AI uses a lot of power. Some of the next generation data centers may use as much power as one million U.S. households. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta hope nuclear power will offer a climate solution for this energy use. Nuclear power plants can deliver hundreds of megawatts of power without producing greenhouse gas emissions. But some long-time watchers of the nuclear industry are skeptical that it's the right investment for big tech companies to make. Read more of science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel's reporting here. Interested in more stories about the future of energy? Email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why is big tech interested in nuclear power?
Yeah. I mean, when I think of AI and nuclear power together, it just sounds like this, like, dystopian sci-fi movie. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, in all the movies, you know, Terminator or whatever, when the AI gets a hold of the nukes, it all goes wrong. But in real life, we got a way to go because before AI can somehow use its nuclear power to destroy us all, Silicon Valley has to remake the nuclear industry, which has been, frankly, stagnant for years.
So today on the show, the AI and nuclear power collab. Why does big tech want to go nuclear?
And is it really going to help with the big electricity crunch that's coming along with our AI revolution?
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Chapter 2: How much power does AI actually consume?
This is where the electricity was generated for decades using steam from the plant's nuclear reactor. And in a few years, Brian says it's going to start again.
I talked about the steam generators. We did all those inspections, did the maintenance. Those are ready to go for plant startup in 2028 already.
Now, restarting this plant isn't cheap. Constellation projects it's going to cost around $1.6 billion with a B. But they're willing to make the investment thanks to Microsoft.
Microsoft has purchased the power of this unit for the next 20 years. That gives us the financial certainty to invest our money.
Wow. OK, so Three Mile Island is coming back online. But is one nuclear power plant going to be enough power to power all these like AI data centers?
No. In fact, TMI puts out around 800 megawatts of electricity. And that all by itself is around the power consumption of what a single AI data center might eat. So these companies are going to need even more. Yeah. It's just the amount of power is really staggering here. And that's why Google, Meta, Amazon are all making investments towards new kinds of nuclear reactors.
And these reactors will look nothing like the old ones.
Wow. Nothing like Homer's job. Yeah.
No, exactly, exactly. So to get a sense of that, I went just outside of D.C. to the headquarters of a company called X-Energy. It recently got somewhere around $250 million from Amazon for its reactor design. Clay Sell is the CEO.
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