My backyard nucleus? That seems to be OK in America and in the market.

Van Buren County is a rural red in southwestern Michigan and is a quiet corner in swing state. Along the shores of Lake Michigan, soft dunes on pillows shift and shape. And the county seating – Paw Paw – is named after a typical Midwest fruit.

“It’s a beautiful natural environment with gorgeous sand dunes that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world,” says Daywi Cook, whose family lived in the area for five generations. “A lot of people like to live here because of loneliness.”

It appears they believe the quietness of the secret town is a pioneer into potential nuclear transformation. Van Buren County Township has been home to the Palisades nuclear power plant since 1971. The aging plant was repealed in 2022, but it was returned to service through more than $1 billion in loans protected under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and is being offered in its first installments this year by the federal government. In addition to revitalizing the plant, the site is also expected to house the country’s first small modular reactor (SMR).

A small modular reactor is a nuclear power plant built in a factory that is much smaller than a traditional nuclear reactor (usually below 300 megawatts). SMRs are usually designed to be mass-produced and shipped to the site for faster, less costly installations.

The future of US energy may be unfolding on this modest corner of Michigan, where Holtech Corporation is building two SMR-300 units to be held in collaboration with the existing 800-megawatt Pallisard plant. SMR is scheduled to be in operation by the early 2030s.

“There are still some unknowns, but Holtec has invited us into conversation,” said Cook, the township supervisor. She is well versed in the area’s nuclear energy, and says the factory’s safety records have helped greatly in softening the county’s residents.

Holtec did not respond to requests for comment.

Cook hopes that the recommended legacy plants and SMRs will provide the economic stability the county needs.

“We’re known as the Chicago Catskill, and there are a lot of short-term rentals that will be booming in the summer,” Cook said. “It would be good to be stable all year round,” Cook added.

Zack Morris, executive director of Market 1, an association of local business and government leaders that drive economic growth in Cass and Van Buren counties, Michigan, says the region is uniquely positioned to be at the cutting edge of the country’s nuclear renaissance. Because of the existing plants, nuclear knowledge is ready, there is a labor force, and the area has enough power to earn power.

Morris said the Legacy nuclear power plant will employ 600 people, with two SMRs hiring a total of 300 people with an average salary of $107,000. “That’s $32 million a year, and a significant amount of money is spent on donations to groceries, restaurants and nonprofits,” Morris said. And the nuclear past in the region has led to little opposition to the arrival of SMRs. He was used in the military on submarines and aircraft airlines for some time. “It’s not a new technology, but I’ve never needed it before,” Morris said.

Holtec SMR provides ample power for 300,000 homes or data centers.

“We have a national problem. It’s a national crisis that we didn’t expect five years ago,” Morris said. “Five years ago, no one saw this coming. Their collective genius hadn’t anticipated this,” he said of data centers that would become online without sufficient strength, and people who wouldn’t want to abandon AI, streaming services or cameras. “It means we have to adapt to the crisis. SMR is the future,” Morris said.

To explain how short-term the world of power generation is covered, Morris offers a tough comparison. “Five years ago, we were worried about how we would withstand demand from a 20-megawatt marijuana farm,” he said.

The role of Big Tech in the nuclear comeback

People use AI for everything from identifying animal trucks in their backyards to analyzing sales data for a decade in corporate reports. And this torrent of AI demand is bringing the torrent of demand for data centers to make the complex computing they need right away. And the demand for data centers built by Tech Titans Google, Amazon and others has led to rapid electricity demand.

The industry works with small, scalable nuclear solutions, but Big Tech is taking out deprecated legacy plants from Mothballs. Constellation Energy is set to reopen Pennsylvania’s 835 MW 3-mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power station in 2028, and Microsoft has agreed to purchase power from a reactivated power plant to power the data center. And Google recently signed an agreement with Kairos Power and TVA for a new nuclear power plant.

Bill Gates is one of the high-tech titans leading charging, investing $1 billion in technology and co-founding Terrapower, which is building the next-generation nuclear power plant in Wyoming. Gate’s company also recently announced plans to explore the construction of nuclear facilities in Kansas.

“Both nuclear fission and fusion are the fundamental technologies that help humanity move everything we do. We are in the cusp of a massive breakthrough. Now the future of energy is subatomics.”

OKLOOpen’s Sam Altman helped to make it public before retreating from his role as chairman in April, but is a highly speculative public stock market play on nuclear potential without revenue or power purchase agreements, leaving at least a few years away from commercial business. However, since the 2024 IPO, its stock has been booming.

