Google, Meta pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 as technology sees looming 'renaissance'

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. 

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.