6 Industries That Could Be Completely Transformed by SMR Energy
Small modular reactors are not just a new way to make electricity — they are a new answer to problems that have stumped entire industries for decades.
The standard pitch for small modular reactors goes something like this: they’re clean, they’re compact, they’re reliable, and they might finally make nuclear energy affordable at scale. That pitch is compelling enough on its own. But it undersells the real story by quite a bit.
The truly interesting thing about SMRs is not that they can replace a coal plant or juice up a grid. It’s that they unlock energy solutions for industries that have been essentially stuck — industries where fossil fuels are deeply embedded not just as fuel, but as part of the production process itself. According to a study by consultancy LucidCatalyst for uranium enrichment company Urenco, SMRs could support the decarbonization of at least 11 industrial sectors, representing a potential market of 700 gigawatts by 2050 and a $0.5 to $1.5 trillion investment opportunity. That is not a niche play. That is a restructuring of how the global economy runs on energy.
Here are six industries where SMRs could cause the most dramatic shifts, and why each one is worth watching closely.
1. Data centers and artificial intelligence 💡
This is the one everybody is already talking about, but the scale of what’s actually happening deserves more attention than it gets. AI workloads do not just need a lot of electricity. They need electricity that is always on, always at the same voltage, and contractually guaranteed for decades. That is not a description of the current grid in most places. It is, however, a perfect description of what a nuclear plant delivers.
Microsoft and Constellation Energy committed $1.6 billion to restart the Three Mile Island Unit 1 plant, now rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, with power targeted for 2028. Amazon signed a large agreement for carbon-free supply from Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear station in Pennsylvania to feed its data center campus there. Google and Amazon have also backed X-Energy’s Xe-100 SMR project with Energy Northwest in Washington state, expandable to 960 megawatts by 2039.
Why SMRs specifically, rather than just plugging into the grid or existing large plants?
SMRs can be built on-site or co-located with a data center campus, cutting transmission losses and grid dependency
Their modular nature means capacity can scale in stages as the data center grows
No combustion byproducts means no carbon accounting headaches
Factory fabrication offers more predictable construction timelines than custom large-reactor builds
The American Society of Civil Engineers notes that data centers are growing faster than the grid can expand in many regions, creating multi-gigawatt power needs that utilities simply cannot meet on current timelines. OpenAI has suggested it may eventually need 20 gigawatts of power for its operations. No combination of solar panels and battery packs is answering that call at the reliability level AI infrastructure requires. 🔬
Do you think Big Tech’s nuclear spending spree is the most important thing driving SMR commercialization right now? The money certainly seems to think so.
2. Steel and heavy manufacturing ⚡
Steel is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on earth. The traditional blast furnace process uses coking coal not just as a fuel but as a chemical reagent, feeding carbon into the reaction that turns iron ore into iron. Decarbonizing that is genuinely hard. Renewable electricity alone does not fix it.
This is where high-temperature gas-cooled SMRs enter the picture. Reactors of this type can generate heat at temperatures high enough to drive the industrial processes that steel and heavy manufacturing need, not just spin a turbine. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s April 2025 report on SMR economics identifies industrial process heat as one of the most substantial market opportunities for advanced reactor designs, particularly gas-cooled fast reactors and molten salt reactors, which operate at high enough temperatures to be useful across chemicals, petroleum refining, and steelmaking.
The Urenco/LucidCatalyst study pegs iron and steel alone at 33 GW of SMR deployment potential by 2050. That number is probably conservative, given how few realistic alternatives exist for direct-heat industrial decarbonization at scale. The steel industry has been waiting for a credible answer to its carbon problem for a long time. SMRs may be that answer.
Key reasons the steel and manufacturing sector is watching SMRs:
Process heat above 700°C is achievable with advanced high-temperature gas reactor designs
Nuclear-generated hydrogen (more on that next) can replace coking coal as a chemical reductant in steelmaking
Long plant lifespans, potentially 80 years, mean a capital investment that amortizes over an industrial planning horizon that actually makes sense
Co-location with industrial clusters avoids expensive transmission infrastructure
3. Clean hydrogen production 🌱
Hydrogen is the molecule that climate policy keeps promising will solve everything. The problem is that 95 percent of hydrogen today is produced using natural gas, a process that emits substantial carbon dioxide. “Green hydrogen,” made by splitting water using renewable electricity, is clean but expensive and intermittent by nature.
SMR-powered hydrogen changes that equation in two ways. First, nuclear electricity is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which means the electrolyzers making hydrogen can run continuously, not just when the sun is up or the wind is blowing. Continuous operation is critical to the economics: an electrolyzer sitting idle half the time is a very expensive piece of equipment.
Second, some SMR designs can directly use their heat, rather than first converting it to electricity, to drive thermochemical hydrogen production. NuScale, working with researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is developing a hydro-thermal chemical decomposition approach that does not require electrolysis at all, reducing both energy and water consumption. The research was presented at the World Petrochemical Conference in March 2025. ♻️
SMR-generated hydrogen has real advantages over alternatives:
Hydrogen electrolysis powered by SMRs may reduce green hydrogen costs by up to 40% compared to renewable-powered production, according to analysis from Strategy International
Baseload reactor operation means no wasted electrolyzer capacity on idle nights or calm days
High-temperature designs can pursue thermochemical production routes that are fundamentally more efficient than electrolysis
The same plant can switch between hydrogen production and grid supply based on market prices, acting as a flexible economic hedge
Major corporations including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Mitsubishi are actively exploring SMRs as an alternative to power refineries and industrial processes, according to Strategy International. That is not the behavior of companies that think this is a fringe idea.
