For years, tech companies and billionaires from Silicon Valley have been flooding the energy sector with funds for nuclear power, promoting the clean energy source as essential to the green shift. The development of artificial intelligence gives them even another reason to advance it.
While generative AI has expanded rapidly, nuclear power projects are subject to strict regulations and often move slowly. This begs the issue of whether developments in nuclear energy can reduce emissions at the same rate as energy-hungry artificial intelligence and other rapidly developing technologies are increasing them.
“It would be five times more environmentally expensive to integrate large language models, GPT-style models, into search engines than it would be for standard search,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research organization that focuses on the social effects of artificial intelligence. Researchers have calculated that at present, certain new AI servers might eventually use more than 85 terawatt hours of power annually, which is more energy than some small countries use in a year.
Myers West said, “I want to see innovation in this country.” “All I want is for the scope of innovation to be established outside of these massive corporations’ incentive structures.”
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has financed many nuclear businesses, including Oklo. He views inexpensive, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence as complementary but necessary for attaining a future of “abundance.”
After investing $375 million in Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion business that Altman chairs, he told CNBC in 2021 that “energy and intelligence, which we’re trying to work on with AI, are the two limiting commodities you see everywhere today.” Microsoft said last year that it would begin purchasing electricity from Helion in 2028. While fusion produces energy by fusing atomic nuclei, fission, which produces energy by breaking an atom, is the focus of Oklo, which Altman also chairs.
An inquiry for comments was not answered by representatives of Altman’s special acquisition business, AltC.
Oklo is developing a small-scale nuclear powerhouse in rural southeast Idaho that might power data centers similar to those that OpenAI and its rivals need. However, the business also has contracts to develop two commercial plants in southern Ohio, and it also intends to serve industrial facilities and mixed-use communities.
According to Jacob DeWitte, CEO and co-founder of Oklo, “the amount of energy we’re going to need to do that is huge” as the country works toward widespread adoption of electric vehicles and decarbonization. “You’re going to need even more for heating and cooking if we want to electrify those processes.”
Finding new clients is easier for Oklo than getting regulators on board.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is in charge of regulating commercial nuclear power plants and materials, rejected the company’s request in 2022 to design an Idaho “Aurora” powerhouse on the grounds that it had not supplied sufficient safety data. The Air Force withdrew its intention in October to award a contract for an Alaskan base’s microreactor pilot program.
You must use new models because of the new physics. Regarding the NRC, DeWitte said, “You have to do all sorts of stuff that’s different than what they’re used to.” He acknowledged that agency representatives must “do their independent job of ensuring this meets adequate safety requirements,” but Oklo said that he is now striving to appease authorities.
With a 15-megawatt fission reactor, Oklo’s projected 13,000-square-foot Aurora powerhouse is smaller than previous plants and has a sleeker, more ski chalet-like appearance than the Cold War-era reactors with their recognizable curving towers. Built at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research site where Oklo has received funding from the Energy Department to test the recycling of nuclear waste into fresh fuel, the plant will be used to produce energy. According to DeWitte, the system is also safer since liquid metal is used as a coolant instead of water.
For many years, the nuclear power sector has not significantly increased its proportion of the American energy mix. It has continued despite strong public resistance stoked by rare but catastrophic catastrophes like those that occurred in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986. The waste produced by even the most modern nuclear facilities has the potential to stay dangerously radioactive for generations, necessitating efficient recycling or disposal methods like the one Oklo is trying.
However, as the climate emergency worsens, the majority of Americans now favor increasing nuclear energy use—57%, up from 43% in 2020, according to a Pew Research study conducted last year. There are now just 93 commercial reactors in operation, down from a record of 112 in 1990, meaning that nuclear power accounts for only 19% of the country’s total energy output. According to one estimate, in order to reach existing green energy objectives by 2050, up to 800 gigawatts of additional nuclear power would be required.
However, many data centers are already finding it difficult to build capacity quickly enough to be inexpensive as tech companies race toward artificial intelligence. In fact, data center rents increased by about 16% only from 2022 to the previous year. Major industry participants have been increasing their nuclear spending, partly because of the demand shortage.
Microsoft inked an agreement with leading nuclear power plant operator Constellation last summer to provide its data centers in Virginia with energy produced by nuclear power. Google participated in a $250 million funding round for the fusion company TAE Technologies the previous year. Additionally, in late 2021, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and other financiers raised more than $130 million for General Fusion, a Canadian nuclear startup.
According to Ross Matzkin-Bridger, a senior director of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to lowering nuclear and biological hazards, it makes sense for Internet companies to directly access nuclear facilities “instead of sourcing electricity from the grid.” He pointed out that many modern nuclear projects are small in addition to being clean. He said, “Compared to other technologies, nuclear energy can fit a lot more energy per acre.”
According to Ayan Paul, a research scientist studying artificial intelligence at Northeastern University, “big investment firms are actually starting to believe that this is going to take off” outside of Silicon Valley. “People now think that our population will be sustained by these kinds of energies.”
However, some experts caution that, despite the rapid growth in demand, nuclear power expansion should not be hurried.
According to Ahmed Abdulla, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Carleton University, “we need nuclear power to get to a low-carbon future.” He said, however, that the regulatory procedure must be rigorous for engineering projects that have traditionally taken decades since “if we sprint to the goal, there is a chance to make serious mistakes.”
SOURCE: NBC NEWS
