5 days ago
AI's Power Needs Have The Potential To Make Nuclear Power Economic
'What will I do with the rest of my life?' That's what legendary Naval officer Hyman Rickover asked after the 2nd World War, and after a U.S. Navy powered by diesel fuel was revealed as somewhat behind the times by an Air Force that could project greater power much more quickly in global fashion.
Thankfully Rickover was the personification of 'unreasonable,' and it's the unreasonable who create the future. In Rickover's case, he saw nuclear energy as the answer to the Navy's woes.
Not only would nuclear power quiet submarines that could operate underwater for months at a time while ready to strike from anywhere at a moment's notice, that same nuclear power made it possible for Navy ships to much more effectively globalize their locations, including aircraft carriers on which planes armed with nuclear weapons could quickly and lethally project power. Obsolescence born of creative destruction wrought by the U.S. Air Force solved. But for one problem.
As Marc Wortman, one of Rickover's biographers observed, 'nuclear propulsion for commercial ships' ultimately 'fell short.' What was doable for entities capable of drawing on taxpayers was not doable for businesses disciplined by actual market forces. One nuclear power plant built for the Navy in Pennsylvania cost $116 million to build, but the output 'cost eight times that of a typical coal-fired plant.'
The seen is a Navy and its mission perpetuated by inefficient use of resources. The unseen is how the U.S. military would have evolved more broadly absent the walking, talking government subsidy that is the U.S. tax code.
Which brings us to Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the immense power requirements associated with what promises to transform work as we know it, and in transforming it, freeing millions and likely billions from work they have to do, all in favor of the work they can't not do. What will lift workers and their productivity to levels that will render the present appear primitive by comparison is also transforming energy usage before our eyes.
See Microsoft's partnership with Constellation Energy in which the technology innovator will buy power from a revived Three Mile Island nuclear plant as a way of meeting the consumption needs of its proliferating data centers. Readers can likely guess where this is going, or perhaps not.
While some view nuclear energy as the one and only source of abundant power that is also clean, the economics of it have never added up. What worked very well in a power sense has had a luxury quality to it such that what made sense for government-funded entities made little economic sense to the entities lacking such a consistent and growing source of funds. Enter AI.
Its power requirements are so substantial as to render nuclear power economic where for the longest time it was not. Better yet, since Microsoft won't presently require all the power generated at a revived Three Mile Island, the excess will bring energy costs down for the businesses and individuals in the area poised to benefit from what Microsoft doesn't consume.
Which is a happy reminder that where markets prevail, problems are much more quickly solved. By making nuclear power economic, Microsoft and others aren't just bringing transformative technology to the world, they're also setting the stage for a market-driven energy evolution that wouldn't have revealed itself absent the copious consumption of the power necessary to discover it.
