John Ketchum, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Nextera Energy, speaks during the 2023 CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Texas, US, on Wednesday, March 8, 2023.

F. Carter Smith | Bloomberg | Getty Images

NextEra Energy is seeing strong interest from data center customers in restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa, CEO John Ketchum said Wednesday.

“We are very busy looking at Duane Arnold,” Ketchum told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “We’re very interested in recommissioning the plant.”

NextEra is conducting engineering assessments on the plant and is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local stakeholders on evaluating a possible restart, the CEO said.

“Obviously, it goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, really data center customers in particular around that site,” Ketchum said.

Duane Arnold’s boiling water reactor is a simpler design that should be easier to recommission at “an attractive price,” Ketchum said. NextEra views the plant as a long-term asset and would hope to sign an attractive power purchase agreement, he said.

Ketchum cautioned in July that NextEra would only restart the plant if the project was “essentially risk free.”

The Duane Arnold Energy Center northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ceased operations in 2020 after more than 40 years of service. The nuclear industry in the U.S. faced a wave of reactor shutdowns over the past decade as they struggled to compete against cheap natural gas.

But power companies are pressing ahead with restarting recently shuttered nuclear plants as electricity demand surges from data centers, manufacturing and the electrification of the economy.

Ketchum’s comments on Duane Arnold come a month after Constellation Energy unveiled plans to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 2028 through an agreement with Microsoft.

Tech giants such as Microsoft are grappling with massive power needs as they scale up artificial intelligence. Nuclear is attracting growing interest from tech companies because reactors provide large quantities of reliable, carbon-free power. Alphabet’s Google and Amazon recently announced investments in next-generation small nuclear reactors.

Holtec International, a privately held nuclear technology company, blazed the trail for restarting reactors with the Palisades plant in Michigan. Holtec expects that plant to come back online toward the end of 2025. It would be the first nuclear plant in U.S. history to restart after shutting down.

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