Scale Matters: Even Climate Hawks Are Embracing Nuclear Power

 Nuclear energy is the No. 1 source of carbon-free electricity in the US, producing more than wind turbines and solar panels combined. That’s been true for decades. Even so, support for nuclear has been soft among so-called climate hawks — the public officials and thought leaders who rank global warming as one of the top issues facing the US and the world. But that changed in 2025 — and in a big way.

In one example of this newfound enthusiasm for nuclear, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is pursuing plans to build at least 1,000 megawatts of new nuclear power generation capacity in the Empire State. Not only that, Hochul is calling on the Trump administration — which has already laid the groundwork for tens of billions of dollars in new nuclear energy projects — to fast-track the federal approval process.

Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom, another Democrat, praised nuclear alongside wind and solar when announcing the Golden State now gets more than two-thirds of its electricity from zero-emission sources.

And in Colorado, Democrat Governor Jared Polis and bipartisan majorities in the state legislature are expanding clean energy goals to include nuclear power. Al Gore, the former US vice president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, is talking positively about a nuclear “resurgence.”

There was even a strong push for nuclear at last month’s United Nations climate talks in Brazil. For example, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer boasted in a speech to delegates that his Labour government is overseeing "the biggest nuclear-building program in a generation."

Clearly, there’s been a shift in the politics of nuclear energy, especially among public officials who care about climate change. But what’s driving it?

First and foremost, it’s the sudden realization that electricity demand is growing much faster than expected — largely because of the data centers needed for cloud storage and the development of artificial intelligence technology.

Staggering Projections

In the US alone, the projections are staggering. Annual electricity consumption by data centers could jump by roughly 150-400 terawatt hours over the next few years, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

For perspective, the low end of this range is roughly equivalent to all the electricity generated in the state of New York in a year. On the high end, it’s all the electricity generated on the US West Coast — and that’s just in the short term.

If current trends persist, keeping pace with longer-term growth will be even more challenging, and weather-dependent sources like wind and solar can only get you so far.

For the US to win the global AI race and keep the power grid reliable and affordable for other consumers, larger sources of so-called firm power are needed. Scale matters — and nuclear reactors can generate electricity at scale, with zero carbon emissions, at all hours of the day and night.

Cost also matters. Historically, that’s been an "Achilles heel" for new nuclear projects. But the economics of nuclear are also getting a fresh look.

While the upfront construction costs for nuclear are high, the ongoing fuel costs are relatively low. Not only that, nuclear plants also have long operating lives of up to 80 years.

For this reason, a 2024 report from the US Department of Energy found that nuclear was being unfairly compared to competing technologies with shorter lifespans of around 30 years. Correcting for this bias, the cost of nuclear “compares favorably to other generation sources,” including wind, solar and natural gas turbines, according to the report.

“If you run it long term, it is the cheapest energy there is,” said Mark Chen, a nuclear industry veteran and president of Kerogen Capital-CelerateX, a private equity firm that invests in low-carbon energy projects.

New Reactor Designs

New reactor designs have also been developed in the hopes of driving down nuclear costs even further.

“The big shift is that projects are fundamentally smaller and can be built faster,” Chen said in an interview with the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.

These small modular reactors (SMRs) are conceptually similar to the scaled-down nuclear plants that have powered US Navy vessels since the 1950s.

SMRs range in size from 50 MW to 350 MW per reactor, compared to roughly 1,000 MW per reactor in traditional civilian US nuclear power plants.

The smaller size means the designs are easier to standardize and build on an assembly line, which could streamline the regulatory approval process and shorten construction time.

Once operational, smaller is also safer. A smaller reactor generates less heat than a large reactor, and new designs feature passive safety systems that require no human intervention or external power source to provide emergency cooling.

In North America, some of the leading SMR projects are in various stages of development in Ontario, Canada, and the US states of Tennessee and Wyoming.

The first projects could be completed within five years, “and I think you’ll see a big ramp-up between five years and 10 years, when a whole lot of projects will start coming on line,” Chen said.

In the meantime, tech giants Google and Microsoft are even bringing retired reactors back into service, such is the level of interest in expanding the use of nuclear power.

Success Not Guaranteed

To be sure, the success of new nuclear projects is not guaranteed. Extensive political and community engagement will be needed to address public concerns and deal with pushback from antinuclear activist groups. Left unaddressed, these are factors that could delay or even derail these projects.

But the significance of the moment shouldn’t be overlooked either. When climate hawks acknowledge the need for nuclear, it suggests the political and economic fundamentals of this issue have changed in a consequential way, and a wave of new investment in this sector may be just around the corner.

Simon Lomax is a policy and outreach adviser to the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and a Colorado Cleantech Energy Fellow. He is a former Bloomberg News energy reporter and a former congressional fellow with the American Political Science Association. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

Scale Matters: Even Climate Hawks Are Embracing Nuclear Power | Energy Intelligence