Some of the largest companies on the planet have been generating headlines in the final weeks and months of 2024 for their efforts to scale up nuclear energy production. On October 14, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company, the world’s fourth largest by market cap, had “signed a pioneering agreement to purchase clean energy in the US from Kairos Power, a leader in building small modular nuclear reactors,” which Pichai described as Google’s “latest step in our history of accelerating clean energy sources and will help support AI investments.”
Two days after Google broke the news of its agreement with Kairos Power, Amazon, which has the fifth largest market cap on the planet, announced it will invest half a billion dollars in X-energy, a leader in the advanced nuclear reactor and fuel technology space. With its investment in X-energy, Amazon said in a statement that the company aims “to bring more than 5 gigawatts online in the United States by 2039, the largest commercial deployment target of small modular reactors (SMRs) to date.”
Ongoing efforts to expand nuclear energy development are not limited to the private sector. In fact, governors from both red and blue states have taken steps in recent months and years to make nuclear energy production more cost-effective and economically viable…