I asked him direct question a few weeks ago
Here’s his response and yes he’s at the top with nuclear. He was in Obamas research group looking into nuclear. He’s not a liberal either
They are very serious about building nuclear plants to supply power to the data centers. That is the only way they can get the extremely high reliability they need and low carbon.
A number of nuclear plants that were shutdown for economic reasons and for BS reasons are being restarted for this very purpose. TMI, the one that didn't melt, and Palisades are for sure and I think others are possible.
The nuke plants may or may not be collocated. They will most likely operate under a power purchase agreement meaning someone else will own the power plant but will have a long term contract to buy all or a large fraction of the power generated.
For work, I just reviewed a model one of our new staff is developing to model potential power purchase agreements to support economic modeling. I tried as politely as I could to tell him his assumptions were 🤬 stupid.
There's a minimum average price that makes an investment a good investment. Obviously that is the floor and the sky is the limit. There's a theory for this and if you make good assumptions, it will be representative of reality. Not easy to do because a big part is how risky is the investment perceived. He did a number of different scenarios, all reasonable possibilities, but didn't keep them equally favorable from the power plant owners perspective. Some were a far better deal than others. That is not how you model this. That is not useful.
Ultimately these will be set by negotiations, but we need to understand what the space looks like which requires consistent assumptions not several options with a few that would never be taken because they are clearly less favorable.
