The Nuclear Flame That Outlasts All

Prometheus never built a data center. 

Then again, he didn’t have to. Stealing a little fire was enough to change his world, but if the Titan were alive today, he’d find himself in Silicon Valley sneaking past Google’s security drones and slipping a reactor core under his toga. 

Why? Because the gods of our age aren’t hurling lightning bolts — they’re training large language models. And that ever-growing hunger for power is threatening to scorch the grid unless we bring them a gift big enough to keep their empires lit.

Today, the U.S. power grid is groaning under the weight of modern Olympus.

Data centers — the beating hearts of the AI boom — have gone from a niche curiosity to the biggest energy hogs in the country, and the numbers are absolutely staggering. 

The EIA now expects electricity demand in the U.S. to rise past 4,179 billion kilowatt-hours this year, a record high and climbing again in 2026. Mind you, that jump isn’t being driven by your fridge or my air conditioner, but rather by rows upon rows of servers answering the world’s dumbest and smartest questions at once.

And you guessed it… these data centers already chew through more than 4% of America’s total electricity consumption; analysts are warning us that that number could triple by the end of the decade! 

By 2028, nearly one out of every eight electrons will be marching into these warehouses of silicon. Put another way, AI alone will soon need the equivalent of every household in California just to keep functioning. 

Try powering that with a few rooftop solar panels and a dream.

Naturally, this brings us to the uncomfortable truth: our power grid doesn’t run on dreams. It runs on baseload power — energy that can stay online 24/7, rain or shine, cloud or drought, hurricane or heat wave. 

Intermittent sources like wind and solar may flatter the conscience and echo in chambers on social media, but they can’t carry the load when a server farm in Texas decides to drink the grid dry at midnight. 

And that leaves us with just three options… well, two really: natural gas, coal, and nuclear. 

Coal is a dying industry, no matter what the media headlines hype, natural gas is the clear bridge that won’t last forever. 

However, we know that nuclear power is the end of the road.

So far, natural gas has been the dominant workhorse for U.S. electrical generation, and accounts for nearly 42% of our current power supply in 2025. It’s cheap, flexible, plentiful, and dispatchable on demand. 

But gas is the rental car of the energy world. It’ll get us from point A to point B, but nobody mistakes it for a permanent solution. Prices will be volatile when the shale gas mammoth slows, supply chains are fragile, and carbon isn’t getting any more fashionable. 

Gas is the bridge, yes — but you don’t build your castle on a bridge.

That leaves us with the real silent giant of U.S. energy: Nuclear. 

Roughly 19% of U.S. electricity today flows from uranium fuel rods, humming away in concrete domes that most people pass on the interstate without a second thought. 

Unlike gas, nuclear doesn’t spike the atmosphere with carbon. And unlike coal, it isn’t choking itself to death, and it certainly doesn’t take a nap when the weather changes. 

It’s the closest thing to Prometheus’s eternal flame that humanity has ever engineered.

For decades, nuclear power held a powerful stigma to it. Images of mushroom clouds and Chernobyl-like meltdowns immediately come to mind when you even utter the words “nuclear power”. 

But in 2025, the tide has turned. 

Holtec’s revival of the Palisades plant in Michigan has finally received federal blessing, aiming to pump 800 megawatts back into the grid. 

Three Mile Island Unit 1 — once a monument to nuclear fear — is being rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, backed by Microsoft’s deep pockets and a 20-year electricity purchase agreement. 

Altogether, the U.S. is planning to tack on another 7 gigawatts of nuclear capacity through restarts and upgrades by decade’s end. I know that isn’t a revolution yet — but it’s the kind of reinforcement the grid has been waiting for.

Meanwhile, Big Tech isn’t just watching, it’s signing contracts. 

Google struck a deal this summer with Kairos Power to tap 50 megawatts of nuclear power for its AI data centers. Amazon is lining up its own nuclear deals. Microsoft is not only buying from nuclear plants, it’s investing directly to bring mothballed reactors back online. 

These aren’t greenwashed press releases, dear reader, they’re billion-dollar energy purchase agreements that tell you exactly where the puck is headed.

Why? Because tech companies NEED baseload power, and nuclear is the only long-term option that’s both clean and scalable. 

AI doesn’t pause when the wind dies, and cloud servers don’t hibernate through cloudy days. Nuclear is dispatchable, dependable, and permanent. If electricity is the lifeblood of the AI boom, nuclear is the only artery big enough to keep the beast alive.

In fact, a joint study from NC State and Carnegie Mellon recently warned that unchecked data-center growth could raise U.S. electricity prices by 8% through 2030. Some regions, especially in the Southeast, are already facing the prospect of running coal plants longer than planned simply because demand is outrunning clean supply. 

Average U.S. electricity prices are up roughly 30% since 2021! 

Let that climb another decade unchecked and you’ll be asking whether your next ChatGPT query is worth the price of a latte.

But it doesn’t have to be this way… 

Today, nuclear plants can run for 60 to 80 years, delivering baseload power without the carbon tax. We’re also moving closer and closer to the first small modular reactor — smaller, safer, faster to build — with companies like Kairos, TerraPower, and NuScale racing to get units deployed. Each reactor may be measured in tens of megawatts instead of thousands, but stitch them together and you get a scalable nuclear that fits neatly into a data-center contract.

And FINALLY after decades of ignorance and distrust, public opinion is tilting: nearly 60% of Americans now support new nuclear facilities, the highest since the 1960s. 

Fear has given way to pragmatism.

Here’s the cold hard truth: nuclear power is not some distant hope. It’s here and humming already. Every so often another restart is announced, every quarter another tech giant inks a nuclear deal, and every year, more terawatts flow from nuclear plants into the bloodstream of American innovation.

Prometheus was punished for stealing fire, but we don’t have any excuses. 

Nuclear energy is ours to use, not borrow, and it remains the only scalable, clean, 24/7 power source that can keep America’s AI dream alive. 

Ignore it, and we risk watching our digital Olympus darken. Embrace it, and we inherit the fire that never goes out.

So my only question left is simple: Will you sit in the dark, or will you recognize the power we’ll rely on tomorrow?