Last October, Amazon announced it had signed an agreement to develop four small-scale modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, along the Columbia River to power its data centers in Eastern Oregon. Energy Northwest, a consortium of publicly owned utilities, is partnering with Amazon on the development of the SMRs which it says could be scaled up to meet the energy needs of more than 770,000 homes in the region without the use of fossil fuels.
But opposition to the plan is now ramping up as environmentalists, academics and Native American Tribes in the region raise their concerns over the safety of this novel nuclear technology to human health, wildlife and water quality. OPB rural communities reporter Antonio Sierra joins us to share his recent reporting on the opposition to Amazon’s vision for nuclear energy and the massive data centers it would help power.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Amazon announced in October that it had signed an agreement to develop four small-scale modular nuclear reactors along the Columbia River in Washington to power its data centers in Eastern Oregon.
Opposition to this plan is now ramping up as environmentalists, academics and Native American tribes in the region raised concerns about how this novel nuclear technology could affect human health, wildlife and water quality. OPB’s rural communities reporter Antonio Sierra joins us now. Welcome back.
Antonio Sierra: Hi, Dave.
Miller: Hey there. So I want to start with just the basics here in case people missed our first conversation about this. Can you just remind us what Amazon wants to do?
Sierra: Yeah, as you mentioned, a few months ago Amazon struck a couple of deals that really put its foot forward with nuclear energy. One of them was with a company called X-energy. And they were going to invest several million dollars in helping them develop novel small modular nuclear reactor technology. They also announced an agreement with Energy Northwest, an organization in Southeast Washington that represents a bunch of different Washington area utilities. Energy Northwest is going to help them place those SMRs, those small modular nuclear reactors, in the Southeast Washington area.
Amazon was really supportive of this because they think that SMRs will help with their climate goal. They have a very public pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040. And they also think this will generate more energy for their artificial intelligence technology, which is really important to their data centers based in Eastern Oregon. So this kind of checks off a lot of boxes for them.
Miller: How much more energy are data centers expected to need?
Sierra: The International Energy Agency projects that data center energy consumption will double from where it was in 2022 to 2026. And they attribute a lot of that growth to AI, artificial intelligence. This is a big sticking point for a lot of environmentalists because they are concerned about what kind of impact it’s going to have on the environment. And then there’s also been a lot of talk about [how] all this extra energy demand will result in utility costs going up further, which has been an issue in Oregon.
Miller: Now, there’s a reason that these modular nuclear reactors would be in Washington, even though Amazon’s data centers are in Oregon. It’s because of Oregon’s Ballot Measure 7, which voters approved in 1980. What did it do?
Sierra: Basically, in 1980, Ballot Measure 7 banned any new nuclear energy facilities without a federally-licensed permanent disposal site also existing. At the time, there was no disposal site. And they said you cannot have any new facilities until one is established. The problem with that is that no disposal site continues to exist [and] the federal government has had a lot of trouble finding a viable site.
So, nuclear energy facilities have been effectively banned ever since 1980. The last nuclear power plant in Oregon, Trojan, closed down in 1992. Ever since then, there have been no nuclear power plants located within Oregon.
Miller: You talked to one of the leaders of that effort, Chuck Johnson, who was 25 at the time. What did he tell you about that effort?
Sierra: Johnson got involved in anti-nuclear activism at a pretty young age, when he was a college student. And his initial focus was that Trojan power plant that I mentioned earlier, but eventually expanded into kind of a larger goal. He thought it would be more effective to focus on preventing new nuclear power plants rather than closing any existing ones. So him and other like-minded people put together this grassroots campaign to put together this restriction on nuclear power plants. This was a time when nuclear power plants were in the news a lot. Chernobyl had already happened in the 1980s. In 1989, closer to home, [at] Three Mile Island, there was a nuclear meltdown on the East Coast.
So this was happening a lot in the news and I think this helped build momentum for them to pass this ballot measure in 1980.
Miller: I’m curious what Johnson said about this current proposal now, given, as you mentioned, that there’s still no federally-licensed permanent disposal facility.
Sierra: It’s very clear that this is still a very relevant issue for him. He’s obviously very proud that he helped pass this measure. And he’s still very skeptical of nuclear energy. I think one of the issues he brings up is that we wanted a nuclear disposal site for a reason, and that’s because we think that nuclear waste is a very big safety and health risk. We cannot have new nuclear energy facilities without a disposal site because this nuclear waste lasts for a very long time – hundreds or even thousands of years. So he’s still very much keeping track of it.
Miller: What did you hear from environmental activists about this plan specifically to put these reactors at Hanford, the highly polluted site we’ve talked about a lot over the last six months, where the majority of our country’s plutonium was produced?
Sierra: Yeah, they’re maybe unsurprisingly very displeased with this plan. I think what’s important for listeners to know is that this area is near the Hanford site, which is, as you mentioned, one of the most highly nuclear polluted sites in the world, in the Western Hemisphere. During the World War II era, this produced plutonium. I think it was one of the biggest plutonium manufacturing sites in the country, from World War II through the Cold War. By the time it closed, there were billions of gallons of pollutants that were sitting in storage tanks underground, as well as just in the soil in general.
