French company EDF is currently building a giant new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset and a decision to build another one at Sizewell in Suffolk is pending. EDF’s UK Chair Alex Chisholm unsurprisingly agrees with Mr Garman.
“Why are data centre providers turning to nuclear? They will need a lot of energy, reliably,” Mr Chisholm told the BBC.
“Replication of Hinkley Point C, alongside the roll out of SMRs, can power Britain’s digital economy.”
SMRs refers to small modular reactors which are the size of a football stadium as opposed to the size of a whole town, like Sizewell or Hinkley.
Amazon is already partnering with SMR firms in Washington and Virginia to develop SMRs and would be a natural customer for Rolls Royce which is developing its own SMR designs here.
A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero told the BBC that modular reactors “will play a particularly important roles in growing energy-hungry sectors like AI and we’re shaking up the planning rules to make it easier to build nuclear power stations across the country”
But this technology is many years away and new grid connections already take years to establish.
Jess Ralston at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said: “Investors can be waiting years for grid connections holding back growth.”
“Nuclear could be a way of supply data centre’s power needs, but hardly any SMRs have been built anywhere in the world and traditional nuclear remains very expensive and takes a long time to build. So, it may be a while, if ever, for this to be a viable solution”.
