Big tech companies are driving a nuclear resurgence, bringing shuttered facilities like Three Mile Island back online and announcing plans to build small modular reactors.

The new data centers being built today require so much electricity that national power grids can't keep up with them.

Tech firms have worked out that they need to source their own power if they're going to build

the kind of data centers that will make them competitive in AI.

The amount of power generated globally by nuclear power plants peaked in 2006, with new plant

construction stagnating in the 1990s.

The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan led to cancelled projects around the world.

In Germany, Angela Merkel, a trained physicist announced that Germany would phase out nuclear

power, and Siemens announced that they would withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry to focus on renewables.

For a while, it seemed that Iran and North Korea were the only countries with a suspicious interest in building new nuclear power stations.

In most of the rest of the world, projects were delayed or cancelled due to public safety

concerns, regulatory hurdles, financing obstacles and fuel bottlenecks.

It's not just the fear of disaster that slowed down nuclear energy, however.

The global demand for electricity grew by just 2.2% in 2023, which was slightly less than

the 2.4% growth seen the prior year.

While there had been strong growth in China, India and the developing world, advanced

economy showed substantial declines in their

need for new power stations.

For much of the 20th century, America's electricity demand had grown steadily and utilities

built power stations to keep up with the growing demand.

Starting in the mid-2000s, the demand for additional capacity in the developed world flattened

out.

...