And what environmentalists are concerned about is that if there are new nuclear energy facilities that are built, that this will be in an impediment to the cleanup, both in the literal sense and that’ll make it harder to clean up some of these pollutants that are in the ground, that it could make it worse if there are any kind of further incidences of meltdowns or any kind of leakage. I spoke with Simone Anter, who is a staff attorney for Columbia Riverkeeper. She told me why Hanford still matters, beyond it being a site of nuclear energy and nuclear waste.
Simone Anter [recording]: Hanford is not a nuclear waste dumping ground. It is a place that has a future that people want to use and will use. If you just look at the river portion of this area, it’s called the Hanford Reach. It’s the last free flowing, undammed 50 miles of the Columbia River. And so you could imagine, this is some of the best spawning habitat for Chinook salmon. It provides many other species with food, water and a place to live, and it is extremely important. People fish there, people recreate here, and to think that they’re not going to do that in 20, 50, 100 years is preposterous.
Miller: What has Amazon or Energy Northwest said about the safety of this technology, in terms of both human health and the environment?
Sierra: What they argue is that, in the instance of SMRs, smaller is safer, right? Working with smaller amounts of nuclear material, being able to incorporate that into the design, will make these things a lot safer than they were, compared to large-scale nuclear reactors. And they also say that you really can’t compare the nuclear regulatory environment to where it was during World War II, when plutonium was still a relatively novel substance. So they’re arguing that both time has made nuclear regulations more strict, and time has also allowed them to develop the kind of technology that will make this safer.
Miller: What has the Yakama Nation said about this idea?
Sierra: I think you were out there a few months ago. The Hanford site is actually really important to the Yakama Nation. I’m not sure if they’ve actually come out firmly against SMRs or this specific project, but that area has some religious sites for them. It is ceded land for them. It belonged to them before it was ceded to the U.S. government. And they are directly involved in the cleanup. So this is not an area that they’re not paying attention to.
Miller: What about the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation?
Sierra: The Hanford site is also ceded land for the CTUIR, and they use it for gathering plants and roots, hunting game and fishing, what they refer to as their first foods. They have taken a very firm stance against it. They’ve taken a stance against any kind of nuclear energy project expansion in Hanford for years and that includes this one as well. So what they’ve said is that we don’t want anything there unless you get some sort of government to government consultation and you have our explicit approval.
Miller: In addition to the environmental arguments we’ve been talking about, you also heard some economic ones. [M.]V. Ramana is a professor at the University of British Columbia. What did you hear from him about the cost of traditional nuclear power plants?
Sierra: Ramana told me that nuclear energy has typically been an economy of scale. Most traditional nuclear reactors are very large and they’re incredibly expensive to build. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars, but they’re able to make up for that by producing a great amount of energy that they can go and sell, and then make back money on their investment.
What he is arguing is that SMRs don’t have that same economy of scale advantage, that although they are smaller and they could be built in off site, that they aren’t necessarily cheaper to operate. So a lot of these developers are really underestimating how much it will cost to build them. His example is NuScale. Our listeners might be familiar with NuScale. They’re a company based in Portland. They had an SMR project they’re trying to get off the ground in Idaho, and there were huge cost overruns with this SMR project. It eventually folded before they’re even able to get them built.
Miller: It seems like he isn’t just skeptical of cost though. What else did you hear from him?
Sierra: He really questioned Amazon and other tech companies’ commitments to climate change. He said that data centers are kind of in conflict with the idea that they were serious about the climate. And what he told me is that if they were truly serious about addressing the climate crisis, then they wouldn’t prioritize data centers the way that they do.
M.V. Ramana [recording]: If you really are serious about the climate crisis, you shouldn’t be building these data centers. You shouldn’t be driving up energy demand in these ways, right? So if somebody says, “I want to build a data center and I’m concerned about climate change,” then there’s a contradiction right there.
Miller: What did you hear from Amazon, I guess, about the idea that they might forgo renewable energy projects as they pursue nuclear power?
Sierra: Amazon told me that they are still committed to other forms of low carbon energy, like wind power and solar power, while they are still on this track of trying to build up their nuclear power capacity. So, for them, it’s not a question of “or,” and just more of a question of “and.” But they really are excited about the potential of nuclear energy and what kind of power it could bring.
Miller: What’s the possible time frame here for this?
Sierra: The optimistic timeline that was quoted to me by Energy Northwest was about eight to 10 years out, and with the very strong possibility that it could take much longer than that. This is a problem for environmentalists. They think that these tech companies want this energy right now, rather than eight to 10 years out, and could seek out other forms of energy that are less clean than nuclear energy. I spoke with Chuck Johnson about this and he thinks he knows what tech companies’ true motivation is about this.
Chuck Johnson [recording]: Is this an excuse or a way for them to say, hey, we have a big plan to be carbon free, but until then we’re just going to take whatever power we can get at the cheapest price we can get. Because that’s what I think they’re doing. I think it’s cynical. I think they’re basically saying, we’ve got to promise to be carbon free, and fortunately for us, it’s something that’s going to take a while to do. So we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to actually build solar panels, or batteries, or wind generators, and figure out how to do any of that, because we just have a plan in place. And then, in the meantime, we can ramp up whatever we need for AI and the system will have to figure out how to accommodate that.
Miller: Antonio, thanks very much.
Sierra: Thank you.
Miller: Antonio Sierra joined us. He is a rural communities reporter for OPB.
And just a quick correction, I gave the wrong name for that professor from the University of British Columbia. His name is M.V. Ramana.
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