Modern AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and it looks like they will get even more power-hungry in the coming years as companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI strive towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). Oracle has already outlined plans to use nuclear power plants for its 1-gigawatt datacenters. It looks like Microsoft plans to do the same as it just inked a deal to restart a nuclear power plant to feed its data centers, reports Bloomberg.
Nuclear falls under ‘conventional’ - the PWR design of TMI is one of the oldest and most common types of nuclear reactor. It’s just another way of creating steam to drive a turbine which then generates electricity.
Nuclear is also anything but clean. People love to call nuclear ‘clean’ because its low in emissions, but that’s ignoring the requirement for either safe storage of radioactive material or reprocessing thereof, as well as the emission of radioactivity in the water cycled through the reactor.
Even if you call it conventional (I don’t think anyone would, but sure) it isn’t dirty. Dirty energy is stuff that releases pollution that isn’t contained. Nuclear releases water vapor and that’s all.
It is very clean. The radioactive material it produces that must be contained is very easy to contain safely. It really isn’t an issue. Check these videos out if you want to learn more about it. (The second video is another plant owned and operated by the same company that is being contracted here.)
https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=VhZ6LZJcA0HJsz2z
https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU?si=6Wn_1t-vNwSFYCMP
Edit: It’s also the cleanest and nearly the safest source of energy, including the disasters. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I love how the ‘Death rates per unit of electricity production’ graphic highlights deaths from a 1975 dam break in China, therefore making hydro seem less safe than nuclear, when the dam in question up to that point hadn’t produced a single megawatt of electricity (and by the looks of it, still hasn’t to this day). At the same time it appears to conveniently ignore the increased mortality among uranium miners.
Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right? No, we count everything, including the accidents, even if measures have been put in place to prevent them from happening again. The dam was made to produce electricity. The construction of that is still a factor in the deaths. Same with solar, coal, wind, nuclear, and everything else. If the deaths wouldn’t have happened otherwise then they are to blame.
How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?