Illinois nuclear plants are in the crosshairs of data centers and AI’s insatiable demand for clean power. At what cost?

As the nation’s leading nuclear energy producer, Illinois is uniquely positioned to capitalize on or fall victim to the latest rush for the carbon-free but controversial power.

The federal government promised a new wave of nuclear energy generation more than two decades ago, but steep construction costs scuttled nearly every one of the ambitious projects.

This time, nuclear energy is being pushed by tech giants scrambling to meet climate pledges set long before data centers’ power needs skyrocketed, largely because of artificial intelligence. They say this zero-emissions power source laden with health and safety concerns could be their silver bullet.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google have entered into lucrative agreements with utility companies and nuclear reactor developers in the name of green and clean. The federal government has followed suit, using Inflation Reduction Act funding to give billions of dollars to companies aspiring to get new nuclear projects off the ground.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled plans to triple the nation’s nuclear power supply by midcentury. While support for most clean energy projects is threatened by Republican control of Washington, this one might stick. A Pew Research poll from August shows Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor expanding nuclear power generation.

Yet, the same hurdles that doomed dozens of proposed reactors a generation ago are still there — chiefly high construction costs and no long-term solution for radioactive waste.

If early experiments reopening plants and developing smaller reactors fail, tech giants could zero in on Illinois’ operational plants, which provide more than half of the state’s power.

“There’s almost nowhere on planet Earth where you could set up a 5-gigawatt supercomputer, except for outside of Chicago,” said Chicago-based clean energy consultant Mark Nelson. The artificial intelligence company OpenAI proposed a computer of this unprecedented size at a meeting with the White House in September, according to Bloomberg News.

Five gigawatts is enough to power a major city like Miami, but it would take roughly five nuclear reactors to produce that much electricity. There are 11 nuclear reactors at six plants in Illinois; five of those plants are in northern Illinois.

So far, Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration has welcomed data centers, which bring jobs and tax revenue, with open arms and tax incentives. But data centers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for energy could stand in the way of Illinois’ long-standing goal to phase out expensive and aging nuclear plants. They could also increase residents’ electric bills.

Carbon-free versus clean

It was a toasty 95 degrees inside the Braidwood nuclear plant on a mid-November afternoon. A 2,537-acre human-made lake ensured the plant didn’t get much hotter, and the steady hum of machinery necessitated earplugs as pressurized steam flowed from a reactor into a turbine to create electricity. Its two reactors generate enough energy to power nearly 1.8 million homes.

Despite recent delays in getting wind and solar projects connected to the grid, Illinois has made significant strides toward replacing coal and natural gas consumption with renewable wind and solar energy over the past 30 years. Its reliance on nuclear energy, however, has remained steady.

Nuclear energy has often been regarded as a bridge fuel to renewables because separating uranium atoms to produce energy does not release any greenhouse gas emissions, the leading cause of climate change.

That same production process, however, produces radioactive waste that lingers for thousands of years. Exposure has been correlated with environmental degradation and acute diseases including cancer.

Sarah Sauer was 7 years old and living near Illinois’ Braidwood and Dresden nuclear plants when she was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2001. Her mother Cindy Sauer believes her cancer was caused by contaminated drinking water.

The plants’ operator paid $1.2 million in 2010 to settle state and county complaints about numerous unreported leaks of radioactive tritium from both plants, located about 60 miles south of Chicago, dating back to the 1990s. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also sanctioned the operator, though the federal agency maintains the exposure level did not present a risk to the community.

Sauer questions the assertion, given that the agency ordered and then canceled a detailed study on cancer risk among those living near nuclear plants. Five years in, the nuclear commission said the study would be too costly and time-consuming. Sauer fears it didn’t want the answers.

“Before Mr. Amazon and Mr. Google all want to get on the bandwagon and start to promote nuclear energy so that they have all the energy for all their projects, let’s get some age-old questions answered,” Sauer said.

Following Sarah’s treatment, which left her with significant developmental delays, the Sauer family moved to Indiana, a state with no nuclear plants. Many do not have this option.

The nearly 25,000-person city of Zion in northern Illinois still stores the waste from a plant that shut down in 1998.

“We have 65 dry casts sitting in the city,” said lifelong resident Doug Ower. “There’s no solution for them, so nuclear energy is not a clean power solution.”

Ower, who lived through the construction and operation of the plant, sat on the city’s community advisory panel while it was being decommissioned. After learning about the burden nuclear plants leave on their neighbors decades after they close, he’s stunned the old energy source is being resurrected by tech companies typically at the forefront of innovation.

The Supreme Court appears to be preparing for the controversy that a resurgence of nuclear power could spark. It agreed to take up a case about radioactive waste storage next session. At the heart of the case is the question of which communities must live with toxins forever.

