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Country music was playing during lunch as conference attendees wearing cowboy boots talked energy. But the chatter wasn’t about oil — all the buzz was for “electrons.”
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This year’s Texas Nuclear Summit in Austin experienced a jump in attendance as experts, analysts and executives saw an opportunity to supply much-needed power for the state’s booming economy. The hot topic was new-generation technology, including smaller reactors that can be built cheaper and faster.
Doug Robison, chairman of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, likened the current moment to the dawn of the fracking boom, when he made his fortune as founder of Permian Basin oil and gas company ExL Petroleum.
When it became clear that new technology was going to transform energy production in the state, “that’s when the money started flying,” said Robison. He’s now president of Natura Resources LLC, a Texas startup that’s building a molten-salt reactor, another new type of nuclear plant.
There’s a rush across the industry to accelerate next-generation reactors and deploy more zero-carbon, around-the-clock power to feed the growing appetite of AI data centers.
Companies like Oklo Inc., NuScale Power Corp. and Nano Nuclear Energy Inc. have seen their shares surge this year. But most of the technology is still largely unproven at commercial scale. Only a few of these smaller reactors have been built so far in China and Russia.
That hasn’t dampened the excitement in Texas, which has seen a huge build-out of new data centers, crypto-miners and factories, alongside big gains in population. Peak power consumption is expected to soar in the next five years, possibly even doubling.
Nuclear still faces many hurdles, both regulatory and financial. It’s expensive to build and banks are wary of providing financing. Perhaps most importantly, there is not yet a single advanced reactor in service in the US.
“We have too many paper reactors” said Dale Klein, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “We need somebody to build real ones.”
–Will Wade, Bloomberg News
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