Is it time for Nuclear in Datacentre industry?

Everyone talks about SMRs (Small Modular Reactors)

What are SMRs? 

Small modular reactors (#SMRs) are factory-assembled modular nuclear reactors, producing up to 300MW per unit (about 1/3 of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors) of clean energy. They can be scaled up by modules based on the demand and would cut cost & time compared to conventional nuclear reactors. 

They have been hailed by the biggest players in the data centre industry as a must direction that will allow us to fullfill the demands for more datacentres and AI needs.

Why they have been in the mainstream datacentre press recently? 

Both Google & AWS announced recently signed agreements with power companies for projected purchases of SMR units. For Google first one would be operational in 2030.

What current and future problems SMRs are set to solve: 

1. Power generation at scale: SMRs are able to produce up to 300MW of power which is much more than an average datacentre needs today and can power entire citites 

2. Clean energy: hashtag#cleanpower will boost any datacenter and its users' clean energy targets including targets of municipalities and countires. It will help improve bad image datacentre industry currently have in the press & public opinion of "polluters" or "power-hogs"

3. Built at the datacentre location SMRs would solve the current challenge hashtag#grid constraints which already today became the bottleneck limiting our use of power for datacentres (see Amsterdam case)

4. Last but not LEAST, they are the likely solution for hashtag#AI capacity growth and the recent investments we are seeing in the press are all citing loud and clear AI needs being behind the recent SMR discussions or agreements. 

So what are the obstacles & why only in 2030?

- new laws and regulations need to be passed in order to allow these types of built for business including datacentre industry and this might take well into 2030

- financial investment and long term commitment are enormous even for the datacentre industry and require partnership building and joint ownership to alievate the burden

- in some locations nuclear is not the favourite power solution and nuclear questions have been always heavily politicised. This will vary country by country but might impact significantly decisions and progress 

If you want to read about the latest SMR investment:

Czech Republic's CEZ announced two weeks ago its partnership with Rolls-Royce SMR a partnership to build 6 SMRs in Czech republic (to be used for traditional power generation), see the link in the comments. 

Are we ready for the SMRs to change how we build datacentres today? 

#SMR #nuclearpower #CEZ #cleandatacentres