Wall Street Warms to Nuclear Power to Help Boost Manufacturing: Report

The banks, which also include Citi, Barclays and BNP Paribas, have not said what steps they will take to help achieve this goal.

However, their involvement could be essential to help meet the emissions target set at last year’s COP28 climate change conference and revive the nuclear power sector.

More details are expected at an event in New York on Monday.

Once considered the future of clean energy, nuclear power has declined in popularity in recent decades due to governments’ reluctance to support expensive infrastructure projects, concerns about its environmental impact and other factors, such as competition from cheap U.S. natural gas.

Nuclear accounted for a quarter of Germany’s electricity generation until 2011, but a change in government policy meant that all of its plants were closed by last year.

Nuclear’s share of global electricity production fell to its lowest level since the 1980s last year, according to the State of the World Nuclear Industry Report.

That could soon change, and it’s not just Wall Street that’s getting more interested in nuclear power. Big Tech is also increasingly throwing its support behind technology as companies try to power AI systems and data centers while reducing carbon emissions.

Microsoft last week struck a deal to reopen a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which remains best known for a partial meltdown in 1979.

The tech giant has agreed to buy power generated by the plant for the next two decades after investing heavily in AI through its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told investors earlier this month that demand for power for advanced AI is so “insane” that his company is building a data center powered by three small nuclear reactors.

“We found the location and the fueling site, they already have construction permits for three nuclear reactors,” he said on Oracle’s first-quarter earnings call.

“These are the small modular nuclear reactors that power the data center. That’s how crazy it gets. Here’s what’s happening.”

Rolls-Royce is one of the main competitors with it small modular reactor designs and has secured development funding of over £200m from the UK Government.

Meanwhile, TerraPower, a company co-founded by Bill Gates, is planning a new nuclear plant in Wyoming.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s after-hours requests for comment. Citi declined to comment.