Nuclear is Back Baby

And morality doesn't matter

If you’ve been following the AI landscape including reading my articles, you’d know that while TSMC and NVIDIA can grow sales ad infinitum, there’s a huge problem regarding power. Pretty soon we’ll have gigawatt class data centers. Over the next decade, I believe I read the US will have to increase its total electrical production by about 20% to feed the DCs already being built to feed that AI beast.

And you’ll quickly notice something. No one is talking about solar or wind.

All these “green” tech companies realize that solar and wind cannot be built in enough quantities fast enough to feed the AI boom (nor are they economical). Several power sources do exist that do, most notably geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.

Of these three, nuclear is by far the most promising. In fact, nuclear has long been the most promising solution for energy production. France gets something like 80% of its power from nuclear and has the cleanest air in the world. In fact, when Germany shut down all of its nuclear plants, it started importing energy from French nuclear plants. All of that effort just to make political claims that Germany didn’t technically have nuclear. France is so abundant in energy since it openly supports nuclear that it makes a net profit by selling it to other countries.

If you’ve been following, you’d know modern nuclear is so safe a major accident is basically impossible. Even given the accidents that have happened, nuclear is the safest and cleanest energy per megawatt on planet Earth.

But for decades, the US government has stymied every new nuclear project, instead pushing significantly more expensive and less successful technologies like wind and solar. The only reason nuclear is considered more expensive is because the amount of regulation necessary to build new plants makes them inordinately expensive. Had the US adopted nuclear in the same manner as France back in the ‘80s, we could have a totally clean electric grid, not to mention significantly smaller electric bills.

So this is where the latest news comes in. See, nuclear reactors take a long time to get approved and built. The profit and loss statements of companies like Microsoft have no patience for such frivolities. So, in conjunction with some other parties, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into restarting Three Mile Island to one purpose and one purpose alone: to power its data centers for AI.

Yes, we have now reached such a regulatory environment that is so heinously ridiculous that rather than invest in so called “green energy” projects, we’re restarting a nuclear reactor (actually, 3 of them) famous for being unsafe.

Because of course corporate profits are so much more important than safety.

And how did Microsoft achieve this feat so quickly? Well, they actually trained an AI on nuclear regulation and had it generate the approximately two million pages of documents that needed to be submitted to the US government to get it approved.

I am extremely disheartened that we citizens of this country have to pay for ridiculous and overpriced energy while corporations are allowed to act willy nilly in defense of their profits. I am shocked at how quickly Microsoft, Google, and more have suddenly changed courses regarding CO2 emissions and green energy as soon as it threatened their profits. Although not really. We all know it was for show and they have no morals at all. Reminds me of people who buy electric cars and forget the electricity they use to charge them probably came from a coal plant.

Fortunately, as a long time supporter of nuclear, this is actually a bipartisan issue and hopefully we’ll all get to benefit instead of just trillion dollar companies.