Google brings a closed nuclear power plant back from the dead

Google announced this week that it is working with NextEra Energy to revive a nuclear power plant in Iowa that closed in 2020.

NextEra had been searching for a partner to reopen the reactor for the past year, and found one in Google, which has been steadily adding carbon-free energy sources to power its growing fleet of data centers.

Neither company revealed the financial terms of the deal.

The Duane Arnold Energy Center was closed after a summer storm (a major rainstorm) destroyed part of the secondary containment system that would have prevented the release of radioactive gases.

The power plant was originally designed to generate 601 megawatts of electricity, and if the restart goes as planned, the refurbished reactor will be able to produce an additional 14 megawatts.

NextEra hopes to restart the facility in 2029, and Google has agreed to buy the majority of its power for 25 years. The remainder will be sold to Central Iowa Power Cooperative on similar terms. The organization currently owns a 20% stake in the Duane Arnold Power Plant, although NextEra said it has agreements to purchase both the co-op and the other minority owner.

Nuclear power is experiencing a resurgence as technology companies and data center developers look for new sources of energy as electricity demand rebounds after more than a decade of slumber.

The Iowa reactor is not the first reactor to be brought back from the dead. Last year, Microsoft said it would work with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island that was shut down in 2019. Constellation said it expected the effort to cost $1.6 billion. If all goes as planned, the 835-megawatt reactor should start operating in 2028.

Restarting the reactors is a shortcut to bringing new nuclear capacity to the grid, and would likely shave years off the time it takes to build a new power plant. But they are still long-term projects, putting them in competition with new natural gas-fired power plants, which also take years to develop.

Meanwhile, companies like Google are also turning to solar power and batteries, which can be deployed in months rather than years, dramatically reducing the time it takes to get a new data center up and running.