Utility NextEra Energy is considering restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa thanks to strong interest from data centers.

The comment comes after Microsoft last month announced that it would take up 100 percent of a revived Three Mile Island nuclear power plant for 20 years.

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The Duane Arnold nuclear plant – Wikimedia Commons/AsNuke

"We are very busy looking at Duane Arnold," NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during the company's third-quarter earnings call this week. "We're very interested in recommissioning the plant. We're doing all the things right now that you would expect us to do... it goes without saying there's very strong interest from customers, really data center customers in particular, around that site."

That evaluation is still in the early stages, so Ketchum said that he was unable to disclose the cost of restarting the facility. "This is a BWR, boiling water reactor," he said. "They are a lot less complex to bring back and to recommission. It's a simpler design because they don't have a steam generator like [pressurized water reactors] do.

"And so that gives us optimism at being able to do this at an attractive price and be able to execute it without as much risk that might be associated with recommissioning a plant that does not have a boiling water reactor, but is a PWR design."

The Duane Arnold Energy Center northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa shut down in 2020 after more than 40 years of service. It had a nameplate capacity of 601MW.

"There are only two merchant nuclear plants west of the Mississippi," Ketchum said. "Nuclear plants across the country are already serving existing demand. So even if they are contracted by specific customers, new resources need to be built to meet new demand. And alternatives such as new utility-scale nuclear and [small modular reactors (SMRs)] are unproven, expensive and again, not expected to be commercially viable at scale until the latter part of the next decade."

Earlier this month, Amazon announced three separate SMR deals, and invested in an SMR company - following its acquisition of Talen Energy’s data center campus next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Also this month, Google announced a 500MW deal with SMR provider Kairos Power. Oracle founder Larry Ellison claims that his company plans to build a 1GW data center campus backed by three SMRs, but has yet to provide any further details.

Colocation giant Equinix has agreed to purchase 500MW in PPAs from fast fission reactor company Oklo, while Prometheus Hyperscale has also agreed to purchase 100MW from the Sam Altman-backed business.

The push to use nuclear power from traditional plants as well as SMRs comes amid a dramatic power demand increase from the data center sector thanks to AI.

"Given all of the demand that we're seeing from data centers, and the compression of supply and available sites ready to go, it's creating even more of a premium on other industries outside of data centers to try to lock up low-cost renewable generation," Ketchum said.

"And so, all ships are rising with the tide here, so to speak. As data centers are increasing their demand, which is also increasing price, which is also increasing returns, you're also seeing other industries that are looking to secure and hedge their power exposure because they believe that power prices, they may be facing higher power prices down the road."

He added that the demand for greater power availability was not just a data center phenomenon. "This is a movement across industry, the electrification of industry, manufacturing, looking to decouple from China, and they're all looking for ways to control energy prices at the lowest cost possible going forward."