Let’s Talk Nuclear with Dr. Everett Redmond

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.