The Hawk’s talk went nuclear again. Raymond Hawkins brought on Dr. Everett

Redmond. A Senior Technical Advisor of New Reactors and Advanced Technology at

the Nuclear Energy Institute, Dr. Redmond joined the show for a fascinating talk on

nuclear energy and energy in general for the data center industry.

Dr. Redmond studied nuclear engineering at MIT, and along with scuba diving, his

passion is nuclear energy.

Diving in, only some pun intended, to the world of bitcoin, Dr. Redmond said there was

a tie-in between crypto and nuclear energy. “Last year, we saw a number of Bitcoin

companies make agreements with reactor companies. In one case, with a new reactor

vendor. They’re looking for that clean, carbon-free energy to power their mining

operations, and so you’re seeing those connections.”

Dr. Redmond touched on some new nuclear-related projects occurring in the United

States,“There’s a company called New Scale developing a new light water, water-

cooled reactor,” Dr. Redmond continued, “They’ve teamed up with UAMPS (Utah

Associated Municipal Power Systems.) They plan to build an Idaho national laboratory

and be operational by 2029. And then you have a couple of other companies,

TerraPower and X-energy, awarded projects by the Department of Energy.”

 

These projects will bring nuclear power to Wyoming for the first time and expand

carbon-free energy production in Washington.

With a blossoming of new nuclear energy projects afoot, Hawkins wanted to know the

viability of data centers teaming up with nuclear power to provide carbon-free energy to

data storage. Dr. Redmond was clear: nuclear energy tends to go where the need is, and

often that is if there are regulatory requirements to meet carbon-neutral goals. He noted

that some companies with long-range plans are looking at ways nuclear energy can be

part of the equation to provide energy solutions in the future.