Tech companies and Silicon Valley billionaires have been pouring money into nuclear energy for years, arguing that sustainable power sources are essential to a green transition. Now they have another incentive to promote it, and that is artificial intelligence.
While generative AI is growing at lightning speed, nuclear power projects are highly regulated and typically move at a slower pace. This raises questions about whether advances in nuclear energy can reduce emissions as quickly as the addition of energy-intensive AI and other rapidly growing technologies.
“If you try to integrate large-scale language models or GPT-style models into search engines, the environmental costs are five times higher than standard search,” says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute. says Mr. The social impact of AI. At current growth rates, researchers estimate that some new AI servers could soon consume more than 85 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. This is more than the annual energy consumption of some small countries.
“I want to see innovation in this country,” Meyers-West said. “I just hope that the scope of innovation is determined beyond the incentive structures of these giant companies.”
Oklo is one of several nuclear startups backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who believes that AI and cheap green energy can mutually enhance each other to realize a future marked by abundance. It is said that it is essential.
“Essentially in today’s world, the two limiting goods you see everywhere are intelligence, which we’re trying to address with AI, and energy,” he said after investing $375 million in fusion startup Helion Energy. , he told CNBC in 2021. altman chair. Last year, Microsoft agreed to buy electricity from Helion starting in 2028. Oklo, of which Mr. Altman is also chairman, focuses on nuclear fission, the reverse reaction of splitting atoms and producing energy. Nuclear fusion is performed by combining the nuclei of atoms.
Representatives for Mr. Altman, through the special acquisition company AltC, did not respond to requests for comment.
In rural southeastern Idaho, Oklo is working to build a small nuclear power plant that could fuel data centers like those needed by OpenAI and its competitors. But the company also wants to supply mixed-use communities and industrial facilities, and has already signed contracts to build two commercial plants in southern Ohio.
As the U.S. moves toward mass electric vehicle adoption and decarbonization, “the amount of energy we need to do that is going to be huge,” said Jacob DeWitt, CEO and co-founder of Oklo. . “The same goes for heating and cooking. If you want to electrify these processes, you’ll need more.”
Oklo found that getting regulatory cooperation was more difficult than finding potential customers.
In 2022, the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial nuclear power plants and materials, rejected the company’s application for a design for the Aurora power plant in Idaho, saying it did not provide sufficient safety information. In October, the Air Force withdrew its intent to award a contract for a microreactor experimental program to power bases in Alaska.
“We’ve introduced new physics, so we have to use new models. We have to do all kinds of things differently than we’ve done before,” DeWitt said of the NRC. He said Okro is currently working to satisfy regulators, acknowledging that government officials will have to “do their own job of making sure this meets sufficient safety requirements.” Ta.
Oklo’s proposed 13,000-square-foot Aurora power plant, with a 15-megawatt nuclear fission reactor, would be smaller than previous power plants and more sophisticated than its Cold War-era chalet with its iconic curved tower. It looks like a ski mountain hut. The plant will be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research facility where Oklo was awarded a Department of Energy grant to test recycling nuclear waste into new fuel. DeWitt also said the design is safer, citing the use of liquid metal rather than water as a coolant.
The nuclear industry has not meaningfully expanded its share of the US energy mix for decades. Nuclear power is on track despite public opposition fueled by rare but devastating accidents such as Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. But as the climate crisis accelerates, most Americans now support expanding nuclear energy, an increase of 57%. That’s up from 43% in 2020, according to a Pew Research survey last year.
Nuclear power currently accounts for just 19% of total energy generation in the United States, with 93 commercial nuclear reactors currently in operation, down from a peak of 112 in 1990. According to some estimates, up to 800 gigawatts of new nuclear power generation will be needed by 2050 to meet this energy requirement. Current green energy goals.
But as tech companies rush to tackle AI, many data centers are already struggling to add capacity fast enough to remain affordable, with data center rent expected to drop by 2022. It’s up nearly 16% in the last year alone. Tight demand is one reason industry giants are increasing investment in nuclear power.
Last summer, Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation, a major nuclear power plant operator, to provide nuclear power to its data center in Virginia. The year before, Google participated in a $250 million funding round for fusion startup TAE Technologies. And in late 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other investors raised more than $130 million for Canadian nuclear company General Fusion.
For tech companies, it makes sense to tap nuclear power plants directly “rather than sourcing power from the grid,” says Nuclear Threat, a nonprofit organization focused on nuclear and biological risk reduction. Ross Matzkin-Bridger, senior director of the initiative. He pointed out that in addition to being clean, many modern nuclear projects are also compact. “With nuclear power, you can deploy much more energy per acre than other technologies,” he said.
Ayan Paul, a researcher at Northeastern University who studies AI, said that even outside of Silicon Valley, “big investment firms are actually starting to believe this can take off.” “People are starting to believe that this kind of energy will power our population.”
But some experts warn that efforts to expand nuclear power should not be rushed, no matter how rapidly demand is growing.
“We need nuclear power to achieve a low-carbon future,” said Ahmed Abdullah, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Carleton University. But for engineering projects, which have historically taken decades, the regulatory process needs to be systematic, he said, noting that “rushing toward a goal can lead to serious mistakes.” ” he said.
