The rapid rise of AI applications has driven datacenters to unprecedented energy demands, which has prompted major tech companies to adopt on-site nuclear power plants (NPPs) alongside grid electricity. While existing research focuses on off-site NPPs in multi-energy systems optimized for investment returns, recent advances in small modular reactors (SMRs), particularly load-following SMRs (LF-SMRs), offer flexible, reliable power tailored for datacenter co-location. However, LF-SMRs are governed by a set of physical constraints, such as ramp rate and stability limits, making them unsuitable as fully dispatchable sources. This paper proposes a novel day-ahead workload scheduling approach that jointly coordinates datacenter operations and LF-SMR output, explicitly modeling these constraints. We develop a two-stage formulation that forecasts carbon-free grid energy from the grid using conformal prediction in the first stage and then optimizes LF-SMR output and workload scheduling via mixed-integer programming in the second stage. Evaluation on real workload traces shows that our method reduces carbon-based energy consumption by up to 43.44% compared to baselines that omit nuclear integration or ignore SMR limitations.
Yang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.