Constellation Energy: Nukes: Small is getting big
A quick peep at the sheer quantity of low-carbon electricity that’s going to be needed to power AI data centres has led to the nuclear energy sector suddenly getting hotter than Chernobyl’s No 4 reactor back in 1986.
With net-zero pledges all round, the tech giants are already heavily invested in wind and solar, and now they’re hoping that next-generation small modular reactors (SMRs) will be able to satisfy the demands of their ravenously power-hungry data centres.
In the past week alone, Amazon has signed a deal to develop SMRs in Washington state and Virginia and Google has cut a deal to buy power from SMRs that will be developed by Kairos Power. Last month Microsoft signed a 20-year power supply deal with Constellation Energy, the company that operates the largest nuclear generation fleet in the US, which involves reopening a unit at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. The partial reactor meltdown there in 1979 was the worst accident in US nuclear history and a major blow to that industry.
Despite the somewhat eye-catching consequences when things go wrong, fans of the sector believe SMRs are safer and more efficient than large reactors, and can be relied upon to churn out the juice even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
There are clearly considerable regulatory hurdles to jump before this as-yet-unproven technology comes on stream, but the hope is that with big tech’s financial backing and ability to make things happen, the promise may turn into a reality sooner rather than later.
Stellantis: Fix it again, Tony
Stellantis was born in 2021 out of a merger between Fiat-Chrysler and Groupe PSA, and on current form it may well be wondering why it bothered. With sales cratering across the board, the company has been forced to pause production of its Fiat 500e and from November the Fiat Panda, to place large quantities of its Italian workforce on furlough, and to warn the market that it expects to lose a sphincter-tightening $11.2bn in the year.
It is constantly butting heads with the Italian government, to the extent that the deputy prime minister fired a mighty broadside at CEO Carlos Tavares, saying he “should be ashamed and apologise” for “mismanaging a historic Italian company”. Meanwhile workers in the Italian automotive industry, which has seen total car production halve since 2018, have descended on the streets of Rome in the first national strike for 20 years.
Back at Fiat’s iconic Mirafiori plant in Turin, which should have been celebrating the company’s 125th birthday this year, about the only thing working is the museum of vintage Fiats, prompting the question of how they managed to assemble a collection that hadn’t rusted to bits.
Fiat managed to sell 470 Fiat 500s in the US in the first half of 2024, compared with 46,999 of an earlier version back in 2012, and anyone wondering why need look no further than the 500e’s range of 240km and its price tag, which starts at $34,095. You don’t need to be a mathematical wunderkind to compute that this isn’t even beginning to compete with the Chinese, and the future looks bleak.
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