Pro-nuclear advocates welcomed a historic announcement last week when Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest operator of data centers, made a decisive move that all but validated the inevitable: “One of the US’s largest nuclear power plants will directly power cloud service provider Amazon Web Services’ new data center. Power provider Talen Energy sold its data center campus, Cumulus Data Assets, to Amazon Web Services for $650 million. Amazon will develop an up to 960-megawatt (MW) data center at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The 1,200-acre campus is directly powered by an adjacent 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power station also owned by Talen Energy. The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It’s been online since 1983 and produces 63 million kilowatt hours per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044.”
The AWS news comes on the heels of other notable developments pointing to a logical reunification of physics and policy. The global stocktake from the most recent United Nations climate change summit acknowledged, for the first time, that nuclear is an essential and clean contributor to decarbonization efforts. At the same meeting, the Biden administration led a coalition of more than 20 countries that collectively committed to tripling their nuclear capacity by 2050. A wave of nuclear reactors is under construction in China and India, while Japan is busy restarting much of its mothballed capacity. Having observed what happened in Germany after its insane decision to exit nuclear, practically every other country of influence is responding accordingly. It is only a matter of time before Germany course corrects.
