Amazon, Google and Meta have joined a call by big, energy-intensive companies for governments and utilities to build more nuclear power in the latest boost to the industry’s revival.
Oil group Occidental and chemical producer Dow are also among the eight large buyers of energy to sign a pledge to support the goal of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050. The statement was co-ordinated by the World Nuclear Association, an advocacy group for the sector.
Microsoft and Apple, which also use significant amounts of energy and have committed to reducing their carbon footprint, did not sign the statement.
The show of support follows a similar pledge in September by 14 of the world’s biggest financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays and Morgan Stanley, to increase their support for the sector and back a call made at the COP28 UN climate conference for nuclear power to be tripled by 2050.
Amazon said it had invested more than $1bn in the nuclear industry in the past year and that speeding up new power stations would be “critical” for US security, meeting growing energy demands and helping combat climate change.
Since COP28 in November 2023, eight new nuclear reactors have been connected to grids around the world and construction has begun on 12, according to the WNA.
Urvi Parekh, head of energy at Meta, said the tech company had backed the pledge because it believed the challenge of building expensive nuclear plants required significant co-ordination between developers, utilities, governments and power consumers.
She added that the announcement was aimed at encouraging governments to smooth regulation for nuclear power expansion and to signal to utilities that there would be buyers for their electricity. Meta last year issued a tender for 1 to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear power projects to come online in the 2030s.
The nuclear revival has led some countries to change their policies, including Japan, which said last month that it wanted the share of nuclear power in its mix to rise from 8.5 per cent in 2023 to about 20 per cent by 2040.
“We are not only regenerating existing plants, we are also building new generation,” said Takehiko Matsuo, Japan’s vice-minister for international affairs at the economy, trade and industry ministry, at CERAWeek, an annual energy conference in Houston, on Tuesday. Japan’s move on nuclear power was mainly driven by increased demand for electricity, he said.
Italy’s government last month submitted a draft law to parliament laying the ground for the country to reintroduce nuclear power, which it phased out after a referendum in 1987.
Despite high costs, the nuclear industry has been buoyed by rising electricity demand in advanced economies, and by projections from the International Energy Agency that demand will grow by 3 per cent a year for the next decade.
But developers of next-generation nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors, still face technical, regulatory and funding risks.
Technology groups have signed dozens of nonbinding memorandums of understanding with developers of SMRs, but only a handful have committed funding to projects.
Lawrence Coben, chief executive of NRG, a large power producer that last month announced a partnership for gas-fired plants, said: “There’s no proof that there’s any commercial viability to this.”
So-called hyperscalers with large cloud computing and data businesses “are not counting” on nuclear, said Coben. “If there were huge penalties and payments, if you didn’t deliver by 2035, that would be more interesting to me. But that’s not what those contracts say,” he added.
John Ketchum, chief executive of NextEra Energy, which operates one of the largest nuclear power fleets in the US, told the Financial Times that new nuclear power would take until “2035 or later”, noting that “we still have to develop the first of a kind advanced nuclear unit that works”.
Brian Savoy, chief financial officer of utility Duke Energy, said after his company’s earnings last month that it did not expect SMRs to play a meaningful role until the late 2030s.
