Nuclear in my backyard? More of America, and market, seems OK with it

Van Buren County is a rural redoubt in southwestern Michigan, a quiet corner of a swing state. Pillow soft sand dunes shift and shape along the shores of Lake Michigan. And the county seat – Paw Paw – is named after a quintessentially Midwestern fruit.

“It is a beautiful natural environment with gorgeous sand dunes that you don’t see in other parts of the world,” says Daywi Cook, whose family has lived in this area for five generations. “A lot of folks like to live here because of the solitude.”

Covert Township’s tranquility seems to belie its place as the vanguard to a potential nuclear transformation. The Van Buren County township has been home to the Palisades Nuclear Plant since 1971. The aging plant was decommissioned in 2022 but is being brought back into service through an over $1 billion loan secured under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, with the first installment provided by the federal government this year. In addition to reactivating the plant, the site is also expected to house the nation’s first small modular reactors (SMRs).

Small modular reactors are factory-built nuclear power plants that are much smaller than traditional reactors (typically 300 megawatts or less). The SMRs are usually designed to be mass-produced and shipped to sites for faster, less costly installation.

The future of energy in the U.S. may be unfolding in this unassuming corner of Michigan where the Holtec Corporation is constructing two SMR-300 units which will be co-located with the existing 800-megawatt Palisades plant. The SMRs are planned to be operational by the early 2030s.

“There are still some unknowns but Holtec has been inviting us into the conversation,” said Cook, who is the township supervisor. She says the area’s familiarity with nuclear energy and the plant’s safety record has gone a long way to assuage the county’s residents.

Holtec did not respond to a request for comment.

Cook is hoping the recommissioned legacy plant and the SMRs will give the county some needed economic stability which is guided largely by seasonal swings.

“We are known as the Catskills of Chicago. There are a lot of short-term rentals that boom in the summer,” Cook said, which she explained then sit empty in the winter. “It would be nice to have year-round stability,” Cook added.

Zach Morris, executive director of Market One, a local association of business and government leaders that promotes economic growth in Cass and Van Buren Counties, Michigan, says that the area is uniquely positioned to be the leading edge of the nation’s nuclear renaissance. Because of the existing plant, the nuclear knowledge is ready and in the workforce, and the area has ample power to make power.

Morris says the recommissioned legacy nuclear plant will employ 600 people, and the two SMRs will employ a combined 300 people with salaries averaging $107,000. “That is $32 million in payroll annually, resulting in significant money being spent in groceries, restaurants, and donations to non-profits,” Morris said. And with the area’s nuclear past, there’s been little opposition to the arrival of SMRs, which he pointed out have been around for awhile, used in the military for years in submarines and aircraft carriers. “This is not a new technology, but there has not been a need for it until now,” Morris said.

A Holtec SMR will provide enough power for 300,000 homes or a data center or two, a drop-in-the-bucket in the sating of demand.

“We have a national issue, it is a national crisis that we didn’t anticipate five years ago,” Morris said. “Five years ago nobody saw this coming. Their collective genius didn’t anticipate this,” he said of data centers coming online without enough power and people who don’t want to give up their AI, streaming services, or cameras. “That means we have to adapt to the crisis. SMRs are the future,” Morris said.

To illustrate how much the world of power generation has been upended in short order, Morris offers a stark comparison. “Five years ago we were worried about how we were going to put up with the demand from a 20 megawatt marijuana farm,” he said, referring to a planned cannabis operation, and adding, “that is a fraction of what the data centers are asking for.”

Big Tech’s role in nuclear comeback

People are using AI for everything from identifying the animal tracks in their backyard to analyzing 10 years of sales data for corporate reports. And this torrent of requests for AI is leading to a torrent of demand for data centers to do the complex computing needed for instant answers. And the demand for data centers — constructed by tech titans Google, Amazon, and others — has led to a torrent of demand for…