As the data centre sector continues to boom, with cloud services remaining a primary opportunity, such expansion faces the critical challenge of minimising environmental impact. This includes adopting more sustainable practices in power generation and reducing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change effects.
According to Tom Kingham, vice president of engineering & utilities Lead, Europe at CyrusOne, the sector needs to ensure the power it uses to run its facilities is both reliable and environmentally responsible. Nuclear power, he said, is more stable than wind or solar, given that it is not weather dependent.
Nuclear power is still being touted as a low carbon solution for society as a whole and, for the data centre industry, to meet rising AI and cloud demands.
“This is leading to a wave of modern nuclear technology developments. The potential for utilising nuclear to power data centres seems to be helped by the rising interest in small modular reactors (SMRs),” Kingham said.
“Unlike old fashioned nuclear power stations, SMRs are much smaller and have the potential to be located in a much wider variety of locations to provide localised power supplies.”
The SMR potential
Political interest in SMRs is hotting up. The UK, for instance, has already announced funding to develop SMRs as part of its Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, in addition to selecting Rolls-Royce to be the first company to build SMRs to support the country’s efforts to lead in nuclear energy technology.
The EU has also launched a new European Industrial Alliance on SMRs to accelerate the development, demonstration and deployment of SMR projects in Europe.
“Although this is a long-term ambition, the data centre industry should engage with it constructively and not sit on the sidelines,” Kingham explained. “We can’t ignore the fact that we need more compute power to meet the needs of a modern digital economy, yet we also know that we cannot burn fossil fuels to power it. Powering large data centre workloads with SMRs will therefore solve a range of potential challenges.”
He added: “SMRs provide emission free power and create new energy generation capacity local to demand, which reduces pressure on the constrained transmission.
“Although SMR technology is yet to be proven at scale, it does appear that especially in the context of powering large workloads, they provide the best solution. This is the critical window in which we need to address carbon emissions if we are to have any hope of sticking to staying below 1.5°C warming by 2030.”
Environmental points to consider
Nuclear power has been said to be a cleaner form of energy for data centres, given its low carbon footprint and potential to help achieve more sustainable results. However, Kingham advised that using SMRs to power data centres won’t come without challenges.
“Public acceptance, for instance, may be a significant hurdle due to the negative perceptions linked with major historical incidents and the well-publicised issues of nuclear waste disposal,” he explained. “That said, the International Atomic Energy Agency suggests nuclear power plants are among the most secure facilities in the world and subject to most stringent international safety standards.
“Additionally, as with any low-carbon energy infrastructure, the development of SMRs is highly capital-intensive. Data centres, which are providing the energy demand, have a unique opportunity to show industry support for this type of technology. The data centre industry can encourage SMR development, both by demonstrating its value as a low-carbon energy source and speeding up its adoption across other energy-intensive sectors.”
Locations that are appropriate for SMRs may not always align with data centre development zones and could be far from where power is needed, Kingham explained.
“As a result, those facilities are in need of large transmissions,” he said. “SMRs, however, have the potential to be created locally and therefore placed closer to data centres mitigating any challenges with transmission capacity.”
Making SMRs a viable solution for energy needs
As debates over SMRs continue, Kingham suggests that those within the industry must weigh up both the opportunities and challenges of adopting nuclear power.
“SMRs could help close the growing gap between the sector’s rising energy needs, driven by expanding capacity for enterprise compute and the surge in AI workloads and the available supply,” he said. “Falling behind in delivering digital services, AI and other advanced workloads would have a profound impact on the EU’s overall economy, making it essential to explore every viable energy option as demand accelerates.”
He added: “SMRs clearly offer significant advantages, but they also come with notable challenges that the market must address. With the current pace of advancement, neither the commercial deployment of SMRs nor the necessary transmission upgrades is expected to be available before the mid-2030s. This reinforces the importance of alternative sustainable energy sources as critical components in our energy strategy for at least the next decade.
“Innovative solutions, such as advanced cooling systems, ultra-high-density designs tailored for AI workloads and smarter energy-management strategies, will be essential for supporting data centres and their sustainability goals until SMRs become a practical and viable alternative.”
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