A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology’s growing resurgence in popularity.

It mirrors a similar commitment made by a group of countries including Canada at the UN climate conference in Dubai in 2023, and a pledge from a group of financial institutions last year.

The shift comes as countries and companies grapple with how to shore up their energy security and meet growing demand for power without dramatically increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

“There’s been, at a global level, a lot of pragmatism, a lot of realism,” Sama Bilbao y Leon, director general of the World Nuclear Association, told CBC News on the sidelines of CERAWeek, a massive Houston-based conference often described as the “Super Bowl of energy,” where the pledge was signed. 

“Many countries started to do their math and recognized that reaching their goals was simply not going to be feasible without a significant growth of nuclear.”

The industry is getting plenty of buzz at CERAWeek — including from U.S. energy secretary and oil and gas booster Chris Wright — though some say that outside the walls of the energy conference, public opinion could be a sticking point. 

Growing momentum

Nuclear power has gone through several periods of growth and decline in the last half-century, including a rise in popularity in the 1980s that was nearly halted following the Chornobyl accident, according to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). A renaissance in the 2000s was also thrown off course following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011, the result of an earthquake and tsunami.

A lack of new construction combined with aging infrastructure led to a decline in the share of nuclear power to the world’s overall energy mix, going from 24 per cent in 2001 to around 17 per cent in 2023, the agency said. 

But it said a comeback is underway, with nuclear power set to generate a record level of electricity in 2025. 

“More than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally, one of the highest levels in the last 30 years,” said the IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol in a release.

This comes amid spiking demand for electricity due in part to the rise of AI data centres. The advantage of nuclear power is that it doesn’t directly emit carbon dioxide and it can run 24/7. 

Google’s head of clean energy, for example, told a crowd of energy executives this week that while the company has made big investments in wind and solar, it realized that wouldn’t be enough to meet its need for power. 

“If you want to achieve 24/7, carbon-free energy, you need a whole range of technologies that include clean resources like nuclear,” said Lucia Tian, speaking at a CERAWeek panel.

U.S. Secretary of State Chris Wright also boosted the technology during a speech that disparaged renewables like wind and solar power. Wright said he plans to create a long-awaited “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S., and spoke fondly of a longstanding passion for nuclear power that began when he was a child looking at stars in the night sky.

The bulk of Canada’s nuclear power sector is concentrated in Ontario, which is planning a nuclear “expansion” that includes a possible new plant near Port Hope.

There is also growing interest in Canada around small modular reactors (SMRs). These are advanced nuclear reactors with roughly one-third of the generating capacity of their traditional counterparts. They’re also much smaller, meaning their parts can be assembled at factories, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Canada has one major SMR project in advanced development and four other pilot and demonstration projects being planned, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. Several provinces, including Alberta, have also indicated support to explore SMRs. 

That’s good news for companies like NuScale Power, an Oregon-based SMR business. CEO John Hopkins says the technology has already been through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission process and could be deployed “anywhere in the U.S. or Canada” as early as 2031.

“I see the natural progression or groundswell continuing to build for climate disruption, but also for energy security,” Hopkins told CBC News, pointing to rumours that Germany might be backtracking on its decision to get out of nuclear power. 

“That is huge, potentially, if they do that.”

PR hurdle?

Still, Hopkins said one challenge on the horizon could be public relations. There are still people who associate nuclear power with high-profile accidents, he said. 

“People of my age remember Three Mile Island, they remember Chornobyl,” said Hopkins, though he noted younger people don’t tend to have the same associations. 

Joe Brettell, a Texas-based PR executive, made a similar point. The state has big nuclear ambitions with plans to develop its SMR industry. 

“Are we talking to the people about it, helping them understand what their role and opportunity is, especially with something like nuclear that has just some inherent emotional baggage for a lot of people?” he said. “Chornobyl, Three Mile Island, these are unfortunate circumstances that are only a Google search away.”

In Ontario, opposition has also  emerged around plans for nuclear waste disposal sites. 

For its part, the World Nuclear Association says that while high-profile accidents like Chornobyl and Three Mile Island have been “spectacular and newsworthy,” the risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is “low and declining.” 

Bilbao y Leon, the association’s leader, also believes public opinion around nuclear power is shifting as the desire for affordable and secure energy outweighs previous hesitation. She said while building new nuclear projects is expensive upfront, in the long term it’s a cheap, stable form of power. 

“This is part of that newfound pragmatism,” she said. 

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Japan, which has gradually been restarting several of its reactors after shutting them down following the Fukushima disaster. 

“Restarting the existing nuclear power plants will be the cheapest option for us, you don’t have to build anything new,” Tatsuya Terazawa, CEO of the Tokyo-based Institute of Energy Economics, Japan. The country is planning to ramp up its use of nuclear power to feed power demand from AI and semiconductors. 

Going forward, Bilbao y Leon said she will be watching to see nuclear plans and pledges materialize into action. 

“It’s great to have this announcement,” she said. “The next thing is to make that happen.”