New projects, old machines

Well before Sarah was born, in the wake of accidents at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979 and Ukraine’s Chernobyl plant in 1986, Illinois put a moratorium on the development of new nuclear reactors in 1987. It was not supposed to be lifted until the federal government certified a safe way to dispose of nuclear waste, which still hasn’t happened.

Yet, Illinois read the writing on the wall. Despite the Pritzker administration’s firm commitment to expand its renewable energy supply in its landmark 2021 Clean Energy and Jobs Act, it amended the statewide moratorium last year to allow for a new generation of small nuclear reactors such as those Amazon and Google have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. The Biden administration jumped on the bandwagon too, offering $900 million in grants to companies developing these smaller reactors.

“Revitalizing America’s nuclear sector is key to adding more carbon-free energy to the grid and meeting the needs of our growing economy — from AI and data centers to manufacturing and healthcare,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, following the announcement last month.

Operating at less than one-third the capacity of traditional reactors, they are supposed to be safer and less costly. But they’re still a ways off. No American company has brought one into commercial operation yet.

Others are getting scrappy with existing plants because of how costly it is to build a reactor from scratch.

Leveraging Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, Microsoft struck a deal in Pennsylvania with Constellation Energy — which also owns Illinois’ nuclear plants — to restart a reactor on Three Mile Island, the site of the nation’s worst nuclear accident. The software company will purchase power from the plant to offset its nearby data centers’ increasing power demands.

Closer to home, in the coastal town of Covert, Michigan, the federal government gave a $1.5 billion loan to another nuclear company striving to reopen the mothballed Palisades nuclear plant.

NextEra Energy, which did not respond to requests for comment, is also considering restarting Duane Arnold Energy Center, Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, according to news reports.

Breathing new life into old carcasses has raised safety concerns among many nuclear experts. Initial inspections found the pipes at the Michigan plant are severely corroded.

“I have never seen a steam generator with the extent of cracking they found at Palisades,” said Arnold “Arnie” Gundersen, a former nuclear industry executive turned anti-nuclear advocate. He left the industry after four decades, labeled a whistleblower for exposing blatant safety violations by the nuclear consulting firm where he was a senior vice president.

Activists are particularly concerned that radioactive waste could leak into Lake Michigan.

“Unfortunately, this experiment is taking place, not in a controlled laboratory environment somewhere safe, but in the real world using the drinking water supply of 16 million people as its petri dish,” said David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, an anti-nuclear group based in Chicago.

No decommissioned nuclear plants in Illinois could be restarted, but thanks to Illinois’ abundance of nuclear energy and land, it is well positioned to become a “data center hub,” Exelon CEO Calvin Butler said at a University of Chicago panel last month. The Illinois public utility Commonwealth Edison is a subsidiary of Exelon that distributes the power Constellation’s plants create.

Eighty data centers are online in ComEd’s Illinois territory, according to Exelon spokesperson James Gherardi. Another 36 data centers are in development, and they’re significantly larger as a whole. The three dozen forthcoming centers are anticipated to require 22 times more power than the existing 80.

As of 2023, 21 data centers were receiving support through a state tax incentive program designed to attract large-scale data centers to Illinois.

Why the hype?

Like Illinois, tech giants are racing to meet ambitious clean energy goals.

Google is striving for net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, Amazon has its sights set on the same goal by 2040 and, most ambitiously, Microsoft aspires to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases by 2030.

Until recently, they’ve been able to claim strides by purchasing renewable energy credits. The practice, which has increasingly come under scrutiny, allows companies to “buy down” their environmental impact by paying for wind and solar energy to be produced elsewhere.

A Bloomberg analysis found that, if Microsoft didn’t use credits, its 2022 emissions would be more than 11 times higher than what the company disclosed. Amazon’s would be three times higher than what it publicly shared. Google, on the other hand, has phased out its use of these credits after publicly acknowledging they do not lead to real emissions reductions. The credits purchased may be for energy produced at a different time and place.

Tech companies could, for example, use credit for solar energy produced in Indiana at noon on a Tuesday against energy received from a coal plant in Illinois at midnight on a Thursday. This was helpful because the data centers needed constant and reliable power.

“(The tech companies) were never actually eating their own home cooking,” said Nelson, the clean energy consultant. “They cooked for other people and then dined out at Michelin-star restaurants.”

Now that an artificial intelligence search query uses 10 times as much electricity as a basic Google search, tech companies can’t hide behind renewable energy credits. They simply need more power that they can depend on 24/7.

Solar and wind are intermittent energy sources that can only be harnessed when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

“We see the need for gigawatts of power in the coming years, and there’s not going to be enough wind and solar projects to be able to meet the needs, and so nuclear is a great opportunity,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matthew Garman told CNBC last month.

