Who's powering nuclear energy's comeback?

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• 00:00

  NPR.

• 00:11

  Nuclear energy seems to be back in favour this week at the COP 29 climate change conference.

• 00:17

  Discussions are underway about how nuclear can help the world reduce carbon emissions.

• 00:23

  Also, the Biden administration announced a goal to triple nuclear energy production in the US by 2050.

• 00:30

  The inflation reduction act is helping with that with a ton of subsidies.

• 00:35

  And those subsidies are part of the reason that this year Amazon, Microsoft and Google each signed massive deals to build nuclear projects.

• 00:44

  The companies have a voracious appetite for electricity as artificial intelligence data centers chew up more and more energy.

• 00:52

  The US lost its appetite for building new nuclear power plants several decades ago for a few reasons.

• 00:59

  First, it's incredibly expensive to build.

• 01:01

  Also, meltdowns and environmental risks loom large in the public imagination.

• 01:07

  But a new form of nuclear power generation called small modular reactors aims to change that.

• 01:16

  This is the indicator from Planet Money.

• 01:18

  I'm Darien Woods.

• 01:19

  And I'm Weyland Wong.

• 01:20

  Today on the show, could nuclear energy work differently?

• 01:24

  This time we probed the CEO of the company working with Google on its small modular reactor project and we asked how it will deal with concerns about cost, safety and waste.

• 01:40

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• 01:56

  Hey, it's Peter Sagal, the host of Wait Wait.

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