NPR.

Nuclear energy seems to be back in favor this week.

At the COP 29 climate change conference, discussions are underway about how nuclear can help the world reduce

carbon emissions. Also, the Biden administration announced a goal to triple nuclear energy production

in the U.S. by 2050. The Inflation Reduction Act is helping with that with a ton of subsidies.

And those subsidies are part of the reason that this year, Amazon, Microsoft,

and Google, each signed massive deals to build nuclear projects. The companies have a voracious

appetite for electricity as artificial intelligence data centers chew up more and more energy.

The U.S. lost its appetite for building new nuclear power plants several decades ago,

for a few reasons. First, it's incredibly expensive to build. Also, meltdowns and environmental

risks loom large in the public imagination. But a new form of nuclear power generation

called small modular reactors aims to change that.

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darren Woods.

And I'm Waylon Wong. Today on the show, could nuclear energy work differently this time?

We probed the CEO of the company working with Google on its small

modular reactor project, and we ask how it will deal with concerns about cost, safety, and waste.

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