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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made changes to lower the burden for applicants and speed up approvals
By Mathieu Dion
The surge in new data centres for artificial intelligence is translating into growth for the United States electricity sector, and Canadian nuclear company AtkinsRealis Group Inc. wants in.
The Montreal-based company has filed a notice of intent with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get certification of its Enhanced Candu Six nuclear reactor. Chief executive Ian Edwards said the company has been in talks with U.S. utilities and hyperscalers.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find energy on the grid, so they’re looking to develop power sources for themselves,” he said. “We need to be ahead of this in terms of getting the regulatory approval in place.”
Data centres, electric vehicles and air conditioning will push power demand sharply higher over the next few decades. U.S. data centre requirements for electricity are expected to nearly triple by 2035 to over 100 gigawatts, according to a BloombergNEF report.
BloombergNEF says solar and wind will be the leaders in global electricity production by 2050, but nuclear will still grow. In the U.S., cumulative installed nuclear capacity should increase 58 per cent to 164 gigawatts by then, according to its forecast.
But U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambitions go much further, with the goal of facilitating the expansion of nuclear energy capacity to as much as 400 gigawatts by 2050. His administration is seeking to jumpstart the nuclear industrial base by improving the efficiency of licensing advanced nuclear reactors, among other measures.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made changes to lower the burden for applicants and speed up approvals of new reactor designs within 18 months.
“We are going to be the first one with a proven design, a licensed design, to go through that process, and we think we could get there probably in 12 to 14 months,” said Joe St. Julian, AtkinsRealis’ president of nuclear.
After that, the company’s executives think they could build quite rapidly. An EC6 700-megawatt reactor was constructed in China within a five-year timeframe, according to chief executive Edwards. “It’s become fairly competitive even with gas from a time perspective,” he said. “It’s very competitive on a price perspective too, because it’s not a first of a kind.” The Candu technology uses natural uranium, and not more expensive enriched uranium.
Shares of AtkinsRealis got a boost Monday after the Canadian government announced a strategy to enable construction of as many as 10 large-scale nuclear reactors. It also includes a commitment to modernizing the design of Candu reactor technology, which the Canadian government owns and to which AtkinsRealis is the exclusive licensee.
AtkinsRealis is currently developing a nuclear reactor model, the Candu Monark, that could potentially reach about 1,000 megawatts and compete with the AP1000 technology from rival Westinghouse Electric Co.
The firm’s nuclear unit represented slightly more than 20 per cent of its total revenue at $2.3 billion last year, and is expected to reach as much as $3 billion in 2027. “We can definitely see this evolving where it could be 40 per cent of the business,” Edwards said.
Bloomberg.com
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