Speaking as part of a panel discussion at the Datacloud Energy & ESG 2025 event in Brussels, James Bowyer, project director at Newcleo, highlighted several positives in nuclear’s favour, from being an incredibly low carbon technology to its reliability and ability to go off the gird in terms of direct wire.
The shift in focus to nuclear, Bowyer said, has been led by smaller, modular projects like SMRs, which have led many data centre operators to get excited about nuclear energy’s potential.
“The big change in the sector the last 10 years has been from a gigawatt scale where the financing and the duration build has been poor performance, to smaller, modular, repetitive build sequences that could give more certainty, we can get on grid quicker and the sizing of SMRs, which generates, if anything, from 100 to 300 megawatts, actually fit with industrial applications data centres really well.”
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For Loren Long, director of sustainability for Digital Infrastructure Advisors, nuclear is the “only” solution.
“Solar and wind have their place,” said Long, who holds degrees in nuclear engineering. “I would argue they don't have their place because of their intermittency to power something that is on 24/7.”
He argued that for solar and wind to truly be a base load capacity, require batteries of some kind, whereas nuclear energy doesn’t.
David Kingham of Tokamak Energy said that the increasing interest in the potential of nuclear energy comes from the lack of viable solutions currently.
While the timelines for implementation are shy of a decade, Kingham, whose company are developing fusion technologies, that technologies like nuclear fusion look set to benefit pushes for energy innovation, such as in the US.
“The US are losing their decarbonisation targets, instead going for energy abundance, affordability, and innovation, which suits us very well.
“For fusion, it needs not just one company, it needs a whole concerted effort to develop materials and technologies and so forth to make it possible.”
Implementation hurdles: Fuel, public fears and security
John Booth, managing director of Carbon3IT, was the more apprehensive voice on the panel when it came to nuclear feasibility, questioning barriers to deployment such as cost and the availability of fuel.
Russia dominates the world’s production of HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium), a type of nuclear fuel vital for powering next-generation reactors like SMRs.
Bowyer highlighted that efforts are being made to offset Russia’s HALEU leadership, with attempts being made to manufacture the material in the US.
“There is production in France, we're building our own fuel plant,” Bowyer said. “I don't actually see fuel as an issue at all.”
In terms of deployment, despite Kingham referencing potential lead times into the mid-2030s, Bowyer contended that operators need to start preparing now.
“It's not just a build time which is produced for SMRs, but it's finding land, getting through regulatory processes. The interesting thing is where can provide data centre developers and operators work together with SMRs, operating developments and look at joint development with a long term view.”
There’s also the public perception of nuclear energy, which Booth reminding that Germany effectively shut down its entire nuclear programme, an effort that arose in the wake of 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
Long reminded that there’s danger in everything, instead arguing that the consequences of not arresting climate change due to carbon emissions based on fossil fuels is far more devasting.
“We've burned more fossil fuels last year than at every any year previous,” Long said. “We've also deployed more renewable power. But the point is, we're using more and more, and our industry is no exception.”
Further to public fears, Microsoft revived the previously decommissioned Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which was the site of the worst nuclear accident on US soil.
“Which consequences is worse?” Long said, adding: “If you look at Three Mile Island, relatively speaking, not so bad, which, by the way, is a completely different platform than what happened in Ukraine with Chernobyl, which are no completely different platform.”
Instead of looking in fear of disasters that occurred in the past, Long argued in favour of showcasing an effective application of nuclear energy occurring today.
“The test case is France,” Long suggested, which derives around about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy. “They have an excess of energy, and they're the lowest carbon country in Europe.”
The talent question: How does nuclear compare to the data centre shortage?
The data centre industry is facing face significant talent shortages, with Booth also serving as and the technical director of the National Data Centre Academy (NDCA) in the UK, which are attempting to tackle the problem.
Booth told Capacity that a significant amount of training is needed but nuclear is a sector that has expanded in talent, noting that one UK energy firm went from having just two nuclear-focused engineers per year in the mid-1980s to around 200 by the mid-2000s.
Bowyer said that his team were doing work around hydrogen, which he said suffered from similar talent issues to data centres.
“All sectors that need engineering type skills have a massive talent problem,” he said. “It does need cross sector work, we need to have transferable skills. People in people at primary school now could become engineers in 20 years’ time.”
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