Texas Energy Firm Wants to Turn Naval Reactors Into Powerplants

An American energy company has come up with a novel way to generate nuclear power for civilian uses without the high cost and long timeline of building a new nuclear plant. Texas-based HGP Intelligent Energy LLC wants to reuse a pair of retired naval reactors to generate power for a data center, according to Bloomberg, augmenting the grid with a local and long-lasting source of electricity.

According to HGP, a pair of submarine or aircraft carrier reactors could provide about 500 megawatts of power, which could be used to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of warehouse-sized computing centers. One complete plant would cost about $2 billion, a tiny fraction of the expense of building a new civilian nuclear powerplant.

Newbuild nuclear stations take years to permit and construct because of the perceived risks and the complexity of the task involved, and they require a large and hard-to-find workforce of talented welders and pipefitters. By contrast, HGP thinks that a naval reactor-based powerplant could be up and running by 2029, just four years away.

In operation, the equipment would be intimately familiar to veterans of the U.S. Navy's nuclear propulsion program, the men and women known as "Navy nukes," so the plant operator could hire qualified technicians from day one. Similarly, the supply chain for spare parts has been established for decades.

There is one challenge for scaling: security. American naval reactors run on weapons-grade, high-enriched uranium. If extracted from reactor fuel rods, the 93% uranium-235 fuel could be used to make nuclear weapons, and it is considered a proliferation risk. The reactor technology itself is among the defense establishment's most closely-guarded secrets.

The first plant project, according to a proposal filed with the Energy Department and seen by Bloomberg, would be built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The small city is home of Oak Ridge National Lab, the secure facility that helped develop the Navy's first nuclear propulsion reactors and train its first nuclear-qualified officers. ORNL has housed some of the nation's most important nuclear research since World War II, and it is a leading employer of ex-Navy nuclear personnel.

HGP has experience as a grid-scale project developer, having installed 20 sites with battery backup power storage and thermal-power generating capacity for grid resilience. It was among the first battery-backup developers in Texas, and now has nearly two dozen assets in development.