well as part of its decarbonization efforts but mentioned that nuclear power facilities have “a longer expected operational life”. Nuclear is also more reliable than wind and solar, which is why Big Tech is racing to secure new capacity as soon as possible—because nuclear power plants take quite a while to build, unlike wind and solar.

Unfortunately for Big Tech, it’s not just construction times that are making growth in nuclear generation capacity a challenge. New nuclear also carried a heavy regulatory burden and, as Reuters notes in a report on the Meta news, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is “overburdened”.

In additional problems, the country is facing a uranium supply shortage and it is not limited to the U.S., either. Demand for nuclear capacity has shot up so quickly that supply has yet to catch up. This will be problematic because Kazakhstan, the world’s top producer is suffering the effects of a sulfuring acid shortage, which has affected output. Separately, the West is trying to replace its source of processed uranium because Russia is the biggest one but alternatives are not exactly abundant.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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