Nuclear energy provides reliable emissions-free electricity that will allow tech companies to meet their public climate pledges and continue growing. However, building a new reactor is prohibitively costly and time-intensive, hence the scurry to restart old plants and develop smaller reactors.

More than half of the 250 attempts to build a nuclear reactor since 1960 were canceled before any electricity was generated. None of the completed projects were on-time or on-budget, according to Gundersen. The last two reactors went into commercial operation in 2023 and 2024 in Georgia, seven years late and about $21 billion over budget.

Despite touting his previous financial backing of the Georgia reactors on his 2024 campaign site, President-elect Donald Trump qualified his support of nuclear power on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month. The incoming president expressed concern over the cost and safety of large reactors but interest in small modular reactors, suggesting this is where his administration could funnel support.

The last time the U.S. saw a surge of hype around nuclear energy was in 2002, when former President George W. Bush launched the “Nuclear Power 2010 Program” to address a similar expected need for new energy. The anticipated build-out of nuclear energy never panned out due to high construction costs, the growth of renewables, a 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, and low natural gas prices.

Some experts speculate the current excitement could succumb to a similar combination of market and social pressures as federal support dwindles and as battery storage of renewable energy becomes more reliable and cheaper.

“We say that nuclear companies run on OPM (pronounced opium), other people’s money,” Gundersen said. “(Restarting old reactors) wouldn’t happen if they had to put their own money into it.”

In addition to the $1.5 billion loan to restart the Palisades plant, the federal government also gave $1.3 billion to rural electric cooperatives. The state of Michigan also threw $300 million at the project.

Nuclear’s tight grip

Government support for nuclear plants is not new. Despite Illinois’ nearly four-decade moratorium on new nuclear reactors, the state has stood faithfully behind its six operating nuclear plants.

When the domestic fracking boom made natural gas so cheap that nuclear energy couldn’t compete, the state got behind the industry.

Today, five of Illinois’ six nuclear plants receive state assistance. Consumers bear the cost, and the money goes to Constellation, which split off from Exelon in 2022 to run its power generation business.

The latest round of support, totaling $700 million over five years, was tucked into the Clean Energy and Jobs Act and appears on utility bills as “carbon mitigation credits.”

The assistance expires in 2027, and an investment from a tech giant could breathe new life into the struggling plants.

“Whatever happens will depend on the power markets,” said JC Kibbey, the Illinois climate adviser.

Constellation will not seek further state assistance if it continues receiving Inflation Reduction Act support, said Constellation’s chief strategy and growth officer, Kathleen Barrón. Those funds have enabled the company to begin increasing capacity at two of its six Illinois plants, an $800 million investment that will provide enough energy to power 100,000 homes. The fate of the climate legislation is uncertain, however, since Trump has promised to dismantle it when he enters the White House.

Regardless, Barrón said it would be even more desirable to strike long-term contracts with tech companies wanting to plug their data centers directly into the nuclear plants.

Exelon, whose Illinois-based subsidiary ComEd manages the transmission lines that such a deal would bypass, successfully fought efforts to broker a similar deal in Pennsylvania by Amazon and another nuclear plant.

One thing is clear, however. Increased demand must be met by increased supply or consumer prices will soar. In a worst-case scenario, Nelson, the clean energy consultant, worries the state may be forced to rely more heavily on the coal and natural gas plants it’s trying to shut down by 2045.

Silver bullet or distraction?

Nuclear energy supporters like Nelson assert that the radioactive but carbon-free power source will always be a necessary complement to renewables like wind and solar. It provides a constant and reliable baseload of energy, in much the same way coal and natural gas have.

Kibbey, Illinois’ climate adviser, thinks the state’s existing nuclear power will be part of its energy portfolio for a while.

“How do we bring enough clean energy online to meet all our demand? For the foreseeable future, the nuclear plants are going to be a part of that,” he told the Tribune.

But he cautions that a few recent big-budget investments from tech companies and the federal government may be unduly suggesting a prolific expansion of the power source.

Many anti-nuclear proponents aren’t against running the operational plants to their end-life, but they worry that the infusion of cash into restarting mothballed reactors and developing new ones distracts from developing batteries that will enable wind and solar to be more reliable.

“The nuclear industry would have us believe that they’re smart enough to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, but the rest of us are so dumb we can’t store sunlight overnight,” said Gundersen.

Wind and solar are currently the cheapest energy sources, so efficient and cost-effective ways to harness their power would make them extremely attractive to data centers.

Others are urging society to weigh more fundamental questions about priorities.

“We really need to question AI itself. Is all that energy intensity worth it?” said Kraft, of the Nuclear Energy Information Service.