Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Utah faces a significant energy demand due to proposed projects for new data centers.
- Nuclear power has been suggested as a solution to meet growing needs.
- Plans include converting coal plants to nuclear, with regional cooperation and investment.
SALT LAKE CITY — The United States has seen a "seismic shift" in the future energy demand in the last six months, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. The Mountain West, in particular, is preparing for a number of data center projects requiring an enormous amount of energy, turning to nuclear power to close the gap.
"We have one data center project in Utah that they want to build now, actually we have four of these, but one of them would use 1.4 gigawatts of power," the governor said Thursday at Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce's Growth and Prosperity Summit, held at Utah Valley University in Orem.
"The entire state of Wyoming runs on 900 megawatts. Utah runs on 4 gigawatts of power. That means that one campus would need more than 25% of all of the power that we use in Utah," Cox said. "That's impossible. It just can't happen, but that's what we're seeing ... we're in a crisis right now."
While the details of the large deal Cox referenced remain unclear, an 80-megawatt data center in West Jordan was announced in March, and a project in Eagle Mountain will require 400 megawatts of new transmission infrastructure by 2028, according to the developer Tract.
A September report from the U.S. Department of Energy says data centers supporting artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, industrial growth and the electrification of transportation have driven "a surge in electricity demand" that is forcing utility companies to adapt after "decades of stasis."
On Oct. 8, Cox committed to doubling the state's power production over the next decade in a move being called Operation Gigawatt.
The governor listed a few ways the state hopes to meet growing energy demand at the summit — from using natural gas and coal reserves in the short term to hydrogen storage and hydrothermal. He said, "Probably the most important — the answer to all of these questions — is nuclear." The governors of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah have been working to build a coalition to get nuclear technology online "faster, better and cheaper," he said.
"Nationwide, just in the last month, there have been some amazing announcements," Jess Gehin, associate laboratory director of nuclear at the Idaho National Laboratory, told KSL.com.
Microsoft is reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. Within two days of each other in October, Amazon and Google announced they would be investing in small modular reactors, following Dow Chemicals in 2023.
Currently, the U.S. generates around 100 gigawatts of electricity using nuclear power, according to the Department of Energy. There are 94 reactors across the country at 54 different sites providing around 20% of the nation's electricity. That number is set to triple by 2050, with the U.S. signing an agreement at the 2023 World Climate Action Summit.
Large gaps in the nation's workforce and supply chain make this scaling difficult, Gehin said. According to the September report, "the U.S. would need to grow its nuclear workforce by about 375,000" in 25 years, from the existing 100,000 workers.
To streamline new nuclear power plant projects (which require six to 10 years from conception to operation), according to the Utah Department of Energy Development, investors and the government are looking at converting coal power plants that are set to be retired, to cut capital costs by an estimated 15% to 35%.
"Coal plants are thermal plants," Gehin said. "They produce heat, they all have the electrical infrastructure, the cooling infrastructure, they have local workforce. So if you go through these parameters, it's a good fit."
"Something like 80% of the retired and current coal sites in the U.S. could host a reactor," according to Gehin.
Coal generates around 49% of the state's electricity, but virtually all of it "comes from power plants that are nearing the end of their useful life and are scheduled for retirement no later than 2042," a Utah Department of Energy report says.
Four sites have been identified as potential candidates for conversion from coal to nuclear:
- Hunter Power Plant in Emery County, with a 1,577-megawatt capacity and potential decommission in 2042.
- Bonanza Power Plant in Uintah County, with a 500-megawatt capacity, and potential decommission in 2030.
- Sunnyside Cogeneration Power Plant, with a 58-megawatt capacity and no decommission date.
- Intermountain Power Plant, with a 1,640-megawatt capacity, and potential decommission in 2028.
PacifiCorp has started the development of a Natrium nuclear reactor at a decommissioned coal-fired plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. If successful, the company "has plans to replicate its reactor design at the Hunter and Huntington power plants in Emery County, according to the report.
The consideration of how to manage the spent fuel from reactions is also a challenge for nuclear expansion. New technologies, however, are continually being developed to reuse the waste to continue generating power.
According to a 2024 nuclear report from the Utah Division of Energy Development, used fuel holdings in the country still have a lot of life in them. "The stockpile of energy in spent nuclear fuel is remarkable," the report says, "with existing U.S. stockpiles containing enough uranium to power the entire country for decades, even centuries, to come."
