We Need More Three Mile Islands
Jane Fonda isn’t a nuclear expert, but she played one on TV. In the 1979 film The China Syndrome, Fonda portrayed Kimberly Wells, a vivacious news reporter who discovered a cover-up at a nuclear power plant. The conspiracy involved the possibility of a meltdown that could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.”Â
The movie’s timing and location were both impeccable. Twelve days after Fonda’s film hit theaters, a reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI) in central Pennsylvania partially melted down. The accident resulted from “mechanical malfunctions…made much worse by a combination of human errors,” according to a federal post-mortem report.
There were no documented fatalities, illnesses, or injuries; TMI suffered more from poor emergency-procedure planning, haphazard public relations, and hyperbolic media meltdowns than from the actual meltdown itself. But the incident was cannon fodder for the anti-nuclear movement. Fonda, an avid anti-nuke activist well before the accident, knew that she and her comrades commanded the zeitgeist. “You know the expression ‘We had legs’?” she later said. “We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island.”
The ensuing fearmongering campaign effectively killed nuclear energy in the United States. Construction of new nuclear power plants significantly tapered off. After the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986 in the Soviet Union, U.S. nuclear construction came to a standstill. Since 1986, only a few reactors have been built in the U.S., including the recently completed units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. This is significantly less nuclear capacity than we should have, even before considering the rise of AI.
But now nuclear power is on the verge of a comeback, with Silicon Valley leading the way.
Tech Companies Go Nuclear
Artificial intelligence (AI) devours electricity. A ChatGPT search requires about 10 times more watt-hours than a traditional Google search. Training GPT-3, a large language model that uses AI to generate text, requires about 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh)—the same as the annual energy consumption of 130 households.
Our grids will need an additional capacity of at least 18 gigawatts (GWs) to service AI’s data centers by 2030. New York City’s grid is about 6 GW annually, so the grid needs about three Big Apples’ worth of capacity to satiate AI’s energy needs.
Intermittent sources, such as wind and solar, cannot meet that need. They are also costly to build for the small amounts of MWh they provide, and the landmass needed to have a capacity comparable to nuclear is extensive. What would take around 15 square miles of solar, nuclear can do in one—and those 15 square miles of solar would produce power only sometimes, while the one square mile of nuclear provides power around the clock.
Nuclear provides baseload power: the constant, uninterrupted, adequate supply of energy that keeps grids humming.
Nuclear is the most reliable zero-carbon-emitting energy source currently available, which is why tech companies are growing fond of it. Amazon recently announced a $500 million investment in small modular reactors in Virginia and Washington. Google will finance seven small-scale reactors using molten fluoride salt instead of water. Though not as bullish as its competitors, Apple has quietly added nuclear as part of its sustainability goals.
“Nuclear energy, if we do it right, will help us solve our climate goals,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told ABC last year. “That is, get rid of the greenhouse gas emissions without making the electricity system far more expensive or less reliable.”
“This trend isn’t just another market blip—it’s part of a larger movement that has far-reaching implications for investors, especially as we enter the age of artificial intelligence,” writes Frank Holmes, CEO and chief investment officer of U.S. Global Investors. “Nuclear energy truly appears to be staging a major comeback.”
Private capital investment in nuclear energy has skyrocketed in recent years. The value of nuclear investments jumped from $12 million in 2015 to $1.1 billion in 2022—a 9,000 percent increase.
While nuclear power’s rise is a positive trend for reliable energy, removing equally reliable and affordable hydrocarbons from the grid is a scientific and economic impossibility. And though this influx of investment signals a new age for nuclear energy, it also highlights persistent market barriers. Nuclear power is capital-intensive, and the cost of market entry remains high. Constructing new plants is exponentially more expensive than keeping existing facilities online—and government regulation is often to blame.Â
Strangled by Red Tape
In the wake of the TMI meltdown, government fines and permits made nuclear power plants substantially less profitable. Regulations have inflated the time and cost needed to plan, build, and maintain a new nuclear power plant. Paperwork, fees, and other compliance-related expenditures can add up to $60 million in annual costs for the average American nuclear plant.
Time is money, and few projects require more time than n
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