MIT Review: Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI?

[NNadir]

Of course, lest any reader doubt it; I believe nuclear power is the only sustainable form of energy there is.

MIT Review asks the title question:

They say, "no:" Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI?

Subtitle:

Tech giants are looking for more energy, but building new reactors takes time.

By Casey Crownhart

Some excerpts:

Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have sent out a flurry of announcements related to nuclear energy. Some are about agreements to purchase power from existing plants, while others are about investments looking to boost unproven advanced technologies.

These somewhat unlikely partnerships could be a win for both the nuclear power industry and large tech companies. Tech giants need guaranteed sources of energy, and many are looking for low-emissions ones to hit their climate goals. For nuclear plant operators and nuclear technology developers, the financial support of massive established customers could help keep old nuclear power plants open and push new technologies forward.

“There [are] a lot of advantages to nuclear,” says Michael Terrell, senior director of clean energy and carbon reduction at Google. Among them, he says, are that it’s “clean, firm, carbon-free, and can be sited just about anywhere.” (Firm energy sources are those that provide constant power.)...

...But there’s one glaring potential roadblock: timing. “There are needs on different time scales,” says Patrick White, former research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. Many of these tech companies will require large amounts of power in the next three to five years, White says, but building new nuclear plants can take close to a decade.

Some next-generation nuclear technologies, especially small modular reactors, could take less time to build, but the companies promising speed have yet to build their first reactors—and in some cases they are still years away from even modestly sized demonstrations.

This timing mismatch means that even as tech companies tout plans for nuclear power, they’ll actually be relying largely on fossil fuels, keeping coal plants open, and even building new natural gas plants that could stay open for decades. AI and nuclear could genuinely help each other grow, but the reality is that the growth could be much slower than headlines suggest...

I obviously don't agree with the MIT Review on this score, since I am familiar with the First Nuclear Era, where all kinds of new reactors were built quickly. The real constraint is imagination and the acceptance - the wise acceptance - of risk.

One reality under which we've labored for decades is the absurd calculation that fossil fuels can kill at a vast scale so long as we can't even imagine someone dying from radiation exposure.

I am, to be sure, an outlier as I believe computational power can be and often is a good thing. There is a world beyond tweets, porno, "influencers" and all of the other stuff. Modern science is highly dependent on computational power, and given that people built lots of reactors without as much computational power as is in an Apple Watch today, there is a design synergy.

I'm unimpressed by "MIT says..."