Google has ordered six to seven small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) from Kairos Power, becoming the first tech company to commission new nuclear power plants to provide low-carbon electricity for its energy-hungry data centres.
Google and Kairos said on Monday that the tech company had placed an order for SMRs with a total capacity of 500MW, helping Kairos, a seven-year-old start-up, to bring its first commercial reactor online by 2030 and additional reactors by 2035.
Last month, Microsoft announced that it would commit to buying 20 years’ supply of electricity from the mothballed US nuclear power plant Three Mile Island if Constellation Energy restarted the site. Tech companies are increasingly interested in nuclear as a medium-term solution to providing low-carbon electricity to meet their data centres’ energy demands.
Kairos, based in Alameda, California, has developed a reactor cooled by molten fluoride salt, rather than water. In December, it received a construction permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a 50MW demonstration reactor in Tennessee called Hermes.
This was the first approval for a new type of reactor in the US for half a century. The US Department of Energy is investing about $300mn in Kairos’s Hermes project through its Advanced Reactor Demonstration programme.
Kairos’s molten salt reactor uses ceramic-coated TRISO fuel and operates at close to atmospheric pressure, transferring heat from the salt to generate steam and run a turbine.