Stargate, TVA, and huge power demands for national priorities
The recently announced Stargate AI data center would demand a lot of power. How does that compare to how much power the Tennessee Valley Authority provided for Cold War uranium enrichment?
Last week President Trump announced a major collaboration between tech and AI companies for what they called Project Stargate, an endeavor to create a “physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” consisting of “the construction of colossal data centers.”
It’s unclear what role the public sector would play in this private-sector project, but it seems safe to say that it will be subsidized or otherwise coordinated by the government, to some degree, as part of a national priority. After all, it comes on the heels of a Trump executive order to fast-track power plants needed for AI data centers. “We need to double the energy we currently have in the United States,” Trump said at the order’s signing, “for AI to really be as big as we want to have it.”
The electric power demanded by the Stargate facility has been reported to be 5 GW, based on the plans made for the first such facility in Texas last year. That’s a lot of power! So much so that it’s hard to get a sense for how much that is in comparison to the power demands from other nationally prioritized industries. Heavy industrial production, after all, has long been a major consumer of electricity.
Electricity for nationally prioritized industries
On X I pointed to a study by the think tank CSIS which observed that the aggregate power demand of the 45 new electric vehicle battery manufacturing facilities announced since the Inflation Reduction Act likely came to around 5.2 GW. Establishing a domestic EV battery industry was absolutely a priority of the previous administration, and there we can see the power demand is roughly the same as a single Stargate facility.
Another frame of reference for the power needed by nationally prioritized industry can be found in the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In my article last year for The Nation making the case for new nuclear power at TVA, I gave a history of the TVA power system. That history very profoundly involves the construction of generation capacity needed to provide power to federal labs that were enriching uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. TVA’s gargantuan and storied coal fleet was developed in large part to serve that load.
One likely has strong feelings about the national priority of a nuclear arsenal buildup. I know I do. But the fact of the matter is that TVA was instrumentalized by the federal government to provide the huge amount of electric power needed for a national priority.
TVA’s power for uranium enrichment, in context
In light of the huge demand of Stargate, I wondered how that compared, quantitatively, to the power TVA served to the Atomic Energy Commission and the federal labs at Oak Ridge, TN, and Paducah, KY, for uranium enrichment. Let’s dive in to archival records and find out.
1957 was the peak year for TVA’s energy sales to these federal customers, by volume.1 According to the annual report for that year, TVA supplied the AEC and federal labs with about 3.6 GW of power:
The AEC has long-term contracts with TVA for a total of 3,125,000 kilowatts of power. Since electricity-using plants can be constructed much more rapidly than electric generating facilities to serve them, TVA also has been supplying interim power from various sources. The sources included some of the older plants and power obtained from other systems. TVA has also been supplying about 500,000 kilowatts of "extended load" at the AEC plants, over and above the long-term contract demands. More than half of AEC's load for production plants throughout the Nation was supplied by TVA.
How much was 3.6 GW compared to the whole TVA system? The report also mentions that the TVA generation system, consisting mostly of its own resources but in some cases third party resources, amounted to 9.9 GW. But a more appropriate number to compare it against would be the peak demand served by TVA that year: 9.2 GW.2 The uranium enrichment demand therefore constituted about 39% of peak system demand.
The energy sales to these federal customers in 1957 amounted to 31.7 TWh out of a total of 57 TWh — about 55%. For comparison, other industrial customers bought 8 TWh (~14%) and the local municipal and cooperative distributors bought 17 TWh (~29%) and resold that to about a million a half consumers.
A more positive, more hopeful legacy of TVA’s federal customers deserves mention while we’re at it. The federal gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, KY, eventually became a private facility that, from 2001 to 2010, recycled former Soviet nuclear warheads into fuel for civilian nuclear power plants as part of the monumental Megatons to Megawatts project. When the facility closed in 2013 it was TVA’s largest industrial customer.
Let’s fast forward to today. What would the uranium enrichment demand look like at the scale of today’s TVA system?
Just last week, due to the frigid temperatures that gripped much of the nation, TVA hit a new peak load record of 35.3 GW. If we look at the same portion of peak load that was consumed by the 1957 uranium enrichment, it would be a bit under a staggering 14 GW. That’s a tremendous amount of power, almost three Stargates’ worth.
Quenching the thirst for power
In the 1950s, TVA met that federal demand through a huge expansion of coal plants, a fleet that made TVA the largest electricity producer in the nation. TVA’s voracious demand for coal was such a core part of operations that in 1975 they nearly purchased Peabody Coal, America’s former top coal producer, in order to secure their fuel needs during the 70s energy crisis. TVA’s coal fleet resulted in a legacy of air pollution, of strip mining, and of criticism that undermined TVA’s public power model for generations. In 2008 the half-century-old Kingston coal plant, built for the uranium enrichment, was the site of a disastrous and deadly accident. But the coal fleet also secured generations of affordable power for Valley residents and industries.
If TVA took on a Stargate-sized industrial demand today, would the generating capacity built to serve it be so environmentally ruinous as coal? Or even gas? What if it were a nation-leading fleet of carbon-free nuclear plants?
It remains a major frustration of mine that the Biden Administration didn’t similarly tap TVA to power hydrogen production, direct air capture of carbon, and other new clean industrial priorities — while at the same time spurring a new nuclear fleet. Instead, we saw tax credits and competitive bids for regional industrial hubs, one of which TVA even lost out to.
Will the Trump Administration look to TVA and new nuclear capacity to meet new industrial demand for national priorities? The exact production might be a questionable use of public resources, like Stargate and AI data centers, or a bellicose perversion of the original Atoms for Peace mission, like a nuclear arsenal buildup, but the resulting generating capacity could serve national electric demand in a carbon-free way for generations to come.
That 1957 saw the peak energy sales to federal customers was stated in the 1966 annual report.
TVA’s peak load in 1957 is not mentioned in their annual reports, as far as I can tell. Instead I pulled this figure from an internal 2006 TVA report, “The History of the TVA Transmission System,” by James T. Whitehead, a former manager of Transmission Planning at TVA. I retrieved this document a while back from a FOIA request to TVA but never had a good reason to publish it. Here’s a Google Drive link for it.