4. Water desalination 💧
Fresh water scarcity is one of the most serious resource problems the world faces and one that is getting worse, not better, as populations grow and aquifers deplete. Desalination is an obvious partial solution. It is also extremely energy-intensive, which is why most desalination plants today run on fossil fuels, which makes the water clean but the carbon footprint ugly.
A single NuScale Power Module coupled to a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis desalination system could produce approximately 150 million gallons of clean water per day without emitting any carbon dioxide. A 12-module plant could supply desalinated water for a city of 2.3 million residents, with surplus power left over to supply 400,000 homes with electricity. NuScale notes that when coupled to a desalination plant, a single module can provide all the water needed for a city the size of Cape Town, South Africa.
The ITIF report points out something clever about the economics here: an SMR paired with a desalination plant has a natural buffer against grid price fluctuations. When electricity prices are high, power flows to the grid. When they’re low, it flows to the desalination plant instead. The desalination plant becomes, in effect, an economic battery, storing excess energy as fresh water. That is an elegantly useful design for the water-stressed, hot, and sun-exposed countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia where both problems hit hardest.
Countries watching this space include:
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, all exploring SMRs for energy security and nuclear-powered desalination
Texas, where a consortium is exploring nuclear for desalination at the Texas Tech SMR cluster
Multiple small island nations where grid size makes large reactors impractical but water stress is severe
🌍 The combination of clean water and clean power from a single compact plant is a different kind of pitch than anything fossil fuels or renewables can currently make in these regions.
5. Chemical refining and petrochemicals 🔬
This one might seem counterintuitive. Aren’t petrochemicals the problem? Not entirely. The chemical industry produces materials that society genuinely needs, from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals, and much of the carbon it emits comes from the energy used in production, not the products themselves. Swap out that energy source and the emissions profile changes dramatically.
Refineries are particularly interesting targets. A six-module NuScale plant, according to NuScale’s own technical data, coupled to a 230,000 barrels-per-day refinery, can eliminate approximately 40% of overall plant emissions, equivalent to a reduction of 175 metric tons of CO2 per hour. That is a meaningful number for an industry that is not going to stop operating just because we want it to be greener.
Beyond refining, pulp and paper production, chemical manufacturing, and synthetic fuel production all require sustained high-temperature process heat that SMRs may eventually supply. The ITIF report identifies gas-cooled fast reactors and molten salt reactors as the designs most likely to reach the temperatures needed for chemical sector applications. Both are still in development, but both have active programs behind them with real capital.
The industries that stand to benefit in this space share some characteristics:
They require continuous, not intermittent, energy supply
Their production processes use heat directly, not just electricity
They have large enough energy budgets that a nuclear investment pencils out
They face genuine decarbonization pressure with no obvious renewable alternative
What SMRs offer these industries is not disruption in the Silicon Valley sense. It’s a replacement of one energy supply with a cleaner one, while keeping the production process largely intact. That is an easier sell to an incumbent industry than “rebuild your entire supply chain.”
6. Remote communities and defense installations 🚀
This last sector is different in character from the others, and I think it gets underestimated even by people who follow nuclear closely. The problem of energy access in remote locations is not just a developing-world story. It affects military bases, mining operations, Arctic research stations, island communities, and large industrial sites located far from transmission infrastructure.
The World Nuclear Association notes that SMRs can be deployed on grids too small to accommodate large reactors, and that some designs promise smaller emergency planning zones, allowing deployment near smaller communities. The U.S. Army built eight nuclear reactors about five decades ago, five of them portable or mobile. One, the PM-1, successfully powered a remote air and missile defense radar station on a mountain top in Wyoming for six years. That precedent matters.
Today, the Department of Energy has selected Radiant Industries for its pilot reactor program specifically targeting portable nuclear units for military and remote applications. Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base plans to build a microreactor as early as 2027. The case for remote and defense applications is different from the case for data centers or steelmaking:
Energy independence is a military and national security priority, not just an environmental one
Remote communities often pay extremely high prices for diesel-generated electricity, making nuclear competitive even at higher capital costs
Microreactors smaller than 20 MW can fit on a semi-truck and be transported to almost any location
The 14-year refueling cycles on some designs mean deployment in genuinely inaccessible places becomes possible
The Stanford Understand Energy learning hub reports that the Nuclear Energy Agency is currently tracking $15.4 billion in financing toward SMRs globally, with private capital playing an increasingly prominent role. When private investors put that kind of money in, they’re not betting on one application. They’re betting on a platform.
The question worth sitting with now: which of these six sectors do you think will be the first to have an operating SMR on-site at a commercial facility? The timelines are closer than most people expect — and the answer will say a lot about which industry was serious enough about its energy problem to actually solve it.