Insurance industry fees are at low risk

Much of the industry’s excitement surrounds SMR and its commercial development.

Everett Hansen, Marsh’s vice president of energy and power, Everett Hansen is the leading insurance broker who helps businesses manage risk and ensure coverage, and sees nuclear as a safe bet, whether it’s SMR or legacy systems.

“Nuclear power plants are probably the best design,” Hansen said. “Their designs are very thorough and detailed,” he added.

Hansen says that part of the design process is thorough loss modeling and victim analysis. Industry victims refer to “incidents,” and in the analysis the victims can be very serious.

Hansen says that when it comes to nuclear weapons, people’s reaction is to think about it on the worst days. Think Chernobyl, Fukushima, or a 3-mile island. However, nuclear power has come a long way.

“They are very well studied. There’s not much unknown or unseen in nuclear plants,” Hansen said. “Effective management of physical, financial and strategic risks contributes essentially to the commercial pathways where everything is feasible,” Hansen said, describing himself as “optimistic” about the feasibility of SMRS.

There is a cost to deploy SMR, but Hansen believes that will be overcome as well.

“Assets are very expensive to build and SMRs are trying to fall into that problem by reducing equipment in their products. But the risk is economical because it is the first of its kind nature,” Hansen said. As developers act on plans to scale their business models, the costs should decrease over time after the initial build has passed.

“Collectively, we are all surprised in a year or a few years about what has changed. There will be shifts and things will happen,” he added.

Different views of the 2030s timeline for widespread deployment

Still, we differ on Prime Time’s SMR preparation.

Whit Johnson, a Salt Lake City-based partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, advises a portfolio of high-tech clients, agrees that the ghost of nuclear disasters is plagued by today, but the industry has seen many changes ever since.

“Nuclear power isn’t nearly 40 years ago when Chernobyl meltdowns created fear for many people about nuclear power. Technology has come a long way,” Johnson compared nuclear power today with dial-up internet and cloud computing. “Even so, while the public’s perception remains a prolonged stigma about nuclear power, there may be a time when society can create an opportunity to rethink its nuclear weapons,” Johnson said.

“The SMRS clearly offers possibilities, but its viability is primarily based on predictions rather than operational evidence,” said Gilbert Michaud, assistant professor of environmental policy at Loyola University Chicago’s Faculty of Environmental Sustainability and coordinator of the school’s “Climate & Energy” focus area.

Hansen said this is another reason why U.S. regulators are confident in nuclear revival, but Michaud said the existing regulatory framework has yet to keep up with the planned developments of SMR. “The nuclear regulatory framework is based on large-scale nuclear reactors, and adapting SMR regulations remains an ongoing task,” he said.

Before the extensive deployment of SMR, Michaud said there is a need for more planning and preparation protocols. “Deploying in or near these densely populated areas requires better emergency preparation and better public trust,” he says, involving handling and storage of fuel, reducing the cyber threat between issues that require better testing and better data.

It leads him to believe that the broad development of SMR takes longer than most optimistic predictions.

“I don’t think SMR will be that common over the next five to ten years. While it is clear, there are still major regulatory, costs, timelines and community acceptance challenges.

By the 2030s, SMRs are costs, funding, costs of maintaining a proper supply chain amid major obstacles, funding maintenance, and according to Michaud, a pilot project at industrial sites that may not be hidden in strip malls or plots.

“SMR is newer and we’ve seen large cost overruns and delays. As it’s not proven at large, the project is likely to be over budget and these dollars may be invested in proven technologies like wind, solar and storage.

The SMR, planned for Idaho last year, was cancelled due to multiple factors, including a cost overrun.

Meanwhile, the Palisade plant in Michigan needs major repairs to safely reopen, according to regulatory submissions made by Holtech.

However, public opinion is changing. A Pew poll last August found the majority (56%) of Americans supporting more nuclear power for power generation. That remains the same year by year, and Pew noted that Americans are likely to like to expand solar and wind power. However, public support for nuclear power has increased from 43% a decade ago, but according to Pew, overall support for solar and wind has declined double digits in recent years.

In the secret town, Cook is the future at its core and for now the focus is primarily on retrieving and running legacy factories, and she believes people will pay more attention to SMR.

“With SMRS, it’s a newer technology and you’re more skeptical because you have questions,” Cook said.