Google brings closed nuclear power plant back from the dead | TechCrunch

Google announced this week that it is partnering with NextEra Energy revive a nuclear power plant in Iowa that was closed in 2020.

NextEra spent the past year looking for a partner to reopen the reactor, and found one in Google, which has been steadily adding carbon-free energy sources to power its growing data center fleet.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the deal.

The Duane Arnold Energy Center was closed after a summer derecho (heavy rain storm) damaged part of the secondary containment system that would prevent the release of radioactive gases.

The power plant was originally designed to generate 601 megawatts of electricity, and if the recommissioning goes according to plan, the renovated reactor will be capable of generating an additional 14 megawatts.

NextEra hopes to restart the facility in 2029, and Google has agreed to buy most of its power for 25 years. The remainder will be sold to the Central Iowa Power Cooperative under similar terms. The organization currently has a 20% stake in the Duane Arnold power plant, although NextEra says it has agreements to buy out both the cooperative and the other minority owner.

Nuclear power has experienced a resurgence as technology companies and data center developers look for new energy sources as demand for electricity has reawakened from more than a decade of dormancy.

The Iowa reactor isn’t the first to be brought back from the dead. Last year, Microsoft said it would work with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor on Three Mile Island, which was closed in 2019. Constellation said it expects the effort to cost $1.6 billion. If everything goes according to plan, the 835 megawatt reactor should be operational in 2028.

Restarting reactors is considered a shortcut to bringing new nuclear capacity to the grid, likely cutting years off the time it would take to build a new power plant. But they are still years-long projects, putting them in competition with new natural gas plants, which also take years to develop.

In the meantime, companies like Google are also turning to solar energy and batteries, which can be deployed in months instead of years, dramatically reducing the time it takes to power a new data center.