The Department of Energy received hundreds of responses to a request for information, which closed earlier this month, seeking stakeholder input on placing data centers on DOE nuclear sites, officials said this week.
The request for information that went out in April closed May 7, not only drew hundreds of responses, but the comments were “meaty ones,” Neelesh Nerurkar, acting executive director, DOE Office of Policy, said during an online presentation Thursday.
Nerurkar was one of several experts who took part in a webinar sponsored by Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) on the idea of building data centers to support artificial intelligence (AI) at DOE installations.
Data centers require land, electric power, easements and infrastructure, so federal installations owned by DOE seem a natural fit, said Rob Corbin. Corbin is a senior vice president with Seattle-based Sabey Data Centers. He formally worked in the power industry.
DOE is looking at allowing data centers at properties run by its Offices of Science, Environmental Management (EM) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The department has also expressed interest in co-locating the facilities with on-site power generation. Small modular reactors have been mentioned as a possible source of electricity.
Depending on the size of the facilities, data centers can require anywhere from 1 megawatt to 200 megawatts of power, Corbin said.
“There are a lot of critics of data centers,” said Will Williams, the CEO of Western South Carolina Economic Development. “Pick your flavor on why people don’t like them.” Nevertheless, the days of paper files are nearly gone and today most records are placed “up in the cloud,” he added.
Corbin acknowledged there are a lot of “speculators” these days, who “are not necessarily folks who have built data centers before.”
Rob Seifert, who directs infrastructure and regulatory policy for Environmental Management said he has spoken to nearly all the sites in the EM portfolio. Seifert specifically mentioned conversations with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site near Carlsbad, N.M., the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Some NNSA and Office of Science sites are also interested in data centers, Seifert added.
“DOE is one of the largest land-holding agencies in the United States,” said ECA’s executive director Seth Kirshenberg. Kirshenberg also reviewed some of the legal means for DOE host communities to use in requesting that remediated federal land be turned back over to the localities. He also added that changes in the Congressional budget reconciliation bill should expedite environmental reviews significantly.
In its comments, ECA has endorsed the concept of developing the data centers to serve AI demand on DOE sites. The Joe Biden administration pursued a Cleanup to Clean Energy Program to develop carbon-free electric generation on underused DOE weapons site land. During the webinar, some officials said the groundwork done on that initiative provides good background information for President Donald Trump’s push for data centers at such sites.
