Google goes nuclear in world

In what it calls "the world's first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors," Google has taken another step toward its goal of achieving net-zero emissions from its operational chain by 2030.

In terms of developing cleaner, carbon-free energy, Google is certainly putting its money where its mouth is. Just last year the company switched on an advanced geothermal plant in Nevada that has already made impressive gains in developing its technology for using heat from beneath the Earth's surface to generate power.

Now, the tech giant has signed an agreement with Kairos Power, a company that specializes in developing small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. As their name implies, these modular units are much smaller than traditional nuclear reactors and they're meant to be used in conjunction with one another, so they can be scaled to produce exactly the amount of power needed by a facility or a commercial power grid.

In 2023, Kairos got approval from the US Regulatory Commission to build its Hermes demonstration reactor, and earlier this year the company broke ground on the project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The new Kairos/Google agreement will see the deployment of multiple fleets of Kairos' SMRs to areas where Google operates data centers, with the goal of bringing 500 MW of nuclear energy online by 2035. The first deployment of the SMRs is slated for 2030.

“Having an agreement for multiple deployments is important to accelerate the commercialization of advanced nuclear energy by demonstrating the technical and market viability of a solution critical to decarbonizing power grids while delivering much-needed energy generation and capacity,” said Jeff Olson, Kairos Power Vice President, Business Development & Finance.

“This early commitment from Google provides a strong customer demand signal, which reinforces Kairos Power’s continued investment in our iterative development approach and commercial production scale-up.”

In a blog post about the agreement, Google points out that the US Department of Energy says that nuclear power has "the highest economic impact of any power generation source," and that the agency estimates that bringing 200 GW of new nuclear power online by 2050 will create 375,000 jobs. Google also says that new sources of electricity are going to be needed in the coming years to help power advancing AI technologies.

Safety first

Mention "nuclear reactor" and safety most typically comes to mind. While disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima burn bright in our collective memories, the fact is that modern modular nuclear reactors, known as Generation IV reactors, are much safer than the monster-sized plants deployed in the past.

Kairos produces SMRs that make use of fuel pellets known as tri-structural isotropic – or TRISO – particles.